Jaishankar to fly to Sri Lanka tomorrow, sked includes meeting with Prez, PM

External Affairs minister S Jaishankar will be in Sri Lanka between 5 and 7 January.

Updated on: Jan 4, 2021, 15:26:12 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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External affairs minister S Jaishankar will travel to Sri Lanka on Tuesday on a visit to cement India’s relationship with the island nation. The external affairs minister is expected to take up the release of Indian fishermen apprehended last month during the visit that is designed to review the developments in bilateral relations between the two neighbours from a strategic and long-term perspective.

Minister for External Affairs Subrahmanyam Jaishankar is travelling to Sri Lanka on Tuesday (PTI)

Jaishankar had rushed to Colombo within a day of Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa taking charge in November 2019, setting the foundation for both countries to reset ties. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa had travelled to New Delhi soon after on his maiden foreign visit. The effort to deepen ties continued in September last when Prime Minister Narendra Modi held the first virtual bilateral summit with Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, their first after he began a fresh term as prime minister a month earlier after the Sri Lanka People’s Front party secured a two-thirds majority in parliamentary polls.

Jaishankar is scheduled to hold discussions with President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and Foreign Minister Dinesh Gunawardena.

Officials said Jaishankar’s visit would look at smoothing the rough edges in the relationship between the two countries that has turned complicated over the last decade, mostly on account of China’s efforts to expand its influence in the Indian Ocean region including Sri Lanka.

Colombo has, over the past year, signalled on multiple occasions that India is a priority for his government, that Sri Lanka’s strategic security policy will have an “India first” approach though it is open to dealing with other key players for economic development.

Jaishankar’s visit is the second high-profile visit to Colombo in two months. National Security Advisor Ajit Doval had flown to Sri Lanka in November for the trilateral discussion on maritime cooperation and security with Colombo and Male.

The arrest of 36 Indian fishermen from Tamil Nadu and seizure of their vessels allegedly on charges of poaching was discussed at the December 30 virtual meeting of the joint working group on fisheries but there has been no breakthrough yet.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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