South Asia and Beyond

We Won’t Do Anything That Will Harm India’s Interests: Gotabaya

COLOMBO: Seeking to allay India’s apprehensions ahead of his first scheduled trip abroad as Sri Lankan President—to New Delhi this week—Gotabaya Rajapaksa has a reassurance to offer. We will work with India as a friendly country and won’t do anything that will harm India’s interests, he told Nitin A. Gokhale, Editor-in-Chief of BharatShakti.in and StratNewsGlobal, in his first interview after taking over the top political job in the island nation. He favours Sri Lanka to be neutral as “we don’t want to get in between the power struggles of superpowers. But we want to work with all countries”. Asserting that Sri Lanka’s involvement with China during the presidency of his elder brother Mahinda Rajapaksa (who was President till 2015) was “purely commercial”, Gotabaya feels giving away the Hambantota port to China on a 99-year lease was a mistake by the previous government (when Maithripala Sirisena was President and Ranil Wickremesinghe was Prime Minister). The deal has to be renegotiated, he says. And what does the ex-serviceman have to say about allegations of him being ‘authoritarian’ and ‘racist’? It’s a wrong perception, he counters, created during the conflict period (the Eelam war IV). “I am a disciplined person but that doesn’t mean I am racist”.

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Nitin A. Gokhale

Left to himself, Nitin A. Gokhale would rather watch films and sports matches but his day job as a media entrepreneur, communications specialist, analyst and author, leaves him little time to indulge in his primary interests. Gokhale in fact started his career in journalism in 1983 as a sports reporter. Since then he has, in the past 41 years, traversed the entire spectrum across print, broadcast and digital space. One of South Asia's leading strategic analysts, Gokhale has moved on from conventional media to become an independent media entrepreneur running three niche digital platforms—BharatShakti, StratNewsGlobal and Interstellar—besides undertaking consultancy and training workshops in communications for military institutions, corporates and individuals. Now better known for his conflict coverage and strategic analyses, Gokhale has lived and reported from India’s North-east for 23 years between 1983 and 2006, been on the ground at Kargil in the summer of 1999 and also brought us live coverage from Sri Lanka’s Eelam War IV between 2006-2009.    An alumni of the Asia-Pacific Centre for Security Studies in Hawaii, Gokhale now writes, lectures and analyses security and strategic matters in Indo-Pacific and travels regularly to US, Europe, Australia, South and South-East Asia to take part in various seminars and conferences. Gokhale is also a popular visiting faculty at India’s Defence Services Staff College, the three war colleges, India's National Defence College, College of Defence Management and the IB’s intelligence school.

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