South Asia and Beyond

West Container Terminal Better Deal For India: Sri Lankan Foreign Secy

NEW DELHI: Earlier this week, the Sri Lankan Cabinet gave its approval to develop the West Container Terminal of Colombo Port jointly with India and Japan under a public-private partnership. This came after both India and Japan expressed their displeasure over the Sri Lankan government going back on a 2019 trilateral deal (signed during the earlier government) to jointly develop the East Container Terminal. “The President (Gotabaya Rajapaksa) was compelled to not give the ECT to a foreign entity because of pressure from trade unions. He had to give in to people’s power,” Sri Lankan Foreign Secretary Admiral (Retd) Jayanath Colombage told StratNews Global. But to compensate for the issues that came up with the ECT, he offered the West Container Terminal which is a much better deal, Colombage told Editor-in-Chief Nitin A. Gokhale in an exclusive interview. Listen in for more.

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Nitin A. Gokhale

Author, thought leader and one of South Asia's leading strategic analysts, Nitin A. Gokhale has forty years of rich and varied experience behind him as a conflict reporter, Editor, author and now a media entrepreneur who owns and curates two important digital platforms, BharatShakti.in and StratNewsGlobal.com focusing on national security, strategic affairs and foreign policy matters. At the beginning of his long and distinguished career, Gokhale has lived and reported from India’s North-east for 23 years, writing and analysing various insurgencies in the region, been on the ground at Kargil in the summer of 1999 during the India-Pakistan war, and also brought live reports from Sri Lanka’s Eelam War IV between 2006-2009. Author of over a dozen books on wars, insurgencies and conflicts, Gokhale relocated to Delhi in 2006, was Security and Strategic Affairs Editor at NDTV, a leading Indian broadcaster for nine years, before launching in 2015 his own digital properties. 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, South and South-East Asia to speak at various international seminars and conferences. Gokhale also teaches at India’s Defence Services Staff College (DSSC), the three war colleges, India's National Defence College, College of Defence Management and the intelligence schools of both the R&AW and Intelligence Bureau. He tweets at @nitingokhale

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