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India must kick China out of Sri Lanka: William Avery
New York: There are few more knowledgeable observers of US-India relations than William H Avery, a former US diplomat, who served at the US Consulate in Chennai in the 1990s, a time when India’s relations with the US soured after New Delhi’s nuclear tests. In his new book, China’s Nightmare, America’s Dream: India as the Next Global Power, Avery offers a detailed anatomy of the growing ties between the world’s largest and wealthiest democracies.


Avery’s book also delivers a broadside against China and says India must respond to how China has advanced its influence in the region, with allies like Pakistan, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. China has established itself as a growing, and sometimes bullying, power in India’s neighbourhood.



India and most of the countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have festering territorial disputes with China. Avery says India must respond to the Chinese challenge by spending even more on defence and using economic persuasion to influence its neighbours.

“India must now concentrate on the Finlandization of Sri Lanka,” Avery writes, while referring to Finland’s subjugation by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. “In the short term this will mean preventing any further non-Indian involvement in Sri Lanka’s affairs.”


Avery described how China invested millions to turn the sleepy fishing hamlet of Hambantota in Sri Lanka into a booming new port, just off India’s southeast coast, furthering an ambitious trading strategy in South Asia that is reshaping the region and forcing India to rethink relations with its neighbours.


China has been developing port facilities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, and it is planning to build railroad lines in Nepal. These projects, analysts like Avery argue, are irksome to India; there are worries that China is expanding its sphere of regional influence by surrounding India with a “string of pearls” that could eventually undermine India’s pre-eminence and potentially rise to an economic and security threat.
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