Sri Lanka won't do anything that will harm India's interests: Prez Rajapaksa

Sri Lanka will work with India and it won't do anything that will harm its interests, newly elected President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has said ahe of his visit to New Delhi later this week. Rajapaksa, who is considered pro-China, said he wanted Sri Lanka to be a "neutral country" and work with all countries. "We will work with India as a friendly country and won't do anything that will harm India's interests," said Rajapaksa, who will travel to New Delhi on vember 29 on his first official trip abro as Sri Lankan President.

"We want to be a neutral country," Rajapaksa, who was sworn in as Sri Lanka's president last week, told Nitin Gokhale of BharatShakti.in and Strategic News International in an interview. "We don't want to get in between power struggles of superpowers... We are so small and we can't survive to get into se balancing acts," he said.

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Balancing between giants

Rajapaksa said he wanted to work very closely with both India and China. "We want to work with all countries and we don't want to do anything which will harm any or country for that matter, we understand importance of Indian concerns, so we can't eng in any activity which will threaten security of India," he ded. ting that Indian Ocean is an important place and plays an important role in present-day geopolitics, he said Sri Lankan was placed in a very strategic location and all sea lane are passing close to country from east to west. "So, se lanes should be free and country should control se sea lanes," he said.

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Hints at renegotiating Hambantota deal 

Asserting that Sri Lanka's involvement with China during presidency of his elder bror Mahinda (from 2005-2015) was "purely commercial", he said, "I invite India, Singapore, Japan and Australia to come and invest here. Don't allow only China to invest." He vowed to create an investment-friendly environment in Sri Lanka. Rajapaksa also said that giving away Hambantota port to China on a 99-year lease was a mistake by previous government heed by President Maithripala Sirisena. " deal has to be renegotiated," he said. "Giving a small loan for investment is a different thing but giving a strategic important ecomic harbour is t acceptable. That we should have controlled." China, which acquired Sri Lanka's Hambantota port in 2017 as a debt swap, has been ramping up its ties with island nation and expanded its naval presence in Indian Ocean with an established logistics base in Djibouti. "We want investments to help us but we will t do anything to get involved in military and geopolitical rivalry," Rajapaksa said.

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Dismisses ill tags

On allegations of him being "authoritarian" and "racist", president said, "It's a wrong perception created during civil war with LTTE. I am a disciplined person but that doesn't mean I am racist."  two brors – Mahinda and Gotabaya – led a decisive campaign that helped end island nation's three-dece-long civil war against Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). However, bror-duo were accused of condoning sexual violence and extrajudicial killings allegedly by Lankan security forces during civil war, which ended in May 2009 with death of LTTE supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran.

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