With improved bilateral relations and some positive trends in commerce between the two countries, Sri Lanka and India together might just show the way to the brave new world of SAPTA, then SAFTA.
The highlight of Foreign Minister Inder Kumar Gujral´s visit to Sri Lanka in early February was India´s unilateral move to lower tariff barriers on 70 to 80 Sri Lankan items under the South Asian Preferential Trade Agreement (SAPTA) umbrella. Even though the results of this concession will be some time in coming, there is clearly a new chapter opening in the trade relations between the neighbours in the south of the Subcontinent.
To begin with, so far as heightened economic relations are dependent upon better political atmospherics, the Gujral Doctrine of developing non-reciprocal relationships (of which the lowering of tariff barriers was also a part) is definitely clearing the air between New Delhi and Colombo.
Indeed, bilateral relations have come a long way since the 1970s and 1980s when the ethnic tensions and clashes in Sri Lanka were at their height, and India was dragged in because of the cultural links in India of the Tamils fighting for a separate state. The relations hit rock-bottom during and after deployment of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) and its "tragic post-script", as political commentator Nikhil Chakravorty put it, was the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. The IPKF episode and the assassination vitiated the atmosphere such that, as The Hindu wrote, "the other tracks of varied relations had remained in deep freeze…"