In the bitterly fought presidential election in Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa's re-election was expected but not the stupendous scale of his victory over the former military chief, Sarath Fonseka. Not even the president's most optimistic supporters had expected that he would secure 57.88 per cent of the votes polled, the second highest in the island republic's history. He trounced Fonseka by a margin of over 17 per cent, which robs the former general's complaints of election rigging of their credibility.

However, there is the other, negative side to Rajapaksa's stunning electoral triumph. Quantitatively the incumbent president's victory is huge, indeed overwhelming; qualitatively, it is dangerously divisive. The pattern of voting clearly underscores that the ethnic divide in Sri Lanka — that led to the 26-year long civil war that ended last year with the annihilation of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Ltte), for which both Rajapaksa and Fonseka claimed credit — sadly persists. A vast majority of voters belonging to the majority Sinhala community voted for the president while the Tamils who came out of their refugee camps or shattered homes opted for the former military chief who had wooed the Tamils by promising them everything they wanted. President Rajapaksa also says that his top priority is to rehabilitate the victims of the civil war and to find a just settlement of the ethnic question. The Muslim minority also favoured the defeated candidate.

The 'trust deficit', especially between the Sinhalas and Tamils is not going to be easy to bridge. It is indeed already raising worries about Sri Lanka's future even in the midst of euphoria in the Rajapaksa camp. This daunting problem has been aggravated by the highly inflamed polarisation in the island republic that existed before the poll and has been intensified by the president's landslide victory. Rajapaksa's decision to advance the presidential election by 22 months — obviously to cash in on the elimination of the Ltte — was considered a shrewd move until Fonseka, a fine military commander leading the fight against the Ltte — jumped into the fray.

A strange thing then happened. Almost all the diverse and often irreconcilable opposition parties rallied round Fonseka. These ranged from the right-wing United National Party to the ultra-left Janatha Vimukuthi Peramuna and also included parties of the Tamil and Muslim minorities. A few days before the voting, former president Chandrika Kumaratunge also jumped on the Fonseka bandwagon, apparently sharing the belief that he was going to win.

The personal charges that are being flung at each other by the former military chief and the Ministry of Defence on the president's behalf have further fouled up the atmosphere. Allegations of attempting or plotting mutual assassinations may be wild, but the spectacle of troops surrounding the hotel where their former chief was holed up earlier has sent a message of its own.

What impact will this have on the forthcoming parliamentary elections remains to be seen.

Sri Lanka's politics is its own business. But far more than the rest of the international community, India has very high stakes in its southern neighbour separated from the Indian peninsula by only 34 km of seawater. Indira Gandhi once famously said, at a time when anti-Tamil riots were at their height and she had sent her foreign minister to Colombo without even consulting the Sri Lankan government, that 'in relation to Sri Lanka, India is not like any other third country'.

In her son Rajiv Gandhi's time things moved in a different direction. In 1987 Sri Lanka's wily president, J. R. Jayewardene, inveigled the young Indian prime minister to sign an accord to bring ethnic peace to the island republic — an accord that should have been signed by the Ltte and only witnessed by the government of India. Within an hour of the accord being signed, JRJ persuaded Rajiv to send an Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to the island to prevent a coup as Sri Lankan prime minister R.Premadasa was among those openly and vigorously against the accord.

Ironically, the IPKF that was meant to protect the Tamil minority had to fight the Ltte and suffer nearly a thousand casualties. Premadasa, who had become president by 1989, rudely asked for the withdrawal of the IPKF and V. P. Singh who had succeeded Rajiv by then agreed. Almost all regional parties and groups in Tamil Nadu inveighed against the Indian force because sympathy for the Lankan Tamils and even for the Ltte in the southern state was high at that time.

Things changed after Rajiv Gandhi's assassination by the Ltte in 1991. Yet, a lot of sentiment for both the Lankan Tamils and the Ltte resurfaced in Tamil Nadu during the endgame of the civil war last year. No one can overlook that while the number of Tamils in Sri Lanka is over two million, nearly 50 million Tamils live in South India. Even so, every Central government in this country has done all it could to keep emotions in Tamil Nadu under control, and Colombo has reason to be grateful.

Indeed, if Sri Lanka has not met the fate of Cyprus, it is because New Delhi's firm and consistent policy has been to seek justice and autonomy for the Tamil minority but within the framework of a united and stable Sri Lanka. However, after the rebuff over the IPKF, New Delhi distanced itself from Sri Lanka's strife even when Premadasa's successors asked for Indian help to fight the Ltte because that country's security forces alone were not equal to the onerous task. It was in Rajapaksa's time that the Lankan Army developed the necessary capability.

However, the Indian policy began to change when New Delhi found that in its backyard distant countries like Norway and Japan had become overactive. In recent years Indo-Sri Lankan relations were close and cooperative enough, except for an interlude during which Colombo was getting closer to Beijing and little was being done for the luckless Tamil civilians caught in the crossfire between the Ltte and the Sri Lankan security forces. Both sides discussed and tried to solve these problems. Remarkably, in the post-election situation when Fonseka felt that his life was in danger, he appealed to India. On the other hand, despite all the noise by the Lankan opposition, President Pratibha Patil and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh sent extremely warm congratulatory messages to the victorious Rajapaksa.

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