Q. India is our neighbour, India is our friend, India is our relation. Today, I am joined by that lady who leads that friendship, who leads that relationship in Sri Lanka. H.E. Mrs. Nirupama Rao, High Commissioner of India in Colombo. Welcome to Rupavahini.

A. Thank you very much.

Q. You are first female High Commissioner to Sri Lanka. I remember one of your friends said that after Sanghamitra, you are the first female envoy to Sri Lanka.

A. Well I feel extremely privileged to be the High Commissioner of India in Sri Lanka. Being the first lady High Commissioner, of course, brings with it special responsibilities. I think we females have been prepared with a capacity to think holistically and I always remember also what the psychologists say about the female mind and I think in diplomacy it gives you a special advantage. I am particularly happy to be in Sri Lanka as I was here in my youth as a young diplomat, I think First Secretary, here and I am back in a country I feel I have known well. I am happy to renew that relationship.

Q. You have been High Commissioner for 16 long months. How do you feel? I know you are into literary activities, art, music and I have seen you contributing to the newspapers. How do you look back?

A. I do not know how 16 months have zipped by. It feels like yesterday that I walked into your foreign ministry and met the late Lakshman Kadirgamar, the first Sri Lankan dignitary I met. 16 months - you call them long - to me it seems short. So much has happened and I literally had to hit the ground running, as they say. I had a number of visits from India and a number of visitors from Sri Lanka - dignitaries, leaders - to India. Of course we had the unfortunate tragedy of the tsunami and the whole chapter of Indian involvement in emergency relief, I must say its been interesting and professionally fulfilling. You mentioned India is a friend, India is a relative. I think we approached Sri Lanka not only with our heads but also with our hearts.

Q. Talking of tsunami, you were the first to help us. I had the opportunity of visiting one of your ships. The Indian forces won the hearts of the Sri Lankans more than others, though we had a lot of other support. I know you visited the ships. How do you see that?

A. I think the tsunami - national calamity -afforded a great opportunity to work together to provide emergency relief. So our team worked together with the international teams that were here and I think we established a harmonious relationship with the other teams. India was the first country to come to Sri Lanka's help when the tsunami struck and I had the opportunity to visit a number of tsunami affected areas. I had never seen devastation on that scale in my life. Our team worked together with the local community. In fact, our team members spoke Tamil and in the East they were able to relate to the people and provide the assistance that is necessary. We built the bridge across the Arugam Bay - we put 5 bailey bridges together - which is emblematic of the assistance that India had offered. That itself was quite an engineering feat.

Let me tell you that our College of Military Engineering back in India debated that issue, whether the bridge could be built and we did. Our army team pulled it off magnificently. We restored communication in a very important part of the island.

Q. How do you describe the relationship between the two countries?

A. Extremely healthy, very productive, multiplex relationship I would like to call it. It exists at so many levels - the political, the economic, the cultural, the people to people. We issue at the Indian High Commission over 300 visas per day. You can imagine the volume of visitors with the increase in flights between the two countries. We had at the last count almost 110 flights per week between the two countries. So Colombo is connected to so many metropolitan centres in India today. Earlier it was perhaps, Chennai, Trivandrum, Trichy. But now its across the subcontinent. We have so much pilgrim traffic now, tourists coming from India and I think the Sri Lankan tourist authorities are targeting this community of tourists and we have tourists from all over India, they love the beaches, they love the hill stations and we Indians particularly love Nuwara Eliya. Lots of celebrities come here who have made a name for themselves among Sri Lankans. Of course, you have the enormous magnetism of the Bollywood film industry. Sri Lankans love Indian songs, people sing Indian songs. In many ways India and Sri Lanka are coming even closer.

Q. I want to talk in detail about our art, culture, education, sports, if you could elaborate?

A. There is a seamless process that goes on between the two countries. We have cultural affinities. I always say that you hear the muffled heart beats of our collective past wherever you go in Sri Lanka, the influence of Indian culture and the give and take that has happened. People have gone from here to India and I know Anagarika Dharampala in the 19th century went to India and made a name for himself. We all grew up knowing about Anagarika Dharampala. The other day an old book I opened - I happen to collect old books - I had acquired an old book on the Parliament of Religions in the 1890s when Swami Vivekananda delivered an extremely impressive and thought-provoking speech and in that volume there was an impressive photograph of the Indian delegation and Anagarika Dharampala was part of that delegation. India and Sri Lanka we worked together.

BJ : And we had his grandson, Mangala Moonesinghe, going as the High Commissioner to India!

HC : And just the other day when I was in Kandy - great surprises come up all the time - a Professor from Peradeniya University gave me a book he had written on the Sri Lankan community in Malaysia. The book spoke about Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and the Azad Hind Fauj, the Indian national army that Netaji formed, in the Second World War, and do you know that there was a Sri Lankan in that Azad Hind Fauj. So a Sri Lankan contingent was in the INA and defended the region from colonial rule. There is this organic link between us.

As far as culture is concerned the Cultural Exchange Programme is an excellent framework of cooperation between the two countries. Some cultural administrative officers from Sri Lanka, I think 12 - 13 of them, are currently in India interacting with the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. We had representatives from all over the country, including the North East, who are part of this delegation.

Q. How do you see the defence cooperation between the two countries?

A. We have had training facilities for Sri Lankan defence personnel in India - this is a long-established programme that has gone on for over three decades now. A number of your officers have been trained in our defence establishment. I think it is a very beneficial relationship that has been established between the two training establishments. This is an ongoing interaction. I meet a lot of your army and navy officers who have been in India. They have a great sentimental attachment for the years that they have spent in India; there are close friendships between our officers and our men.

Q. What about naval exercises?

A. Two ships were here recently and we had a wonderful day at sea. The weather was glorious and our ships and your ships had some training exercises and some maritime surveillance. We have as you know in South East Asia the problem of piracy on the high seas. Thus these are normal interactive exercises that exist between friendly navies all over the world. The Indian Navy does similar exercises with other neighbouring countries.

Q. In which area would you say is the highest Indo-Lanka cooperation?

A. Well, the level of our cooperation in all areas is extremely satisfactory. There is a logic of such close relationships that should expand further. There is a high level of political understanding between the two countries.

Q. People say that sometime ago when President Rajapakse was Prime Minister, he mentioned to a certain group in India that he would be contesting the Presidency. It is very significant that he is going to make his first trip to India as President. How do you see the significance of this?

A. It is very significant and first of all let me say that we warmly welcome President Rajapakse and Madame Rajapakse with a very high level delegation. I think this is a visit that is reflective of very enduring ties of cooperation and understanding between our two countries. This is significant that this is the first visit he is making abroad after taking charge as President, after his victory. We hope that during this visit we would be able to strengthen our dialogue further. Our leadership will have the opportunity to know the new President even better and I believe that this is an opening chapter of what is going to be an extremely cordial and mutually beneficial relationship.

Q. What can we in Sri Lanka expect from his visit?

A. Well we expect to finalize a number of bilateral agreements and MoUs on functional cooperation in a variety of fields. Officials are preparing for that. In fact, during this year we had a number of bilateral exchanges between the two countries. The Foreign Secretaries met for consultations earlier this year, that was followed by a meeting of the Joint Commission at the Foreign Minister level. We have in a sense paved the way for this high level visit. Right now, we have a delegation from the Indian railways visiting Sri Lanka. The National Thermal Power Corporation was here to discuss the setting up of a coal-powered power plant. We have in a sense prepared the way for the visit of H.E. the President of Sri Lanka.

Q. Excellency, any other area that the two leaders will explore?

A. The exchanges are there - the bilateral exchanges, the economic flowering that you have witnessed. Very shortly we hope to conclude the discussion on the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement between the two countries. How to strengthen this economic partnership, how to promote educational exchanges and I think the ties between the youth of our countries are very important. India is now getting into development work in Sri Lanka. An MoU on small development projects was signed during the Joint Commission meeting a few months ago. Now we are actively exploring the avenues of that. We have a couple of proposals for consideration. We are not only looking at economic partnership in trade and commerce but also in development. Today the Sri Lanka India Parliamentary forum is being launched as we understand in your Parliament. So there will be exchanges between the parliaments of the two countries. So you have very holistic and comprehensive exchange of delegations not only in terms of parliamentary exchanges.

Q. You are not only a diplomat, you are a poet, an artist, writer. Anything in particular in the cultural exchanges between the two countries?

A. I think a number of areas of the Cultural Exchange Programme have been somewhat dormant. My mission is to activate and activise cultural troupes going from Sri Lanka and vice-versa. I think it is a very small stretch of water that separates the two countries. But there is a gap in communication that needs to be bridged. And what better way to do that than by cultural exchanges. Information on both sides can be better exchanged. Television stations show a lot of Indian programmes. We must have more information about what is happening in India - about the IT industry, about the growth of our cities, about the minds of our people - what they think about Sri Lanka and what do Sri Lankans think about India. Mutual awareness building is very necessary. It can form the bedrock of a more mature relationship.

BJ: Sri Lankan culture needs to be made accessible to India. We need to reach out to India.

>A. Recently in Delhi at the Purana Qila, the old fort - you lived in Delhi - we had a number of cultural programmes in winter. An India-Sri Lanka group performed some dances based on the Ramayana. I believe it was a great success. You may be knowing Sanjeev Bhargava. He is a very well known cultural personality. He plans to bring that performance to Sri Lanka. We have to work out how to arrange that. That would be a performance by a joint troupe performing in each other's country. That's one way we could enhance the relationship. Another idea - we have the zonal cultural centres of Indian Council for Cultural Relations in Chennai, Bangalore, Trivandrum - we think we can develop programmes around them. We can have interaction between these zonal centres and Sri Lanka. Southern peninsular India and Sri Lanka could develop a special relationship, which is part of the natural organic flow that has existed between the two countries through centuries.

Q. What do you think of the Sri Lanka peace process and what support would you extend to it?

A. We have always maintained that dialogue is very necessary between the two sides, that violence is not the solution. Recourse to violence is very unfortunate. India has never approved of that. So it is very important that serious, productive and mutually-accommodative dialogue should be there. And India has always been supportive of the peace process, of the efforts that are being made to come to a solution. We hope you will reach a peace settlement that preserves the unity, territorial integrity and sovereignty of Sri Lanka, with respect for pluralism, ethnic and religious pluralism; a peace process that your new President Mr. Rajapaksa has mentioned should be characterized by openness, by inclusivity and by transparency.

Q. How do you see the consensus building by the new President?

A. I see it as a healthy development - a positive development. You need consensus, you need to build common ground between all the parties concerned. To enable this dialogue to move forward, it is very rational, very logical.

Q. Final question to your Excellency . You are from Kerala. Arundhati Roy when she was in Sri Lanka said that this is "Kerala without relations". What would you like to say to that?

A. It is a home away from home for me. Being from Kerala I have to endorse what Arundhati Roy had to say of Sri Lanka. I do not have relatives here. But the muffled heartbeat of our collective past echoes in my heart. Somewhere, I feel that there is a link, some unspoken relationship between me and every Sri Lankan that I meet. Like I said before, I can't help working on the relationship both with my head and my heart.

The interview ended by B.J. quoting Mahatma Gandhi "it is, at least it should be, impossible for India and Ceylon to quarrel"