The Indian high commissioner Santosh Jha meets the Sri Lankan minister K.D. Lal Kantha. Photograph: High Commission of India
India’s high commissioner in Colombo, Santosh Jha, has met K.D. Lal Kantha, the senior Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) figure who as land minister oversees state land in the North-East, for talks on “politics, agriculture innovation & international geopolitical developments”.
Jha described the meeting in a social media post but gave no further details. It is at least the third reported meeting between the two, after talks in February 2025 and in March this year, when they took stock of regional and global developments.
Lal Kantha is Sri Lanka’s minister of agriculture, livestock, land and irrigation.
Lal Kantha addresses former military officers in Ratnapura in May 2024. File photograph
JVP and India
The JVP led a violent campaign against the 1987 Indo-Lanka Accord, which created the provincial councils under the 13th Amendment, and the deployment of Indian troops. Its leader Tilvin Silva has since claimed the party was “never anti-Indian”, and a JVP delegation this month made a BJP-hosted visit to India.
Sinhala nationalists have noted that Lal Kantha was the JVP leader who maintained the party’s old position on India. In 2024, he boasted to former military officers that while the armed forces defeated “separatist terrorism” with guns, the JVP had rallied the people to support the war.
As land minister, he has faced questions from Tamil MPs over the acquisition of more than 5,700 acres of Tamil land. India has meanwhile pressed Colombo to hold long-delayed provincial council elections.