THE SRI LANLAN ETHNIC CONFLICT, INDIAN INTERVENTION AND GLOBAL RELATIONS -A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF A SRI LANKAN ENGLISH NEWSPAPER EDITORIAL

Abstract

This paper traces the functions of discourse features in an editorial of the national Sri Lankan English newspaper, Morning Leader of the Sunday Leader publications focusing on the official visit of the newly-elected Sri Lankan President to India in December 2005. It investigates how these features represent Sri Lanka’s stand on the global commitments of India toward resolving the conflict in the background of the history of Indo-Lanka relations on the implications of being proximate neighbors, India’s growing regional and global power status, the proposed Joint Defense Cooperation Agreement and India’s decline of direct intervention. It is an ideological discourse analysis of the text in terms of discourse and sociocultural practices and of the three levels of analysis of meaning: textual, ideational, and interpersonal. It mainly focuses on the discourse features that support issues of globalized political and economic relations that enhance the presence of the State, ethnic and party power-based and power-biased discourse and socio-political ideologies dominated by the majority community in Sri Lanka. The newspaper’s discursive practices identify the naturalization of the ideologies. They also support implicitly for unilateral ethnonationalistic foreign policy interests and thus fall in line with those theorists who argue that globalization is an advantage that facilitates inter state-security, not intra-state security and implicate a productive analysis of global politics in harmony with that of domestic politics. Thus, representing India’s role with positive and negative attributes clearly demonstrates these covert ideological positions of the Sri Lankan media discourse.