India must act fast on solving fishers' dispute with Sri Lanka

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3 days ago

With campaigning for next year's Tamil Nadu Assembly elections already heating up, there is an urgent need for Delhi to delineate the 'Kachchatheevu issue' from the stand-alone fishers' dispute, and keep the former especially out of domestic politico-electoral bickering in India read more
The Sri Lankan side has indicated a willingness to allow a limited number of southern Tamil Nadu fishers from India if and only if they give up their bottom trawlers and purse seine nets. Representational image: REUTERS
Bilateral relations between India and Sri Lanka, including defence and security ties, are at an all-time high, but the festering fishers' dispute especially has the potential to negate some of these collective gains. This has to be read in the context of ocean security that became India's major post-Cold War concern after an adversarial China, the superpower US, and other extra-regional powers set their strategic sights on this side.
The Mumbai-based naval shipbuilder Mazagon Docks' recent takeover of the Colombo Docks should be seen in context. Both are public sector undertakings, and the majority stakes for Mazgon Docks now ensure that India does not lose out to China or any other, as happened with the strategically located Hambantota Port and the financial hub, Colombo Port City (CPC).
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Earlier, during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's April visit to Sri Lanka, the two sides initialled a defence MoU—one of a total of seven—formalising existing arrangements for joint military exercises and capacity-building. It is seen as a cautious first step to bigger things, so to say.
In between, you had a quiet visit to Sri Lanka by a high-level defence delegation from India. The usually nosy Colombo media and their set of strategic analysts were quiet on the subject. Political reservations were also restricted to the vocal yet miniscule Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), which broke away from the ruling Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) a decade or so back.
In some ways, such initiatives followed confidence-building measures, which in Sri Lanka's case included India's Covid-era assistance, followed by fiscal doles at the height of the nation's unprecedented economic crisis. Further, India infused a sense and purpose into Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'Neighbourhood First' policy from his first term through his SAGAR and MAHASAGAR socio-economic framework.
The two nations are also partners in the 'Colombo Security Conclave' (CSC) along with other near neighbours in the Indian Ocean, focusing initially on non-traditional ocean security like oil leakage. This has since been expanded to include cyber security and terrorism, among others. Despite hiccups caused by domestic political changes in member nations, the future trajectory of the CSC is being keenly watched. Incidentally, socio-political changes in Sri Lanka did not affect the nation's relations with India.
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Significantly, the centre-left JVP-National People's Party (NPP) combined government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has also stuck to the 'right-liberal' President Ranil Wickremesinghe's commitment to check all boxes in their new SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) while clearing entry for foreign research vessels in Sri Lankan waters and ports. This follows India's continual concern over the frequent presence of so-called Chinese research vessels, better known as 'spy ships' in the shared waters. Until now, Colombo has not yielded to the Chinese Embassy's more recent endearments and reprimands that bilateral maritime relations should not be influenced by third nations (read: India, and at times the US, too).
Exclusive Waters
It is in this background that India and Indians need to visualise the festering and fomenting fishers' dispute. The dispute is an unintended and unanticipated product of a bilateral accord from 50 years back. The twin accords of 1974 and 1976 solely aimed at defining the International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL) under the up-and-coming UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
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Today, the fishers' dispute and the accompanying 'Kachchatheevu issue' have deflected attention from the unique nature of the twin IMBL accords. By adopting the UNCLOS provision and by deliberating deviation from the median-line prescription for IMBL identification, the two nations made the Palk Strait link their exclusive waters, denying access to third nations. The geopolitical and geostrategic criticality of the 'exclusivity', legitimised by UNCLOS, has not been adequately acknowledged in the two countries.
In context, the fishers' dispute flows from the Indian fishers' deployment of high-speed bottom trawlers and big-size purse seine nets, both since declared as 'ecologically destructive' by the West that had introduced them in the first place. From the Sri Lankan side, the Tamil fishers of the North especially are badly affected even as they seek to recover lost life and livelihood after long years of ethnic war.
At bilateral and multilateral talks involving the respective governments and/ortheir fishers' representatives over the past several years, the Sri Lankan side has indicated a willingness to allow a limited number of southern Tamil Nadu fishers from India if and only if they give up their bottom trawlers and purse seine nets. By now, it is acknowledged that this fishing equipment also destroys the boats and nets of their 'umbilical cord Tamil brethren' from Sri Lanka, apart from scooping up fishlings and eggs and scraping the natural habitats of fish schools.
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Twin Components
On the ground, the twin dispute has twin components. On the one hand, the Sri Lanka Navy (SLN), mandated to secure the nation's territorial waters, cries foul whenever Indian fishers' cross the IMBL. In recent years, they have also termed Indian fishers' catch as 'poaching' under the law.
Over the past two decades or so, there have been multiple occasions when SLN patrols have arrested Indian fishers and their boats and produced them before local courts for trial and punishment. There have also been occasions when the SLN had opened fire or otherwise harassed and bullied the Indian fishers while rounding them up.
Lately, the Sri Lankan Tamil fishers too have started reacting mid-sea. There have been skirmishes and clashes between the two groups, often closer to Sri Lanka's northern Tamil coast. A new group of yet-to-be identified 'Sri Lankan pirates' has also emerged in recent months, doing what the SLN was otherwise doing all along, though there have not been any shooting incidents involving them, thus far at the very least.
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Traditional Rights, Historic Waters
India's Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and the Indian missions in Colombo and northern Jaffna have been interceding on behalf of the Tamil Nadu Government and the state's fishers when arrested, but that is not a permanent solution. Alongside, India's federal government and that in southern Tamil Nadu have launched a joint subsidy scheme for the Rameswaram fishers to procure long-liners for taking to deep-sea fishing and stay away from harm's length.
Successive governments in Delhi have argued with their Colombo counterparts to provide more space and time for such conversion. It is being pointed out that the conversion also involves 'cultural readjustment', as the affected Rameswaram fishers are not used to staying out in the sea for more than one night at a time, which deep-sea fishing entails. There is also a need to create a market for tuna and other species caught in the deep sea, where Maldivian and Sri Lankan neighbours have had an upper hand all along.
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Yet, even in recent talks with Tamil-speaking Sri Lankan Fisheries Minister R Chandrasekar, Indian High Commissioner Santosh Jha reportedly made a pointed reference to the deep-sea fishing efforts initiated by the government in India. The High Commissioner also underscored the need to revive bilateral fishers' talks, facilitated by the two governments.
However, the Sri Lankan Tamil fishers are clear that they would not yield until they actually get to see their Indian brethren give up their bottom trawlers and purse seine nets. The cooperation and attestation of the Sri Lankan government to any such plan also remains in the realm of speculation.
Before Chandrasekar, his Tamil-speaking predecessor Douglas Devananda was known to have approached the India-unfriendly Chinese Embassy in Colombo more than once to help resolve the issue, where Beijing never ever has had a role. This opened a new angle, which thankfully rests there after last year's change of government in Colombo.
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Politics, Diplomacy
The simmering discontent now centres on two interrelated issues when viewed from Colombo. One, the Modi dispensation in New Delhi, unlike its predecessors, is seen as increasingly pressing the argument of the Tamil Nadu fishers and government that it was a 'livelihood issue' for both sides, and not just the Sri Lankan fishers.
In this context, there is said to be a more frequent mention of phrases like 'traditional fishing rights' in 'historic waters' in Indian propositions at bilateral discourses. There are fewer or less frequent references to the 'destructive methods' employed by the Indian fishers.
The second is even more serious in terms of bilateral politics and diplomacy. Successive Tamil Nadu Chief Ministers, from the late Jayalalithaa (AIADMK) and M Karunanidhi (DMK), have been calling for an annulment of what is now referred to as the 'Kachchatheevu 'Accord'—though the name of the islet never finds a place in the twin pacts. Instead, they refer only to latitude and longitude positions in the map while delineating the IMBL.
In her maiden Independence Day speech as Chief Minister as far back as 1991, Jayalalithaa demanded that New Delhi 'retrieve' Kachchatheevu. Jayalalithaa and her DMK rival M Karunanidhi, both former chief ministers, moved the Supreme Court, claiming that the bilateral accords were bad in law and under the Constitution.
The two petitioners challenged first the transfer and secondly the process—through an exchange of letters between the foreign secretaries of the two nations. According to them, the Indira Gandhi-led Congress Government at the Centre had 'ceded' Kachchatheevu, which had belonged to the erstwhile Sivaganga principality of the Ramanathapuram royalty, and hence should have sought Parliament's approval under the Constitution. After their death, DMK treasurer T R Baalu, MP, has sought to replace Karunanidhi in the DMK's petition, if only to keep it alive and take it forward.
There is no knowing when the case will reach its finality, but the question remains if an Indian court's verdict against the Accord could negate India's international commitments under the joint UNCLOS notification from the early eighties. For now, human presence on the islet is restricted to a few Sri Lankan Navy personnel's periodic visits and to the annual St Anthony's Church festivities, for which Tamil fishers from the two countries gather for two or three days at best to hear the Mass, delivered by a Catholic priest from Jaffna, Sri Lanka.
Long Shadow
The fishers' dispute is one issue at the bilateral and multilateral levels where there is a national consensus in Sri Lanka, cutting across ethnic, political, administrative, and sociological divides. Suffice to point out that in 2017, it was a Tamil parliamentarian, M A Sumanthiran (not elected to the present House), who had piloted the draft, which proposed higher penalties for international trespassers and poachers—which boiled down to Tamil fishers from India.
Then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, otherwise seen as 'India-friendly', was keen that it should be a government bill with all its legal and political connotations both in the country and across the Palk Strait. The House passed the bill unanimously, again reflecting the nation's mood in the matter.
In this background, going beyond the existing issues that are limited to the two fishing communities and at times involving the Sri Lanka Navy, Kachchatheevu as a politico-electoral dispute in India is casting its long shadows on bilateral relations, without anyone noticing it or anyone acknowledging it.
The then Sri Lankan government of President Wickremesinghe, promptly through Foreign Minister Ali Sabry, cast a lid on any domestic controversy by declaring that it was all a part of India's electoral politics of the time and that New Delhi had not made any suggestion of the kind to Colombo. However, EAM Jaishankar's reference to the previous charge recently has caused eyebrows to raise across the Palk Strait.
With the Tamil Nadu assembly elections due next summer, there are concerns in Sri Lankan circles that any overheated exchanges on Kachchatheevu in India could be counterproductive to bilateral relations overall.
The fact remains that the Kachchatheevu issue is not a profitable poll proposition for any party or leader in the Tamil Nadu context, as successive elections have shown. The ruling BJP at the Centre has not understood it for them to acknowledge the same by keeping silent on the subject. For their part, Chief Minister Stalin and his AIADMK challenger and predecessor, Edappadi K Palaniswami, are already playing their mutual blame game from the Jayalalithaa past.
Mischievously Translocated
A section of the Sri Lankan strategic community on the one side and the political opposition on the other is mischievously and meaninglessly evaluating EAM Jaishankar's statement(s) in the light of New Delhi's recent decision to review the Indus Valley Treaty with Pakistan. No one in Colombo or elsewhere in Sri Lanka is suggesting that India would seek a review of the 'Kachchatheevu Accord' here and now, but they are not sure that it won't happen in the future, especially if bilateral ties soar on another front or other fronts.
Already, the seven bilateral MoUs signed recently have been challenged before the Sri Lankan Supreme Court. Politically, every opposition party, including their otherwise India-friendly leaderships, has complained that the JVP-NPP government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake did not take the people and Parliament into confidence on these MoUs.
Free Passage
There is another angle to the 'Kachchatheevu debate', if opened/reopened. When New Delhi launched work on the 'Sethusamudram Canal Project' to make the narrow sea-lane cutting across Palk Strait navigable on the Indian side, the US lost no time in asserting that it would then claim 'free passage' under UNCLOS. The intended import is not fully appreciated for New Delhi to educate Tamil Nadu through the past years. Incidentally, the canal project is now before the Supreme Court of India, and on-site work was stalled very long ago.
For now, any reopening of the 'Kachchatheevu Accord', whatever the reason, circumstance, and time, has the potential to open a Pandora's Box whose contents are not just known. The fish output in the islet zone is not big enough for the Rameswaram fishers to fight for. Thus, it still remains a political dispute at best in India with absolutely no electoral purchase of any kind. With Tamil Nadu assembly elections due next year, the temptation to repeat the political accusations is high.
The sparks that fly then, if fuelled and oiled, can lead to unanticipated and undesirable outcomes on the bilateral front. Under the circumstances, the Indian fishers are also not going to get their due, after all.
By not referring to the 'Kachchatheevu issue', per se, politically or otherwise within the country, and at the same time encouraging Indian fishers to take to deep-sea fishing in a big way and early on, New Delhi would be able to ensure that bilateral ties with Sri Lanka remained on course. It would then be for the incumbent governments in the two nations and their successors over the coming years and decades to build on the same—even as they resolve the stand-alone fishers' dispute in ways that do not extend and expand the avoidable animosity between their fishing communities.
The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: [e-mail]. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost's views.