The recent death of the Sri Lankan sailor has revived the longstanding India-Sri Lanka fishers’ issue and the related Katchchatheevu issue
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The death of a Sri Lankan Navy (SLN) sailor when his vessel engaged with an Indian bottom-trawler from southern Tamil Nadu at mid-sea, has revived the fishers’ issue that has evaded a permanent solution for long. This, in turn, has reopened the internal Indian political discourse on the related ‘Katchchatheevu issue’, that too at the official-level between the Centre and the state. The issues have to be handled with greater sensitivity if the complexities have to be contained and do not become the single-most bilateral concern as they also involve human lives, people, and constituencies on both sides.
The Sri Lankan police have arrested all 10 fishers in the Indian trawler and launched ‘homicide’ investigations. The Foreign Ministry in Colombo summoned an official from the Indian High Commission and registered a formal protest. The same was done by the Sri Lankan High Commission in New Delhi, with India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). Otherwise antagonistic towards the Sri Lankan armed forces over the ‘ethnic war’ in the past, the Sri Lankan Tamil (SLT) fisher association leaders paid homage to the dead sailor in his home, down South.
The Sri Lankan police have arrested all 10 fishers in the Indian trawler and launched ‘homicide’ investigations. The Foreign Ministry in Colombo summoned an official from the Indian High Commission and registered a formal protest. The same was done by the Sri Lankan High Commission in New Delhi, with India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA).
Fisheries Minister Douglas Devananda, who is also a Tamil leader from the North, was a pall-bearer at the sailor’s funeral, and said that ‘Tamil Nadu’s silence hampers a resolution to the fishers’ issue’. He said that he had taken up the larger fishers’ issue with visiting Indian External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar recently, and wanted to travel to Tamil Nadu, to confer with Chief Minister M K Stalin.
The sailor’s death has revived a controversy that has been raging for nearly six decades, with intermittent breaks, during the three-decade-long ethnic war in Sri Lanka. At the centre of it was the Indians’ indiscriminate and reckless use of high-speed bottom-trawlers and big-sized Purse seine nets, introduced on the Indian side but still banned in Sri Lanka. SLT fishers have all along complained that their deployment damaged their mechanised boats and gear, caused injuries to men and destroyed corals and other fish habitats forever. The end of the ethnic war in 2009 and the destruction of the dreaded LTTE’s ‘Sea Tigers’ fleet caused the SLT fishers’ return to native seas, where Indian counterparts had re-entered a few years earlier.
Giving legal teeth to Sri Lankan accusations of ‘poaching’ was the more basic issue of Indian fishers crossing the International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL), bilaterally agreed upon through two agreements in 1974 and 1976. Mandated to secure the nation’s sovereignty, territory and marine wealth, the SLN targeted Indian trawlers, at times leading to death and injuries to fishers, mainly from Tamil Nadu’s Rameswaram coast and Karaikkal enclave in the union territory of Puducherry.
The conflicting sensitivities on both sides led to New Delhi and Colombo continuing their efforts to diffuse the situation and led to a joint statement issued at the end of bilateral talks in 2008. The statement acknowledged ‘humanitarian and livelihood dimensions’, and ‘agreed to put in place practical arrangements to deal with bona fide Indian and Sri Lankan fishermen crossing the IMBL’. The war was still raging in Sri Lanka, and the ‘practical arrangements’ included Colombo’s ‘designation’ of ‘sensitive areas along the Sri Lankan coastline’ and the Tamil Nadu government issuing permits for genuine fishing vessels and identity cards to fishers.
The conflicting sensitivities on both sides led to New Delhi and Colombo continuing their efforts to diffuse the situation and led to a joint statement issued at the end of bilateral talks in 2008.
On the livelihood front, the issue was still about Indian fishers’ ‘destructive fishing practices’. At fishers-level negotiations facilitated by the governments, Sri Lankan representatives laid down a pre-condition for meaningful negotiations—that their counterparts give up trawlers and Purse seine nets, which were also legally banned and strictly enforced in Sri Lanka. From the Indian side, the government of late Chief Minister Jayalalitha, in particular, stuck to the position that fishing was a ‘livelihood issue’ also for Tamil Nadu fishers, who had ‘traditional rights’ to access the ‘historic waters’.
The construct derived from the state government’s position that the 1974 and 1976 accords that outlined the IMBL were legally flawed. However, the Centre clarified in the Supreme Court that no territory was ‘ceded’, which alone required parliamentary approval, as argued by chief ministers Jayalalithaa and M Karunanidhi, in their petitions filed in a private capacity while in the Opposition. The death of the two leaders, respectively in 2016 and 2018, has caused the ‘closure’ of their petitions.
The fact that the delineation was possibly only one of a kind under bilateral/multilateral agreements signed between coastal nations across the world as a part of the first UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has not been adequately appreciated. India, in particular, was keen on denying access to third nations to those waters, which the deviation from the UNCLOS’ median-line principle facilitated in this case. Unlike understood or misunderstood in Tamil Nadu, owing to inadequate information, then and now, in return for the Katchchatheevu islet, India got ownership and possession of 10,000 sq. km minerals-rich Wadge Bank waters, off the southern-most Kanyakumari coast.
After the arrest of these 10 fishers for the sailor’s death, Chief Minister Stalin wrote to EAM Jaishankar, seeking the early re-convening of the official-level Joint Working Group (JWG), aimed at finding a permanent solution. In his response, Minister Jaishankar revived the controversial reference to the 1974 Accord, which was an unsuccessful campaign-point of BJP Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Lok Sabha polls earlier this year. At the time, Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister Ali Sabry declared that the internal Indian discourse did not concern the Colombo government as it was a ‘resolved issue’. For his part, MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal, has since said since that New Delhi always ‘prioritised’ the welfare of the TN fishers in Sri Lankan custody and had already taken it up with Colombo.
The SLN’s subsequent arrest of 25 TN fishermen only days after the court-ordered remand for 10 in the sailor’s death has caused further consternation all along southern Tamil Nadu’s coastal villages. CM Stalin has once again written to EAM Jaishankar, this time, however, joining political issues with him, claiming that three consecutive BJP governments at the Centre had ‘not made any tangible efforts to retrieve Katchchatheevu’.
The SLN’s subsequent arrest of 25 TN fishermen only days after the court-ordered remand for 10 in the sailor’s death has caused further consternation all along southern Tamil Nadu’s coastal villages.
Incidentally, every time Katchchatheevu has been mentioned in India, it has triggered a media/academic discourse across Sri Lanka, centred and issues of sovereignty, territorial integrity and protection of marine wealth, pressuring the Colombo dispensation even more. It is another matter, in the recent incident, 25 arrested Indians were fishing only in ‘country craft’, approved by the Sri Lankan Tamil fishers but not by the SLN, at least at present.
In the fitness of things, the Katchchatheevu issue is not germane to the larger fishers’ problem. Knowledgeable fishers in the Rameswaram area readily concede that neither the restoration of their rights to dry their nets on the islet, as guaranteed in the 1974 Accord nor the retrieval of Katchchatheevu would help them. They acknowledge that such retrieval, either by approaching an Indian court afresh or the UNCLOS secretariat or even the International Court of Justice (ICJ) are unfeasible options as they cannot then hope to overcome the existing antagonism of the SLN and the SLT fishers. Their leaders are also knowledgeable about the non-feasibility of India or Indians moving the UNCLOS or ICJ, unilaterally in the matter, even if they were to be considered.
Further, Indian fishers point out that relatively recent unanimously-approved legislative initiatives of the Sri Lankan Parliament have steeply increased the fines and jail-term for bottom-trawling and poaching, which has not been helpful.
All of it has revived thoughts about actionable alternatives, where ‘deep-sea fishing’ may still be at the top of the list, despite anticipated hiccups early on. Launched as a coordinated subsidy-driven scheme of the Centre and the state government about a decade ago, the scheme is at best dormant following what became political one-upmanship, also between the Centre and the State. This meant that parallel efforts at talking the Rameswaram fishers too suffered. The death of many deep-sea fishers from further down south in Cyclone Ockhi in 2017 was a further dampener.
Yet, given the massive hurdles from across the IMBL, reviving deep-sea fishing with added subsidies to provide for inflation, and educating fishers on international pricing mechanisms and marketing efforts, as promised by the state government in 2011, maybe the only way out. If we aim to achieve permanent peace, tranquillity and continued prosperity in the fishing villages of Rameswaram and the neighbourhood, conscious efforts would have to be made now by the political leaderships at the Centre and in the state, to revive deep-sea fishing, whole-heartedly and by all stakeholders, over a longer time frame with accompanying costs in money, time and efforts.
Sathiya Moorthy is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator
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N. Sathiya Moorthy is a policy analyst and commentator based in Chennai.
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