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Sri Lankan president’s visit to Kachchatheevu sparks diplomatic ripples—testing India-Sri Lanka ties amid heated Tamil Nadu demands for retrieval.
Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s visit to Kachchatheevu islet—undertaken without prior public intimation—during an official tour of northern Jaffna on 1 September 2025, surprised Tamils across the Palk Strait for different reasons.
The Sri Lankan Tamil (SLT) fishing community acknowledges that Kachchatheevu is not central to their ongoing dispute with their ‘umbilical cord’ brethren from southern Tamil Nadu’s Rameswaram. In fact, Rameswaram fisher leaders also do not claim otherwise. However, given Tamil Nadu’s socio-electoral climate, political parties in the State have continued to demand that New Delhi ‘retrieve’ the otherwise barren islet, located midway between the Rameswaram and Jaffna coasts.
“The government is committed to safeguarding the surrounding seas, islands, and landmass of the country for the benefit of the people and will not allow any external force to exert influence in this regard,” Dissanayake said while addressing an official function in Jaffna. Neither the audience nor local journalists—who had been given the President’s formal itinerary for Jaffna—realised that he was alluding to Kachchatheevu, or that he was proceeding there immediately after the event in a Sri Lanka Navy (SLN) speed boat.
“The government is committed to safeguarding the surrounding seas, islands, and landmass of the country for the benefit of the people and will not allow any external force to exert influence in this regard,” Dissanayake said.
In every sense, the President’s Kachchatheevu visit was symbolic—meant to assert that the islet was Sri Lankan territory, and that as Head of State, he required no invitation or clearance from any other government, including India. Yet, if the Sri Lankan Establishment and the ruling Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)-National People’s Party (NPP) combine believed this would boost their politico-electoral standing among Northern Tamils, they were mistaken. Nor is it likely to consolidate their limited ‘Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist’ vote-bank from the 2023 pre-poll era.
Northern fishers, who supported the JVP-NPP in the 2024 parliamentary elections, did so largely because the political career of their long-time patron and former Fisheries Minister Douglas Devananda was already waning, and they had almost always not voted with the peninsula’s elite and upper castes. For the fishers who were the worst-hit among the Tamils in the war zone, livelihood concerns outweighed other issues. By contrast, for much of the Tamil polity, the protracted ethnic conflict and the 30-year-long Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) war have remained paramount, then and now.
However, the immediacy of the circumstances for Dissanayake’s Kachchatheevu visit was provided by India’s Tamil actor-politician Vijay, who at a recent conference of his fledgling Tamizhaga Vetri Kazhagam (TVK) party in Madurai, called upon Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to ‘retrieve Kachchatheevu’. He was merely the latest State-level leader to do so. The remarks reverberated in the Sri Lankan Parliament, where Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath reiterated that there was ‘no change in the status of Kachchatheevu’.
‘Kachchatheevu Island belongs to Sri Lanka. It is Sri Lankan territory, and that will never change. Elections are currently underway in South India, and candidates often make statements to win votes. This is not the first time such rhetoric has emerged during campaigns, and none of those claims has resulted in any change,’ Herath told Parliament. Notably, he echoed the traditional Sinhala political practice of referring to Tamil Nadu as “South India”. Before him, his predecessor, Ali Sabry, had conveyed similar sentiments when the issue threatened to become a poll issue in India, circa 2024.
‘Kachchatheevu Island belongs to Sri Lanka. It is Sri Lankan territory, and that will never change. Elections are currently underway in South India, and candidates often make statements to win votes.
In Tamil Nadu, Chief Minister (CM) M. K. Stalin has raised the demand whenever SLN arrests Indian fishers for violating the International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL) and ‘poaching’ in Sri Lankan waters. Stalin’s late rival and then AIADMK CM Jayalalithaa initiated the competitive Dravidian push on Kachchatheevu in her maiden Independence Day address in 1991, and followed it up with a Supreme Court petition—rendered infructuous by her death in 2016.
DMK treasurer T.R. Baalu has recently sought to substitute himself in place of late party patriarch M. Karunanidhi, who too had petitioned the Supreme Court. Back in 1974, as Chief Minister, Karunanidhi had secured a unanimous Assembly resolution opposing the cession of Kachchatheevu to Sri Lanka.
He even had the support of then Jana Sangh leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee, later a Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) Prime Minister, who nonetheless upheld the 1974-1976 accords once in power. Another Tamil Nadu-born Jana Sangh/BJP leader, the late Jana Krishnamurthy, also pressed the cause until Vajpayee assumed office. This was despite documentary evidence showing that Kachchatheevu had historically belonged to the Sivaganga court under the Ramanathapuram royals.
The Kachchatheevu issue pre-dates the fishermen’s dispute, which gained salience only after the end of Sri Lanka’s ethnic war in 2009. However, there had been constant mid-sea incidents involving the two fishing communities since the mid-1960s, when India introduced the (now despised) bottom-trawling to boost forex earnings through fish exports. The method was banned in Sri Lanka then as it is now. By contrast, the Kachchatheevu dispute arose from the 1974 and 1976 bilateral agreements, which assigned the islet to Sri Lanka. Most political parties and analysts, especially in Tamil Nadu, called it a ‘sleight of hand’, as it was achieved by deviating from the median-line principle for drawing the IMBL between the two countries, and deliberately so.
Ownership of the islet had been contested since colonial times, with Delhi and Colombo taking opposing positions. The 1970s Accords ended this ambiguity as part of IMBL negotiations, later formalised under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)—though UNCLOS itself only entered into force in the 1990s.
The zig-zag boundary was justified as a way to avoid creating an enclave of international waters that could attract third-party claims. Thus, the Palk Strait remains one of the few maritime zones in the world where no third nation can demand access, under the accepted UNCLOS framework.
Most political parties and analysts, especially in Tamil Nadu, called it a ‘sleight of hand’, as it was achieved by deviating from the median-line principle for drawing the IMBL between the two countries, and deliberately so.
Until recently, successive Indian governments consistently maintained the position that Kachchatheevu belonged to Sri Lanka, both within Parliament and outside. The Modi government too adopted this line. However, during the 2024 parliamentary campaign, Modi tweeted that the then Congress Government of the 1970s at the Centre had “callously” given Kachchatheevu away to Sri Lanka.
Both PM Modi and External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar went hammer and tongs against the Congress-DMK alliance, and were careful not to claim victory. Their statements came only after the conclusion of the Tamil Nadu phase of the Lok Sabha polls. The issue mattered the most in the State, but owing possibly to the delayed timing, reaction from poll-weary State politicos was subdued at best.
It has also been argued that the 1970s decision was not a “sell-out”, since it was accompanied by India’s assertion of ownership over the mineral-rich Wadge Bank waters near its southern tip—part of a strategic recalibration after the 1962 Sino-Indian war and the 1971 Bangladesh war.
Against this backdrop, President Dissanayake’s Kachchatheevu visit must be seen. No Sri Lankan President since the 1970s Accords has visited the islet, which has become both a symbol of bilateral ‘give-and-take’ and a lightning rod for political controversy in Tamil Nadu.
Any VIP to have travelled anywhere close to the India-Sri Lanka IMBL was the Chinese Ambassador, Qi Zhenhong, in December 2021—also via an unannounced SLN-arranged trip during Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s tenure. The visit caused ripples in New Delhi’s strategic circles.
As much as symbolism, a lot of sensitivity is attached to Dissanayake's visit as well, since pressure may now mount on the Modi-led Centre from Tamil Nadu parties and social outfits, to ‘retrieve’ Kachchatheevu. The ruling BJP at the Centre, which hopes to be able to share power with the Opposition AIADMK ally after next summer’s assembly polls in the State, has been put on the defensive.
As much as symbolism, a lot of sensitivity is attached to Dissanayake's visit as well, since pressure may now mount on the Modi-led Centre from Tamil Nadu parties and social outfits, to ‘retrieve’ Kachchatheevu.
The Kachchatheevu issue has not been a decisive factor in any electoral outcome in Tamil Nadu, including in the Ramanathapuram Lok Sabha constituency where the temple-island of Rameswaram is situated. President Dissanayake’s visit, while diplomatically avoidable, has the potential to generate some discomfort for his counterparts in New Delhi—similar to how pointed criticism by Prime Minister Modi and External Affairs Minister Jaishankar of the opposition Congress created ripples in Colombo, even though President Ranil Wickremesinghe was then in office.
Despite the immediate controversies, there is little evidence to suggest that President Dissanayake’s visit will significantly disrupt India–Sri Lanka bilateral relations. As with previous flare-ups over Kachchatheevu, any current tensions are likely to fade naturally in the days rather than persist over months or years.
N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a policy analyst & political commentator, based in Chennai.
The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.
N. Sathiya Moorthy is a policy analyst and commentator based in Chennai. ...
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