The solution will require great effort on both nations’ government and fisher communities
Reports about Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe wanting a ‘once and for all solution’ to the problem of ‘poaching’ by Indian fishers in the nation’s northern waters has to be understood in context. Any assumption in India that Wickremesinghe’s ideas could involve some kind of give-and-take in the form of shared/cooperative fishing has no basis. Instead, the President is focussed on ending ‘poaching’ by Indian bottom-trawlers and purse seine nets—both banned in the two countries—and nothing more. Or, so it seems.
According to the reports, President Wickremesinghe is aware that the ‘problem has been rising intermittently, causing embarrassment to the governments of both countries’. He has since named Sagala Ratnayake, Chief of Staff of the President’s Office, to lead a Lankan delegation of experts to discuss the matter with the Indian government.
Any assumption in India that Wickremesinghe’s ideas could involve some kind of give-and-take in the form of shared/cooperative fishing has no basis.
The composition of the Sri Lanka delegation and the venue/venues of their meeting(s) are unclear as of now, but it would make sense if the Sri Lankan delegation stops over in Chennai first for discussions with local officials and fisher groups before proceeding to New Delhi for higher-level, official exchanges on the findings from earlier meeting(s).
Both Tamil Nadu chief minister M K Stalin and his Puducherry counterpart N Rangagswamy have been writing to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and External Affairs Minister (EAM) Dr. S. Jaishankar over the Sri Lanka Navy (SLN) reportedly arresting and/or harassing their fishers, and also confiscating their costly vessels and gears under domestic laws that dictate heavy fines and jail-terms. Their predecessors had done the same in their times viz the PM and EAM of the day. On the ground, things have worsened, according to the Tamil fishers.
Yet, the wisdom behind the Tamil Nadu fishers boycotting the annual St Anthony’s church fete on the tiny Katchchateevu Island this year, to protest a Sri Lankan court sentencing their brethren in past cases of ‘poaching’ by violating the international maritime boundary line (IMBL), is questionable. This is because the Government of Tamil Nadu, and in turn the Government of India, had to exert pressure on their Sri Lankan counterparts to allow their participation when the festivities were restored after decades following the conclusion of Sri Lanka’s ‘LTTE war’ in 2009.
Artisanal fishers and other pilgrims bound for Katchchateevu this year protested in public when the trawler-fishers announced the boycott unilaterally, and the government that facilitates their movement with assistance from Coast Guard cancelled this year’s pilgrimage.
It Is not unlikely that in the future, the Sri Lankan government might cite this year’s boycott to deny permission for Indian fishers to participate in future editions of the annual festivities, introducing new pressure-points in an already strained area in bilateral relations. Even without it, artisanal fishers and other pilgrims bound for Katchchateevu this year protested in public when the trawler-fishers announced the boycott unilaterally, and the government that facilitates their movement with assistance from Coast Guard cancelled this year’s pilgrimage.
There are multiple layers to the complicated issue that need to be understood and appreciated in full before attempting a ‘final solution’, whatever that may be. Primarily, the issue involves Tamil-speaking fishers in the two countries. Under regular circumstances, these two groups have called each other ‘umbilical cord brethren’ for generations and centuries, but when it comes to livelihood issues, they are unyielding.
Thus, the Sri Lankan Tamil (SLT) fishers in the North, and at times the East, have been charging their Indian brethren from southern Tamil Nadu and the Karaikal enclave in the union territory of Puducherry, for violating the international maritime boundary line (IMBL) and even more so for ‘indiscriminate poaching’ of the catch that is due to them. On the immediate side, the Indian fishers end up destroying their smaller vessels and fishing-nets. Over the medium- and long-terms, they can cause large-scale destruction of traditional fishing grounds, especially the coral reefs where pricy shrimps nest, causing further depletion of fishing stocks.
Under regular circumstances, these two groups have called each other ‘umbilical cord brethren’ for generations and centuries, but when it comes to livelihood issues, they are unyielding.
According to SLT fishers and their associations, who have been organising periodic protests, their Indian counterparts had already depleted the stocks on their side of the Palk Bay due to similar trade practices that are admittedly bad. Through past negotiations, they have agreed to consider letting Indian fishers into their waters if, and only if, the latter gave up bottom-trawling. The pre-agreed grace-periods have come and gone, but there has not been any improvement on the ground.
The two national governments are alive to the plight of the respective fishing communities, and have been working to find amicable and workable solutions. In context, India has also become increasingly alive to a permanent solution to address the livelihood issues of their fishers, who have been around these waters for generations and centuries. This goes by the internationally-accepted norm that politically-created borders cannot curtail fishers’ activities just as they cannot stop fish from moving across the artificially-created IMBL.
Yet, India too is alive to the problem of bottom-trawling, a practice banned in the country as much as in Sri Lanka. But enforcement is known to be lax in India, making Sri Lankan Tamil fishers (like their Sinhala counterparts elsewhere across the country’s coast) demand bottom-trawling facilities for themselves in their own territorial waters. This has the potential to break into a bigger issue in times to come.
Through two agreements in 1974 and 1976, India and Sri Lanka delineated the IMBL under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), leading to a ban on Indian fishers crossing over to the other side. India was yet to introduce Norwegian-funded bottom-trawling as part of the economic recovery programme that followed rupee-devaluation in 1966, so the current problems were not around at the time.
Violation of the IMBL and ‘poaching’ were unknown at the time as enforcement was lax on both sides. However, in the pre-trawler, pre-IMBL era, too, occasional mid-sea clashes between fishers from the two countries used to be reported. They were treated like those clashes that break out between fishers’ villages in mid-sea and along the coastline across Tamil Nadu, then and now.
Violation of the IMBL and ‘poaching’ were unknown at the time as enforcement was lax on both sides.
Then followed an era of Tamil militancy in Sri Lanka, with its maritime/’naval’ component, where the LTTE’s ‘Sea Tigers’ dominated the scene until the SLN began catching up in the new century. The end of the ethnic war in 2009 meant the return of Indian fishers first, followed not long after by their Sri Lankan counterparts.
While acting to curb possible re-emergence of ‘sea tigers’-like outfits from among the Sri Lankan Tamil community and also contain support for them from India’s Palk Bay fishers as during the past decades, the SLN, in the name of protecting sovereignty and territorial integrity, was known to have attacked or opened fire on the latter in the past, at times leading to deaths. Over the past decades and more, there have been few deaths in this manner, but the number of arrests and court-ordered penalties has increased.
In 2018, when present-day President Wickremesinghe was Prime Minister, a private member Bill standing in the name of M A Sumanthiran, a senior Tamil parliamentarian, was adapted by the government to increase the penalties for poachers. It was competitive politics involving fellow-Tamil parliamentarian, Douglas Devananda, now fisheries minister. That the prime minister at the time is now President is a fact that cannot be wished away.
Flowing from the IMBL accords is the Katchchateevu issue, wherein India agreed to a deviation from UNCLOS’ median-line marker and agreed to a violent deviation that put Katchchateevu on the Sri Lankan side. Successive Tamil Nadu governments since the early ’90s have demanded that the Centre take back Katchchateevu after the islet became a central-point of fishers’ arguments, though the affected Rameswaram fishers readily concede that there were no fish in those waters too.
A decade ago, considering all aspects of the dispute, the governments of India and Tamil Nadu together launched a programme to train the affected Indian fishers to take to ‘deep-sea fishing’, and allocated substantial funds for encouraging them to buy long-liners required for multi-day fishing. The programme has yet to catch, especially because the ‘Rameswaram fishers’, who are at the centre of the Sri Lankan dispute, are not culturally attuned to staying out at sea for more than one night at a time. The political changes at the Centre and in the state, and also the intervening ‘Cyclone Ockhi’ in 2017—where reports claimed the death of many fishers from the southern-most Kanyakumari district, and adjoining southern Kerala—were also dampeners to the programme.
The programme has yet to catch, especially because the ‘Rameswaram fishers’, who are at the centre of the Sri Lankan dispute, are not culturally attuned to staying out at sea for more than one night at a time.
Today, India does not have much time to lose. Apart from periodic arrest of southern Tamil Nadu fishers in distant Gulf nations, the frequency with which their brethren are getting arrested in the Maldivian waters has increased of late as well. This should not be confused with bilateral political strains as even during the closing weeks of ‘India-friendly’ President Mohamed Solih late last year, the Maldivian National Defence Force (MNDF) levied an equivalent of INR 2.27crore on an Indian fishing vessel from Tamil Nadu’s Thoothukudi found poaching in their waters. More recently, the MNDF has apprehended another Indian fishing vessel for violations.
While working out cooperative fishing of some kind, including licensed fishing for Indian fishers in Sri Lankan waters, sounds easy, it is not to be. Both the Sri Lankan Government and their fishers are not agreeable to anything of the kind until and unless Indian fishers give up the use of bottom-trawlers and purse seine nets. That leaves behind deep-sea fishing as the only workable option, where governments in India have to put in greater and persistent efforts at funding, training and motivating the affected fishers. This is to drive home the point that deep-sea fishing is the next stage after the trawlers, whose introduction in the ’60s was resisted but has now become something the fishers can’t let go of.
N Sathiya Moorthy is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator
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N. Sathiya Moorthy is a policy analyst and commentator based in Chennai.
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