At a time when political discourse in southern Tamil Nadu is centred on the propriety and wisdom of Chief Minister M. K. Stalin reading out a long list of the state’s pending demands to Prime Minister Narendra Modi at an official function in Chennai, one of those issues stand out like a sore thumb in the nation’s carefully-crafted ‘Neighbourhood First’ policy. The reiteration of the state’s decades-old demand for the Centre to ‘retrieve’ the tiny Kachchativu islet from Sri Lanka, and the Chief Minister claiming that “this is the right time” to do so, is as much ill-timed as it is ill-conceived. Speaking at the event in which Prime Minister Modi unveiled INR31,530-crore worth of Centrally-funded projects for the state, Chief Minister Stalin submitted that retrieving Kachchativu could be a solution to the problems faced by the fisherfolk and it would help to uphold their traditional rights to fish there. As was to be expected, Modi, who spoke afterwards, did not touch upon either the Kachchativu or other domestic issues that the Chief Minister had flagged.

The Chief Minister’s Kachchativu call came at a time when he was leading the state in donating food and medicines to all Sri Lankans, in addition to the Centre’s credit facilities. Stalin’s initiative was well-received all across the island nation, especially after he expanded the limited Tamil-centric assistance to cover all people.

In his speech that followed, the Prime Minister confined Sri Lanka-related references to the prevailing economic and political situation in the country, without commenting on them. India would continue to stand with the people of Sri Lanka and support democracy, stability, and economic recovery. The Prime Minister said, “As a close friend and neighbour, India is providing all possible support to Sri Lanka. This includes financial support, fuel, food, medicine and other essential items.” New Delhi has also spoken strongly in international fora on the need for giving economic support to Sri Lanka, he recalled.

Different leader

The Chief Minister’s Kachchativu call came at a time when he was leading the state in donating food and medicines to all Sri Lankans, in addition to the Centre’s credit facilities. Stalin’s initiative was well-received all across the island nation, especially after he expanded the limited Tamil-centric assistance to cover all people. Two successive Prime Ministers, Mahinda Rajapaksa and Ranil Wickremesinghe wrote to him, thanking him for the timely gesture. Hardcore anti-India elements in the Sinhala polity, too, relented, after they discovered that barring India, no other nation had rushed to their rescue, including China. The Chief Minister’s gesture meant that the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist hard-liners were seeing a different Dravidian political leader, as different from their stereotyped perceptions contextualised to the ethnic issue and war.

Counter-productive

It is in this context, that his demand for New Delhi ‘retrieving’ Kachchativu has become as ill-timed as it is otherwise irretrievable. The Chief Minister’s call has not gone down well with the Sri Lankan Tamil fishers, who too link Kachchativu to the bilateral dispute, though fishermen from both sides are alive to the fact that it is no more a prosperous fishing ground as it used to be in earlier decades. Already, Jaffna-based Sri Lankan Tamil parliamentarians such as Selvam Adaikalanathan have declared that they would not part with Kachchativu. The ‘Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist’ hard-liners have not missed the Chief Minister’s phrase that ‘this is the right time’ to retrieve Kachchativu. Conditioned to think that way, they have involuntarily concluded that Stalin was only referring to the impossibility of their nation’s economic situation and that he was indicating a quid pro quo deal, centred on the uninhabited islet, where fishers from both nations gather only for the annual two-day St Anthony’s church festival. This is true of the Sri Lankan state’s institutional mechanisms, whose memory is not short.

The Kachchativu issue derives mainly from the 1974 bilateral agreement when the two nations adopted a ‘deviating median’ that the 163-acre barren islet on the Sri Lankan side of the ‘International Maritime Border Line’ (IMBL), drawn for the first time.

Even as Sri Lanka’s economic crisis began unfolding, critics of the Government of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, including incumbent cabinet ministers, claimed that India was ‘blackmailing’ the nation into signing on dotted lines. Later, critics, including the Leader of the Opposition, Sajith Premadasa, claimed that India was rushing assistance only to save the ruling Rajapaksas, only with the view to protecting the ‘interests of Prime Minister Modi’s industrialist friends’. As if to make amends, Premadasa, Jr, made an open appeal to Modi to help Sri Lanka, to the ‘maximum extent possible’.

Deviating median

The Kachchativu issue derives mainly from the 1974 bilateral agreement when the two nations adopted a ‘deviating median’ that the 163-acre barren islet on the Sri Lankan side of the ‘International Maritime Border Line’ (IMBL), drawn for the first time. Independent of political and governmental pressures from Tamil Nadu, successive governments at the Centre have stood by this decision, as notified under the first edition of the ‘UN Convention on the Law of the Sea’ (UNCLOS), which conferred international legitimacy to the Accord and made unilateral revocability, near-impossible. The why of it remains unclear, but the deviation has ensured that the 53-km Palk Strait remains a lake for the exclusive use of these two nations—one of its kind under UNCLOS—with access-denial to third nations. The third nations began showing interest when India commenced work on the Sethu Samudram Canal project— stayed by the Supreme Court—the US declared that if the waters became navigable, as intended, they would seek access.

New Delhi has consistently claimed that the 1974 Accord did not deal with either cessation of territory or alteration of a national boundary, requiring parliamentary clearance. It was pioneering work at demarcating the IMBL.

However, the continuing dispute is over Sri Lanka repeatedly denying access to Indian fishers to rest and dry their nets, as provided under the 1974 Accord. First, they cited the decades-old LTTE war as the impediment, then they argued that Indian fishers did not require to dry the nylon nets that had come into vogue. Some also pointed to the absence of the said clause in the successor accord of 1976. All through, Colombo had cited revenue records in northern Jaffna district to claim ownership of Kachchativu, just as successive governments in Tamil Nadu have cited voluminous documents on the sovereignty transfer from the Raja of Ramnad and the Sivaganga zamin. In making out a case before the Supreme Court, political rivals turned former Tamil Nadu chief ministers, Jayalalithaa and M Karunanidhi, in their capacity, also submitted that the 1974 Accord violated Article 3 of the Constitution, which required the Union to obtain parliamentary approval whilst ‘ceding’ territory. New Delhi has consistently claimed that the 1974 Accord did not deal with either cessation of territory or alteration of a national boundary, requiring parliamentary clearance. It was pioneering work at demarcating the IMBL. All these, even as successive governments at the Centre have stood firm on protecting Indian fishers from Sri Lankan naval attacks and arrests. However, their release from the island’s prisons was rendered more difficult by a 2017 parliamentary legislation that laid down stringent penalties and hefty bail amounts, supposedly on all maritime trespassers. Though as Chief Minister, Stalin may have ill-timed and wrongly phrased his concerns over the unending fishers’ dispute, he was not the first one to deploy the ‘retrieval’ phrase. Delivering her maiden Independence Day address as the late chief minister, AIADMK’s Jayalalithaa said so on 15 August 1991. She reiterated the same, both inside and outside the state assembly many times, and also moved to the Supreme Court in her individual capacity. DMK’s M Karunanidhi, Chief Minister Stalin’s late father, followed suit on all fronts.

Politics and political demands apart, some strategic analysts in India have felt uncomfortable at the theoretical possibility of Kachachativu, so close to the Indian mainland, becoming accessible to adversarial China, one way or the other, given the ever-increasing bonding between Beijing and Colombo.

However, what seemed to have got Stalin’s goat is the recent reiteration of the same by some state leaders of Prime Minister Modi’s ruling BJP at the Centre. In saying so, they have often claimed that the Modi government would either ‘retrieve’ Kachchativu or would get it on a long-term lease from Sri Lanka, for the use of Tamil Nadu fishers. Such politically-loaded statements, especially from leaders of the all-powerful ruling party at the Centre, have consequences from multiple Sri Lankan perspectives. Politics and political demands apart, some strategic analysts in India have felt uncomfortable at the theoretical possibility of Kachachativu, so close to the Indian mainland, becoming accessible to adversarial China, one way or the other, given the ever-increasing bonding between Beijing and Colombo. Whilst an Indian lease over Kachchativu would not find takers across the board in Sri Lanka, the two nations could consider creating a joint patrol—once proposed by Colombo—to keep an eye, or two, on the shared waters, to curb illegal fishing by third nations and also the increasing incidence and volumes of drug smuggling. In considering the possibility, the two nations could also look at the desirability of making it a part of a pilot project for a permanent joint naval patrol by the navies of all member nations of the recently-formed ‘Colombo Security Conclave’ (CSC), including Maldives and Bangladesh. Such an arrangement, when extended to the waters of other member nations, could help them collectively address the common security concerns.

• International Affairs
• India
• Sri Lanka
• democracy
• Economic
• Financial support
• Food
• fuel
• Kachchativu
• medicine
• Tamil Nadu
• UNCLOS

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