The hullabaloo in Tamil Nadu over Katchatheevu island in the Palk Strait with Prime Minister Narendra Modi accusing the Congress of giving it away to Sri Lanka “callously” is at best grist for the BJP’s election mill.
It has no bearing on the real issue, which is the rather unreasonable demand of the Tamil Nadu fishermen that they be allowed to fish in the Palk Strait, the Palk Bay and even the North Eastern Jaffna seas because they had been fishing there for centuries.
For them, the International Maritime Boundary drawn up in 1974 and 1976 is of no relevance.
Though the retrieval of Katchatheevu from Sri Lanka is portrayed as a solution to the problem, it is not. The Tamil Nadu fishermen, armed with trawlers that scrape the bottom of the shallow sea denuding it of not just fish but all forms of marine life, had over-fished in the sea next to the Indian shores and had taken to poaching in Sri Lankan waters right up to the Sri Lankan shores.
They brazenly exploit the relative weakness of the North Sri Lankan Tamil fishermen and the feeble response of the government in Colombo.
When arrested, the story the Tamil Nadu fishermen narrate to the outside world is that they did not cross Katchatheevu and that the Lankan navy seized them in Indian waters. If this were true, the Indian Coast Guard, which has bases on the Indian side, would have intercepted the Lankan navy. But there has not been a single case of confrontation between the Indian and Lankan naval personnel.
Since the arrest of the fishermen triggers a hue and cry in Tamil Nadu, Indian diplomats get them released promptly. But since this is treated as a minor inconvenience, the boats come back again. Previously, the Lankan navy used to open fire, but they don’t fire even warning shots these days so as not to annoy the Big Brother.
Sri Lanka had banned trawlers in 2017, but Indian trawlers come unchallenged. Lankan Fisheries Minister Douglas Devananda told parliament that at least 5,000 bottom trawlers from Pondicherry, Karaikal, Rameshwaram and Nagapattinam enter Sri Lankan waters week after week to engage in bottom trawling at the expense of the livelihoods of local fishermen.
“After the 1976 agreement, the Indian mechanised trawlers which were 36 feet long with 120 horsepower capacity at that time, turned out to be 50-60 foot long massive vessels with 350-550 horsepower engines after 2000,” Devananda said.
With big Indian boats on the prowl, the North Lankan Tamil fishermen do not get enough catch.
“There are days when we return home empty-handed, and there is not even enough fish for our own consumption,” Rasenthiram Mathiyalahan, secretary of Aadhikovilady Fishermen Union in Point Pedro, told Sunday Times.
Local fishermen are appalled by an Indo-Lankan proposal to issue permits to Indian fishermen to fish in Lankan waters. “We will never allow such proposals to be implemented,” Varnakulasingham, a fisher leader said.
There is an India-Sri Lanka Joint Working Group on Fisheries, but it has not achieved anything other than getting the Sri Lankan side to agree to treat the captured Indians “humanely” and release them at the earliest.
In the past, the Northern Tamil areas had the reputation of being one of the most productive regions in terms of export-quality seafood. But over time, shrimps, blue swimming crab and cuttlefish became the main targets of Indian bottom trawling, resulting in a loss of about US$ 750 million annually to Sri Lanka and affecting about 50,000 fisher families.
A study quoted in a research paper submitted to the Sir John Kotelawala Defense University revealed that in 2016 around 1000-1500 mechanized trawlers were coming to Palk Strait, Palk Bay and Gulf of Mannar three days in a week. They had harvested approximately 1900 tons of shrimps and 4000 tons of demersal fish.
The Northern Lankan Tamil fishermen were earning just LKR 600 – 800 LKR per day, which was a third of the income they used to earn before the Indian trawler invasion.
Sinhalese fishermen from South Sri Lanka do fish in Indian waters but not in the Palk Strait and Palk Bay. They go to the deep seas in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea as they use multi-day boats. Sometimes they get caught for fishing in Indian waters and are released.
PK Balachandran is a senior journalist based in Sri Lanka
