By Kaushal Kishore*
At an election rally in Meerut on Sunday, March 31, 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi referred to the Katchatheevu Island. It is an island in Palk Strait and connects the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea in the Indian Ocean.
On July 21, 2022, in reply to a question by a member of the Rajya Sabha from Tamil Nadu, Vaiyapuri Gopalsamy, better known as Vaiko, who is the founder of a political party, the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, the Minister of State in the ministry of external affairs, V. Muraleedharan, told the Upper House that under the 1974 and 1976 maritime boundary agreements between the Government of India and Sri Lanka in 1974 and 1976, “the Island of Katchatheevu lies on the Sri Lankan side of the India-Sri Lanka International Maritime Boundary Line”. The Minister further told the Rajya Sabha that “Currently, the matter relating to the Katchatheevu Island issue is sub-judice in the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India”.
Muraleedharan’s reply was the same as when another Rajya Sabha Member Puspanathan Wilson of the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham (DMK) asked whether the Government had taken any steps to release the Katchatheevu Island from Sri Lanka by annulling the agreements entered in the years 1974 to 1976 by the Governments of India and Sri Lanka; whether any talks were initiated between India and Sri Lanka concerning seceding the Katchatheevu Island and retrieving it from Sri Lanka; and if so, the details thereof and, if not, the reasons therefor?
Almost five decades ago, the Union government headed by Indira Gandhi transferred this part of Tamil Nadu to Sri Lanka. Since then this issue has been raised on several occasions in the legislatures to the courtrooms. Prime Minister Modi has been trying hard to win the Tamils with all his articulations and attires. The controversial Setu Samudram project and Ram Setu or the Adams Bridge have been discussed for a long time. The little island situated in the same region is 33 kilometres apart from the Indian coast.
Modi’s reference to it was apparently a deft ploy to shift the public discourse around nationalism at a time when leaders of the Opposition alliance were trying hard to create a wave of sympathy in support of the jailed Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party supremo Arvind Kejriwal and certain other imprisoned leaders at the Ramleela ground in the national capital.
The two issues seem to define the tone of the 18th Lok Sabha elections while trying to create a nationalism versus corruption binary.
Katchatheevu Island and the Palk Strait need no definition. They are on the ancient Silk route connecting India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. The followers of Sir Robert Pal established a church on this little island in the 18th century to serve travellers. Sixty years ago, the Railway line connecting the two shores existed before the Rameshwaram cyclone of 1964. On the same track, Lala Lajpat Rai and the celebrated art critic Ananda Coomaraswamy travelled to reach their destinations in 1905.
Last year, after the announcement of INDIA, the Opposition alliance in Bengaluru, the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham (DMK) supremo and the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu MK Stalin had written a letter to Prime Minister Modi about the same island, and before the arrival of the Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe, the DMK issued a whip for its 24 members in the Lower House of Parliament to raise this issue. As a consequence, 15 fishermen were released from Malladi jail in Sri Lanka. But they arrested nine other Indian fishermen from the same region as soon as the President left India.
The current discourse on the island started due to the response to the Right to Information (RTI) query that the Tamil Nadu Bharatiya Janata Party president K. Annamalai received recently. It brought certain hidden pieces of information concealed behind the objections raised by DMK MP Era Sezhiyan in the Parliament on July 23, 1974, that was believed to be the voice of the then Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi. In fact, the transfer of the island was an outcome of the series of pacts between Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Sri Lankan President Sirimavo Bhandarnaiake that M. Karunanidhi confidentially supported and publicly opposed.
In this case, the governments in the Centre and the State tried hard to conceal the truth from the country. They neither cared to inform their own colleagues in the government and the party nor the Parliament. The RTI response revealed that the two leaders disposed of the Katchatheevu island as their personal property when they handed it over to Sri Lanka. Indira signed the agreement with Bandaranaike in 1974.
After such a long time, the issue has returned and raised serious questions for the Congress Party and the DMK. Congress spokesperson Jairam Ramesh has been talking about the return of half a million Tamils from Sri Lanka. But in 1961, the first Prime Minister of India Jawahar Lal Nehru refused to discuss this island in the Parliament and said that before leaving its claim his government would not even consider it. However, the then attorney general M.C. Setalvad, on October 19, 1958, suggested that the sovereignty of the island was in favour of India, and there were no merits in the Sri Lankan claim.
This is why it is rather difficult for the Congress Party to satisfy the fishing folk out there.
The island came into existence due to the volcano eruption in the 14th century. This little piece of land, scattered across 285 acres on a good day, is 33 kilometres off the Indian coast and 62 kilometres from Jaffna in Sri Lanka in Palk Strait connecting the Bay of Bengal to the Bay of Mannar to the Arabian Sea in the Indian Ocean. In the 17th century, it was under the kingdom of Raja Ramananda of Madurai. It became part of the Madras Presidency during the British Raj. Sir Robert Palk and his followers defined it, and the fishing Tamil community from both sides have been claiming it for more than a century. The government of India ceded it to Sri Lanka in the seventies.
India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar recently stated that in the last couple of decades when the Sri Lankan Navy arrested at least 6184 Indian fishermen in the sea, during the same period, 1175 Indian fishing boats were also seized by the Sri Lankans. In 2015 Wickremesinghe issued the shoot-at-sight order for the stranded Indian fishermen when he was the Prime Minister. It made a profound impact on the socio-political life of Tamil Nadu.
Leaders associated with DMK and its political rival in Tamil Nadu, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazagham (AIADMK), have been playing politics on it for a long time. Former Chief Minister late J. Jayalalithaa (AIADMK) declared it against the interests of the state and unconstitutional in the State Assembly. Her government further moved to the Apex Court where the Attorney General argued that such demands would sour the relationship between the friendly neighbours. The same case was also instituted in the Delhi High Court in the middle of the seventies and was dismissed during the Emergency.
In 2019, it was the Pulwama terror attack and the surgical strikes. This time, rituals of the Ram Mandir started at Rameshwaram at the beginning of this election year. Now, when election campaigning is in full flow, this little island near Ram Setu has caught the attention of millions of proponents of Ram Rajya and Ayodhya that reflected the kingdom beyond hatred, war and violence.
All 39 seats of the Lok Sabha in the state of Tamil Nadu are going to vote in the first phase of elections on April 19, 2024. Katchatheevu island has been making a profound impact on the coastal regions, but it’s not limited to Tamil Nadu itself, such roaring voices of certain leaders of the BJP and the Congress Party are sufficient to reaffirm it as a truly national issue.
The governments of India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives need to resolve this international issue to promote peace, prosperity and friendship among the people of the three nations. The political parties questioning the authenticity of the surgical strike had faced defeat in the earlier election. On this issue of Katchatheevu Island, they can be destined to a similar fate.
*Author of The Holy Ganga (Rupa 2008) and Honourary Secretary, Srishti Sustainable Development Foundation. Views published are personal.
