{"id":21754,"date":"2013-05-31T14:53:59","date_gmt":"2013-05-31T18:53:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=21754"},"modified":"2013-05-31T14:53:59","modified_gmt":"2013-05-31T18:53:59","slug":"kachchatheevu-issue-is-part-of-the-problemit-cannot-be-part-of-the-solution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=21754","title":{"rendered":"Kachchatheevu Issue is Part of the Problem;It Cannot be Part of the Solution"},"content":{"rendered":"

By<\/p>\n

N Sathiya Moorthy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Independent of the Tamil Nadu Assembly’s repeated resolutions and Chief Minister Jayalalithaa’s repeated missives to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, there is an urgent need for the State and its polity to look futuristically at the problems faced by their fishers in the Palk Bay, and delink one from the others, if any practical solution has to be found. Given that the first Provincial Council election in the Tamil-majority North in Sri Lanka has been promised by September, there is an equal, if not greater, urgency for the Tamil Nadu polity to delink it too from the fishing issue.<\/p>\n

The ethnic issue is strictly an internal problem of Sri Lanka, with popular sentiments in Tamil Nadu influencing the polity and the Government. The reverse is also equally true. The fishing issue is a bilateral problem involving the fishing communities of the two countries and the two national Governments. On the Indian side, Tamil Nadu has stakes and has made it clear to the Centre, whoever has ruled from Fort St George over the past four decades. A new element in the form of the Northern administration can add a new and more complicating element as and when polls are held to the Provincial Council. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A solution to the ethnic issue, whenever it happens and whichever the route it takes, cannot resolve the bilateral fishing problem. The reverse is also true. The fishing issue stands on its own feet, and precedes Tamil Nadu’s emotional involvement in the Sri Lankan ethnic row at least by a decade. India and Sri Lanka signed two agreements on the international maritime boundary line (IMBL), in 1974 and 1976. Notifying Kachchateevu islet as a part of Sri Lanka, if that is still considered the source of the current travails of the Tamil Nadu fishers, came through the 1974 agreement, addressing IMBL issues along the Palk Strait. The 1976 agreement demarcates the IMBL in the Gulf of Mannar, and makes a pointed reference to the 1974 accord and the Palk Strait IMBL. There was also a trilateral agreement involving Maldives in 1976, where again reference was made to the year’s bilateral between India and Sri Lanka. <\/p>\n

It can be argued that the benefits accruing to the Tamil Nadu fishers in terms of free access to Kachchateevu may have been withdrawn by the subsequent accord in 1976, just as the latter provided for an interim facility for Government boats from Sri Lanka fishing in the southern Wadge Bank for three years, after identifying it as Indian territory. The latter is pronounced, the former definitely has not been. This, as also the belief that fishers the world over have claimed traditional rights to fish in waters that have been divided politically over the past decades or even centuries is at the heart of the legal issues involved in the problem. Sri Lanka claims sovereign rights to waters on its side of the IMBL. It also cites the livelihood issues of fishers in the Northern Province who have been affected by ‘extensive and mindless’ poaching by their Tamil Nadu counterparts. <\/p>\n

Part of the problem, not of the solution <\/strong><\/p>\n

Kachchateevu is a part of the problem. It cannot be a part of the solution. There is no fish to catch in abundance in adjoining waters. The periodic broadsides from Tamil Nadu –repeated ad nauseum by the Sri Lankan Tamil polity and intellectuals –about Sri Lanka allowing military use of the islet to China has no basis. At least thus far, the Tamil Nadu fishers who were allowed regulated entry to the islet for the annual St Antony’s feast after the conclusion of the ethnic war in Sri Lanka as per the 1974 agreement, did not find any evidence. On the future defence of India’s interests in the seas in Tamil Nadu’s neighbourhood, the Centre is seized of the problem. <\/p>\n

Long before ‘Eelam War IV’ (2006-09) took Sri Lanka to the boil all over again, the Indian Air Force (IAF) had set up a Southern Command in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of neighbouring Kerala State. More recent reports indicate that the IAF is positioning a squadron of Russian-made Sukhoi fighter jets in Thanjavur near the southern Tamil Nadu coast, near the troubled bilateral waters. It proves that the Centre has taken care of the nation’s maritime interests and concerns along the larger Indian Ocean sea lanes. More recently, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has declared that India was ready to be the ‘net provider of security in South Asia’. For Tamil Nadu to confuse its priorities on the fishers’ issue could complicate matters. Solution of the problem should be the topmost priority of the State, going beyond even the ‘ethnic issue’ in Sri Lanka. <\/p>\n

Making fishers talk… <\/strong><\/p>\n

Tamil Nadu’s claim that Kachchateevu had formed a part of the Ramanathapuram zamindari under the common British rulers of India and Sri Lanka is contestable at best. It cannot help resolve anything, when resolution to their current woes is what the Tamil Nadu fishers demand. So can Chief Minister Jayalalithaa’s more recent letter to Prime Minister Singh, where she has reiterated the State’s demand for India taking back the islet. This has also formed the basis for her moving the Supreme Court in her private capacity as the General Secretary of the AIADMK party. <\/p>\n

The State Government impleaded itself as a party to Jayalalithaa’s petition after she returned to power for a third time in 2011. The Opposition DMK-led ‘Tamil Eelam Supporters’ Organisation’ (TESO) too has since filed a petition on the same lines, both claiming that the Centre had no right to ‘cede’ Kachchateeu to Sri Lanka, without parliamentary approval. The Centre position seems to be that the 1974 and 1976 agreements involved only refining the IMBL, not defining it, which alone needed parliamentary approval. Whatever the view the Supreme Court takes, whenever, it may have little consequences on the bilateral agreement that has already come into force. It instead may have consequences for the Tamil Nadu fishers, who may face a more hostile Sri Lankan Government and Navy, not to leave out the Sri Lankan fishers, particularly from the Tamil-majority North. <\/p>\n

Successive resolutions by the Tamil Nadu Assembly and appeals from the State Government, the Chief Minister and the otherwise divided polity, have stated that denial of access to Kachchateeu has also denied access for the Tamil Nadu fishers to access the fishing sources in the vicinity. The truth is that there is no fish to catch in the area. Indian fishers also have not contested the Sri Lankan claims that they had crossed the IMBL at will. Only when attacked, they at times say that the incident took place within the Indian waters. If true, this should embarrass the Indian Navy and Coast Guard. Rarely has either found much truth in such claims, as anything to the contrary comes with consequences for both nations, starting with the ‘affected fishers’. <\/p>\n

The question thus is not about Kachchateevu or the IMBL. It is about providing livelihood to the fishers in Tamil Nadu, who are also blamed by their Tamil counterparts from Sri Lanka for interfering with theirs when they are about it restart it after the conclusion of 30 long years of war, when they in turn were banned also from fishing in the waters manned by the LTTE’s ‘Sea Tigers’. International precedents have provided for negotiated settlement to issues of the kind by the affected fishing communities and their Governments, too. Such settlements have involved pre-conditions, which in this case relate to the excessive use of bottom-trawlers and purse seine nets by the Tamil Nadu fishers, sweeping away the fish stocks and even their breeding grounds, apart from destroying their nets and boats at times. <\/p>\n

Sri Lanka’s Northern fishers have also begun facing pressures from the Southern fishers, who happen to be Sinhalese. The latter, given in a big way to deep-sea fishing over the past decades, now find international regulations and restrictions, including a EU ‘yellow card’ restrictive and prohibitive in deeper seas. Given the huge loans that they have to repay for the deep-sea vessels, some have also be said to have taken to ‘human smuggling’, getting caught, ironically, in taking the island’s Tamil illegally to Australia -often, getting caught in the mid-sea, with a leak in the boat that anyway was not constructed with unlimited human cargo on board. <\/p>\n

An agreement of some kind, signed in the second half of Chennai between the fishing communities in the two countries, need to be discussed in greater detail, and the Governments in the two countries have to facilitate the process arrive at a solution agreeable to all stakeholders. After a quiet return-visit in March 2011, it is Tamil Nadu’s turn to host the next meeting. Meeting at Colombo in January 2012, the Government-level Joint Working Group (JWG) on fishing referred to the same, but the process remains deadlocked in Tamil Nadu. The latter, according to news reports, seems to feel that the political climate was not conducive to such a meeting. They however need to brood if the time is conducive for the continuance of mid-sea skirmishes involving Tamil Nadu fishers on the one hand, and the Sri Lanka Navy and occasionally the Tamil fishers of Sri Lanka on the other.
\n
\n(The writer is a Senior Fellow at Observer Research Foundation) <\/em><\/p>\n

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By N Sathiya Moorthy Independent of the Tamil Nadu Assembly’s repeated resolutions and Chief Minister Jayalalithaa’s repeated missives to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, there is an urgent need for the State and its polity to look futuristically at the problems faced by their fishers in the Palk Bay, and delink one from the others, if …<\/p>\n

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