The contentious issues of Katchatheevu and Sethusamudram resurface amid Tamil Nadu’s election fervour

The schedule for the General Election 2024 has been announced and the State of Tamil Nadu is full of rattle and brouhaha over non-issues. The ruling DMK which has been maintaining silence over issues like the provision of drinking and irrigation waters and the fate of the State’s fishermen arrested by the Sri Lankan Navy have dusted and taken out age-old topics for use as campaign materials in the election. A cursory glance over the election manifesto of the DMK drafted under the chairmanship of M K Kanimozhi, the late Karunanidhi’s daughter by his third wife Rajathi, makes the reader doubt whether Tamil Nadu is a part of India or not.

One of the salient points of the DMK’s election manifesto is to make Tamil Nadu a NEET-free State. This means that admission to the undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the State’s medical colleges would be free of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, the selection system ordered by the Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court. It was the UPA Government (2004-2014) in which the DMK was the second largest constituent that brought the NEET into practice. Similarly, the DMK would revive and resume the works of laying a canal through the Palk Strait known as the Sethusamudram Channel. The project work has been put on hold following directives by the Supreme Court based on the fact that it is neither economically sustainable nor commercially viable. The only motivating factor behind the revival of Sethusamudram Channel is that the DMK Government would be able to demolish the Ram Sethu, a stone structure believed to have been built by the army of Lords Ram to cross the sea in their mission to same Maa Sita from the custody of the Ravana. This is being seen as the Dravidian’s reply to the Pranaprathista of the Ram Temple at Ayodhya held in January. The DMK has declared its mission to destroy Sanatana Dharma once and forever. Udhayanidhi Stalin, heir apparent to the DMK throne and the chief ministership in the eventuality of Stalin leaving Tamil Nadu for an early rendezvous with his father M Karunanidhi and ideological father Ramasamy Naicker, have declared time and again that Sanatana Dharma is more dangerous than Covid and Cancer and should be banished from the face of the earth.

Yet another promise made by the DMK is the retrieval of Katchateevu, a small islet handed over to Sri Lanka by the Government of India in 1975. The decision to secede this 285-acre uninhabited islet to Sri Lanka in 1975 was taken after a series of discussions involving top-level diplomats of Sri Lanka and India including G Parthasarathi, a close aide of Indira Gandhi.

Katchatheevu is an uninhabited islet in the Palk Strait. The islet once used for pearl farming was strategically important for fishing activities and was owned by the Raja of Ramnad and later became part of the Madras Presidency after the delimitation of Gulf of Mannar and Palk Strait during British rule between the then Governments of Madras and Ceylon. In 1921, both Sri Lanka and India claimed this piece of land and the dispute remained unsettled.

The agreement signed by Indira Gandhi and her Sri Lanka counterpart Sirimao Bhandarenaike in 1975 and 1976 says that with the establishment of the Exclusive Economic Zones by the two countries, India and Sri Lanka will exercise sovereign rights over the living and non-living resources of their respective zones. The fishing vessels and fishermen of India shall not engage in fishing in the historic waters, the territorial sea and the Exclusive Economic Zone of Sri Lanka, nor shall the fishing vessels and fishermen of Sri Lanka engage in fishing in the historic waters, the territorial sea and the Exclusive Economic Zone of India, without the express permission of Sri Lanka or India, as the case may be, according to the agreement. The agreement made it clear that Katchateev belongs to the territory of Sri Lanka. From 1976 to 2008, the DMK and its leader Karunanidhi were silent over Katchateevu. It was a case filed by AIADMK general secretary J Jayalalithaa in 2008 that made Karunanidhi take up the issue as part of his political one-upmanship. When the case came up for hearing, the then chief justice R M Lodha asked Mukul Rohatgi, the then attorney general, what were the possibilities of retrieval of Katchatheev. “If you want Katchatheevu back, you will have to go to war to get it back,” Rohatgi told the Court. In another development, the Coast Guard in an affidavit filed by it in Madras High Court said that it was the Tamil Nadu fishermen who violated the International Maritime Boundary Line and fished in Sri Lankan territorial waters. Sinha Ratnatunga, a respected editor of a popular newspaper in Sri Lanka said that more than 600 fishing boats from India cross over the IMBL and carry out bottom trawling in the island’s territorial waters violating all norms. The bottom trawling using purine nets destroys the entire marine wealth in the Sri Lankan waters. The demand for the retrieval of Katchatheev is with an ulterior motive. The Dravidians do not want a cordial relationship between India and Sri Lanka. Should Lanka too end up as the Maldives? asks R R Wijayabalan, who is one of the best friends of India in the island nation.

(The writer is special correspondent with the pioneer; views are personal)