Hours before India and Pakistan confronted each other on the cricket battlefield of Ahmedabad this weekend, while the rest of the world was focused on the Israel-Palestine conflict, Union Minister of Ports, Shipping and Waterways Sarbananda Sonowal and Tamil Nadu Minister for Public Works, EV Velu, flagged off a ferry service from Nagapattinam to Kankesanthurai in Jaffna, that will give people from India and Sri Lanka more options to connect with each other.
What’s the big deal, you might ask. After all, the ferry fare is Rs 7,670, almost the same as the airfare from Chennai to Jaffna; moreover, the ferry takes four hours compared to the plane’s journey under an hour. Why should we really care about this boat restarting after 40 years?
Here are six reasons why this ferry is a critical link in the game-changing relationship between India and Sri Lanka. And this is not because Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent a video message, which described the “vision of connectivity” that goes beyond the boat and includes digital payments, fintech and a joint energy grid. Or that Minister of External Affairs, S Jaishankar, virtually flagged off the service from New Delhi. Sri Lanka’s Ports, Shipping and Aviation minister Nimal Siripala de Silva had to return helter-skelter from Kankesanthurai as he couldn’t attend the ceremony of receiving the first boat. The honours were done by local Sri Lankan officials and India’s Consul General in Jaffna Raakesh Natraj.
First, the ferry brings people closer together. The people of northern and eastern Sri Lanka — in Jaffna, Trincomalee, Mullaitivu, Talaimannar and many other towns and villages in between, which were once known because of the civil war of 1983-2009, until the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were finally defeated with the death of Prabhakaran — are predominantly Tamil. They have much in common with Tamil Nadu, such as language, religion, customs, and ethnicity. The ferry gives them another option, besides air travel.
Second, this is just the first such service between the two countries. Two more are on the horizon, between Rameswaram and Talaimannar, and Karaikal, near Pondicherry, to Kankesanthurai. The revival of the Rameswaram ferry will reignite memories of the past, when a ferry would ply from Dhanushkodi to Talaimannar. But the town in Tamil Nadu was destroyed in a cyclone in the 1960s taking the ferry with it.
Third, the ferry allows every passenger to carry 150 kg of goods while flights restrict you to mostly 30 kg. Why would I not take the boat if other costs are equal?
Third, to catch the plane from Palaly, which is the tiny airport outside Jaffna, passengers must clear all kinds of security checks. That doesn’t mean the plane isn’t popular. It is, and gets sold out really quickly – most passengers are Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora and it is unsettling to hear French and Tamil, but no English leave alone Hindi, being spoken all over Jaffna. But it’s equally true that the plane is really for the worldly-wise who know how to negotiate things, while the boat is for the less affluent.
Fourth, greater connectivity between people allows both sides to catharsise the trauma that has been building over the last four decades since India trained the Tamil Tigers in the early 1980s (under the Indira Gandhi government), and then fought them in the wake of the India-Sri Lanka accord in 1987, that was followed by a disastrous civil war between Sri Lankans that ended only in 2009.
Sixth, in the current situation—as Sri Lanka emerges from an economic crisis—the ferry is another example of India promoting greater regional connectivity with the neighbourhood. India gave $3.9 billion in aid before and during the crisis, both in cash and kind like fuel, medicines, etc, which has been much appreciated by Sri Lankans. Both sides increasingly recognise that economics can also be good politics.
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Connecting people, boosting economy
The Modi government’s decision to economically align itself with Sri Lanka as a model for the rest of the region is a political one. International aid organisations like the World Bank have been pushing the idea for some time about how India can power growth in the neighbourhood by integrating them on a few basic parameters—electricity, the movement of labour, trade and investment—as well as improve the standard of living by cleaning up the air, which, in turn, is really an economic exercise.
Come to think of it, it’s a no-brainer. If you have a plane, a boat, a train or a bus that connects people, from one country to another, it will spur economic activity. On my recent trip to Jaffna, that began with a flight from Chennai, a fisherman by the name of Shahjahan and a young Sri Lankan Tamil girl, who sang Hindi songs with total fluency without understanding one word, effusively expanded on how wonderful it is to have an option of directly travelling to Chennai instead of first flying to Colombo and then taking another plane to India.
Both said that the trip via Colombo was not only much more expensive, but also more difficult. Negotiating with people who either don’t know Tamil or refuse to speak it, cannot be easy. Only a week ago, I witnessed a Tamilian in his brand-new, gold-bordered lungi approach the counter of the Burger King outlet at Katunayake airport being told off by the Sinhalese employee at the counter that he spoke no Tamil; the man left without ordering an over-priced burger that also tasted of plastic.
At a World Bank conference in Colombo last week, Sri Lanka’s Minister for Power and Energy, Kanchana Wijesekera, told local journalists that Sri Lanka was determined to turn its economic crisis into an opportunity by integrating further with big, economic players – like India. He waxed eloquent about the pipeline that would soon connect India (Tamil Nadu) with Sri Lanka and how the possibility of the two electricity grids being integrated was not far off.
Wijesekera agreed that a regional electricity grid exchange was the need of the hour. Through this exchange electricity-starved nations in the region, Pakistan for example, could buy electricity from surplus nations such as Nepal and Bhutan. “Things are certainly moving in that direction,” Wijesekera said.
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The electricity question
Slowly, India is also recognising that the time has come to push the electricity question. About a fortnight ago, Nepal allowed the sale of hydroelectricity to India, just like Bhutan has been doing for the last 30 years or so. It’s one reason why Bhutan’s per capita GDP is so high. Recently, India also agreed to let Nepal sell 40 MW of power and Bhutan 60 MW of power to Bangladesh, via its transmission lines.
Certainly, India’s enormous size and geostrategic location gives it a veto power over the rest of South Asia. This is particularly clear in the case of Pakistan. Because of bad political relations between both countries, India has moved to push economic integration on the eastern flank of South Asia, while deliberately marginalising the western part. That’s also why a regional energy exchange is far more secular.
For now, it’s time to celebrate the ferry and to remember the Sri Lankan Tamil fishermen who I met in Talaimannar a month ago. They were super excited at the thought of a boat connecting Tamils with Tamils, even if some Indian Tamil fishermen wielded trawlers that scoured Sri Lanka’s fishing seabed.
Perhaps the ferry will spur conversations and debates, alongside economic activity. That one idea is enough for the moment.
Jyoti Malhotra is a senior consulting editor at ThePrint. She tweets @jomalhotra. Views are personal.