Ten miles out from the last shores of Sri Lanka, it was whispered, hid the secret of immortality — a golden mistletoe that grew on an uninhabited island. Every March, pilgrims would cross the sea to the shrine of Anthony of Padua on Katchatheevu to pray to the saint who had once preached to shoals of fish. Even though the pilgrims were sometimes stranded for days by ill winds, no one ever found the mistletoe: Sinnachchi lived a century, Kanchchi 10 years longer still, and one woman 160, it was said—but each eventually met their end.
For their part, the fishing folk living on nearby Delft dismissed the legend of the golden mistletoe, the colonial civil servant RH Basset recorded, attributing their great age and good health to milk, the root of the Palmyra, sea air, and innocence of heart. Fiery toddy, he wrote, was “the counteracting influence that prevents everyone in Delft from living to be about two hundred.”
A hundred years after Basset recorded the folklore of Katchatheevu, the island is becoming entwined with an uglier story of competing ethnic-religious nationalism. Earlier this week, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi accused the Congress of giving away Katchatheevu in 1974, he stoked fears of renewed India-Sri Lanka conflict. The tiny island has long occupied a disproportionate space in the imagination of ethnic and religious nationalists in both countries, and tensions have been building up.
In 2023, journalist RK Radhakrishnan revealed that the Sri Lankan navy surreptitiously planted idols of the Buddha on Katchatheevu, a part of a larger campaign targeting Hindu religious shrines and cultural symbols. Tamil Nadu Bharatiya Janata Party leader’s assertion that New Delhi will seek to reclaim Katchatheevu might be election-time posturing, but it will empower Sinhala nationalists in Sri Lanka who cast India as a predatory threat.
The story of the magic mistletoe should hold out this lesson: The prize of Katchatheevu probably isn’t worth the fight.
Also read: MV Ruen hijacking had unmissable message—naval patrolling is a costly band-aid, not solution
The contention over Katchatheevu
Few Indians paid much attention when, in August 1956, Lok Sabha MP Jhulan Singh raised the issue of Katchatheevu. The crisis in Kashmir, the bitter legacy of Partition, and the business of making a new nation seemed much more important, records show, than the Ceylon navy using a barren one-and-a-half-square-mile island in the Palk Straits for gunnery practice. In a brief answer, PM Nehru replied that Ceylon had been asked to postpone “any decision to use the island for the purpose until the question of ownership was clarified”.
Fishing communities on both sides of the Palk Straits had used Katchatheevu for centuries to rest, dry their nets, and hide trafficked goods. The status of the island, though, figured in discussions on restricting overfishing between the governments of British India and British Ceylon in 1921. The Government of India claimed possession of the island, arguing it was part of the Zamindari of the Raja of Ramnad; Ceylon responded that it was owned by the Diocese of Jaffna. Earlier records, dating back show shifting sovereignties, as kingdoms on both sides of the Palk Straits rose and fell.
“To avoid contention,” scholars N Manoharan and Madhumati Deshpande have written, “the delegates agreed to run the Fisheries Line three miles west of Katchchatheevu and compensate that elsewhere so as to maintain an equitable apportionment in the fisheries domain for both Sri Lanka and India.”
Even larger storm clouds of contention, though, were rising over the Palk Straits. In 1952, as Sinhala chauvinism began to emerge as a powerful force in Sri Lanka politics, there was growing concern over the migration of ethnic Tamils. Sri Lanka’s army had stepped in to stop migrants, leading one MP to wonder if this might lead to war with India. There would be no question of war if the migration continued unchecked, PM Dudley Senanayake caustically replied, as “Ceylon would in that case automatically become part of India”.
Later, historian Urmila Phadnis recorded, foreign secretary Lakshman Jayakkody chimed in, saying: “Colombo was full of illicit immigrants who were being given shelter and protected by Mudalalis,” or moneylenders. These fears grew after the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) rose to power in Tamil Nadu.
Then, in 1956, PM SWRD Bandaranaike rose to power on a Sinhala-nationalist programme. Even though Bandaranaike and Tamil leader SJV Chelvanayakam negotiated a regional autonomy agreement, historian Robert Kearney writes, the communal storm grew in momentum, exploding into riots in 1958.
Early in 1954, Nehru and his Sri Lankan counterpart John Kotelawala had signed an agreement on the status of Indian-origin workers brought to work on the island nation’s tea, coffee, and coconut plantations. Ten thousand people, the Lok Sabha was told in 1956, had returned home after being served legal notices to leave, while another 17,000 left Sri Lanka voluntarily.
To Nehru, the main issue was securing the rights of the ethnic Tamils who remained in Sri Lanka, not a territorial dispute over an island almost too small to figure on the map.
The line in the sea
Ending the long-festering maritime dispute with Sri Lanka, former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi hoped, would serve several geopolitical ends. For one, communal tensions in Sri Lanka had risen to dangerous levels. The notionally Left-wing Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, or People’s Liberation Front, launched an insurgency in 1971, which targeted both Bandaranaike’s government as well as the Tamil minority. To Indira Gandhi, Katchatheevu was a small price for securing a regime that was willing to keep the United States out of the Indian Ocean.
Era Sezhian, a DMK Lok Sabha member, condemned the PM for the India-Sri Lanka border agreement, describing it “unholy and disgraceful act of statesmanship, unworthy of any government”. DMK governments would continue to press India’s claims for decades after.
Things didn’t quite work out to plan, though, for two separate but related reasons. The rise of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) plunged Sri Lanka into a murderous war. Rajiv Gandhi’s government allowed India to be sucked into the conflict, leading to a rapid deterioration in the relationship between the two countries. Large-scale trafficking of weapons for the LTTE also led to the militarisation of the Palk Straits as Sri Lankan forces tried to stop the flow.
In principle, the 1974 agreement on the India-Sri Lanka maritime boundary gave fishing communities the right to continue to use their customary fishing grounds. Executive orders passed in 1976 constrained fishing boats not to stray across the border, though, and the conflict drew the line in the sea in blood.
The boom in fishing through the 1980s deepened the crisis, development economist Ajit Menon and his co-authors have noted. Tamil Nadu’s fishing fleet came to include large trawlers, which could sweep the oceans for shrimp—damaging breeding grounds, and denying small fishermen from northern Sri Lanka their share of the catch. Even though communities on both sides of the border were ethnic Tamils, their interests collided.
Following the end of the war in Sri Lanka, the strains grew. Twice in 2011 alone, fishermen from Point Pedro and Mathangal captured Indian trawlers, in direct-action raids, scholar J Scholtens, M Bavnick, and AS Soosai record. Large numbers of Indian fishermen continue to be arrested by the Sri Lanka navy each year, fuelling tensions between the countries.
The poisoned waters
“Five kilometres more land we have or five kilometres less—this is not important,” Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev admonished China’s Mao Zedong after clashes with India broke out in Ladakh in 1959. Like other powers, Khrushchev explained, the Soviet Union had often ceded territory to its neighbours to cultivate goodwill and secure its borders. Mao’s aggressive action on the China-India border, he predicted, would serve only to push New Delhi toward the United States, and weaken Nehru’s commitment to non-alignment.
The Soviet leader’s words ought to be considered carefully in New Delhi. Tempting as it might be to score political points on Katchatheevu, India’s strategic interests don’t lie in securing control of a tiny island. Instead, the real challenge India faces is containing China’s growing influence in Sri Lanka. Fighting over territory, and hostile words, won’t help India’s case.
Alternatives aren’t hard to think of. Instead of obsessing over tiny amounts of territory, New Delhi could initiate a constructive dialogue on sustainable use of the fishing grounds in the Palk Straits that respects the rights of communities on both shores. For its part, Sri Lanka must be encouraged to temper its use of coercion against Tamil Nadu fishing workers.
Ethnicity, nationhood, and greed have all collided to poison the waters around Katchatheevu for too long. Two nations, and two peoples, have paid an unacceptable and unnecessary price.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)
Hopefully Modi will understand this! In most of whatever my be the policy decision, he first blames Nehru and Congress for their mistake and once he satiates he goes on making the policy.