Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is accusing the opposition Congress party of improperly ceding Katchatheevu island to Sri Lanka. (Nikkei montage/Source photos by AP and Ken Kobayashi)
NEW DELHI — With national elections just around the corner, a political row has erupted in India over a tiny, uninhabited island ceded to neighboring Sri Lanka half a century ago.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi — eyeing a third straight term — is reaching back into history to land a blow against the embattled opposition and Congress party which had agreed to hand control of the then-disputed Katchatheevu island to Colombo in 1974.
The party of some of India’s best-known politicians, including post-independence prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, Congress now languishes in the opposition after ruling the nation for decades.
“Eye opening and startling! New facts reveal how Congress callously gave away #Katchatheevu,” Modi wrote on social media on March 31. “This has angered every Indian and reaffirmed in people’s minds — we can’t ever trust Congress! Weakening India’s unity, integrity and interests has been Congress’ way of working for 75 years and counting.”
The island — just over 300 meters wide and 1.6 kilometers long — is in the Palk Strait near India’s southern Tamil Nadu state, which goes to polls on April 19 in the first of several phases across the world’s biggest democracy. Some 970 million people are registered to cast a ballot before voting ends in early June.
Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, popular in the politically crucial Hindi-speaking belt across India’s north and central states, is widely expected to win another five-year term with the opposition unable to launch a major challenge.
But the BJP has struggled to make inroads in Tamil Nadu, where it failed to take any of the state’s 39 seats in the 545-member lower house during 2019 elections.
Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge waved off Modi’s jab as political posturing, saying the prime minister has “suddenly woken up to the issues of territorial integrity and national security in [his] 10th year of misrule.”
“Perhaps, elections are the trigger,” he added.
Kharge pointed out that the Modi government’s then-Attorney General, Mukul Rohatgi, had in 2014 shelved any plan to take up the issue with Colombo.
“‘Katchatheevu went to Sri Lanka by an agreement in 1974,” Rohatgi told the Supreme Court at the time, adding “How can it be taken back today? If you want Katchatheevu back, you will have to go to war to get it back.'”
Analysts say the BJP is trying hard for a breakthrough in Tamil Nadu and stepping up pressure as several key opposition figures face corruption allegations.
“Nothing is working for the BJP in Tamil Nadu,” V.S. Chandrasekar, a New Delhi-based political observer and former executive editor at the Press Trust of India news agency, told Nikkei Asia. “So, naturally they are raking up this issue because elections are coming … but it’s a dead bomb and has failed to explode.”
“People in India know that it’s an election rhetoric [and] Sri Lanka also knows that the issue is being raked up because of the upcoming polls,” he added.
Facing dwindling stocks, fishermen from parts of Tamil Nadu often cross the neighbors’ international maritime boundary to catch fish around the postage-stamp sized island — and sometimes get detained by Sri Lanka.
Regional parties frequently raise this issue with the federal government and have also brought it up in parliament, while two cases over the island agreement are pending in the Supreme Court.
Senior BJP leader and India’s external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar, told a news conference this month that Sri Lanka had detained more than 6,000 Indian fishermen and seized 1,175 Indian fishing vessels over the past two decades.
“This is not an issue which has suddenly surfaced, this is a live issue. … I’m bringing it up today because fishermen are still being detained, boats are still being apprehended,” India’s top diplomat said. “Today, the issue is how did we arrive at this point, who has the responsibility and who is hiding what people should know.”
While the island issue has come up in previous elections, the focus is on winning votes rather than actually reclaiming Katchatheevu.
“The main target of this debate in the current context is the electorate in Tamil Nadu,” said Raj Kumar Sharma, visiting fellow at New Delhi-based think tank United Service Institution of India. “The intention is not to indicate that India would pressurize Sri Lanka to hand over Katchatheevu … an idea which is a non-starter.”
For its part, Sri Lanka said it has no plan to revisit an issue settled 50 years ago.
“There is no controversy. They [in India] are having an internal political debate about who is responsible,” Foreign Minister Ali Sabry was quoted as saying in the Times of India newspaper. “Other than that, no one is talking about claiming Katchatheevu.”