Fisheries dispute haunts Sri Lanka-India relationship

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — Along Sri Lanka’s northern Jaffna coast, fishermen in T-shirts and sarongs grumbled about their poor catch the previous night. As they mended their blue nets spread out close to the lapping sea, the men complained about how the only fish they could sell was a meager haul of barracuda, Indian mackerel and milk shark.

There is no mystery as to what is sapping the livelihoods of these men who are the breadwinners of their families. “It is the Indian trawlers, fishing illegally in Sri Lankan waters at night,” said Rajendran Mathiyalagan, a 50-year-old fisherman standing on the shore of Valvettithurai, a small town on the northern tip of the Jaffna peninsula, which is just 30 kilometers from India’s southern coast. “They come in the hundreds in their big boats, like an entire village in the sea, tearing our fishing nets and scooping up all the fish.”

Local community leaders despair at the heavy economic price they have to pay due to Indian boats poaching in the marine-rich Sri Lankan waters. Indian boats employ bottom trawling, which involves dragging heavy nets across the seabed to capture large volumes of fish. Sri Lanka banned bottom trawling in 2017 in keeping with international sustainable fishing regulations.

“This is the most burning issue for our communities in the north — the Indian illegal fishing,” said Nirosh Thiagarajah, former chair of a local council in Welikamam East. “A traditional way of life is under threat because of the Indian bottom trawling.”

In 2023, the Sri Lankan Navy detained 240 Indian fishermen and seized 35 Indian fishing trawlers for poaching. The following year the navy arrested 554 Indian fishermen and seized 72 poaching trawlers. Already this year, in January alone, over 60 Indian fishermen have been arrested by the navy, according to the navy’s official numbers.

On Jan. 28, the Sri Lankan Navy fired on Indian fishing boats near Sri Lanka’s Deft Island, injuring five — two critically — out of 13 fishermen on board. India called the Sri Lankan acting high commissioner in New Delhi and lodged a strong protest over the incident, saying, “The use of force is not acceptable under any circumstances whatsoever,” according to the statement from the Indian Ministry of External Affairs.

Sri Lankan fishermen say that the incursions of Indian trawlers — which enter Sri Lanka’s waters at night — have severely impacted their catches. They now barely fill one basket with fish in a day, compared with roughly six baskets before, they say.

“The Queenfish catch has dropped to 5%” from the amount before the local fishermen began to feel the impact of Indian trawlers, said Annalingam Annarasa, coordinator of the Northern Province Fisheries Cooperation Union, referring to a species that is essential in the local cottage industry production of dry fish, a popular ingredient in Sri Lankan cooking.

Observers of this Indian intrusion say local fishermen, who use small boats with outboard motors as part of their artisanal tradition, are no match for the powerful flotillas from the north. “Indian wooden-hull trawlers have been replaced by the steel-hull variety, making them more powerful and more aggressive,” said Y. Nandana Jayarathna, a retired Sri Lankan Navy rear admiral. “They come for the prawns and shrimp, which are most lucrative, but in the process, [they] catch a lot of fish and damage the nets of local fishermen.”

This issue of drag fishing is also hurting much of the goodwill New Delhi has been working to build in the Jaffna region to protect its southern flank.

“India’s tendency to be tone deaf to the plight of Sri Lanka’s northern fishers and failing to contain its southern fishers are testing New Delhi’s claims to be a good neighbor,” a Colombo-based Asian diplomat said on condition of anonymity. “The discussions Indian officials have been involved in with their Sri Lankan counterparts to address this issue appear cosmetic.”

This maritime tension even prompted Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake to raise the issue during a December visit to India. “Recognizing the irreparable ecological damage caused by bottom trawling, which is a banned practice in both countries, I requested that measures be taken to stop this practice and curb IUU (illegal, unreported and unregulated) fishing,” Dissanayake said in a media statement at the end of his three-day visit.

At their December meeting, Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, right, asked Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for measures be taken to curb illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing by Indian fishermen.   © Reuters

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said: “We also spoke at length about the issues related to the livelihood of our fishermen. We both agreed that we must adopt a humanitarian approach towards this matter.”

But preceding diplomatic efforts indicate that any change remains elusive. “During the last five years Sri Lanka has pressed for bilateral discussions at the fisheries ministry level, but India has evaded it,” Ali Sabry, former Sri Lankan foreign minister, told Nikkei Asia. “It is the responsibility of India’s central and regional government … and India is too big for us to take them on.”

For several years now, Sri Lanka’s northern fishers have protested Indian poaching. In 2021 they launched a flotilla with black flags calling for the island’s northern seas to be protected from Indian trawlers. “The poaching has intensified since the [civil] war ended and the Indian government did respond initially to stop bottom trawling,” said Mathiparanan A. Sumanthiran, a former Sri Lankan parliamentarian of a northern Tamil political party, who backed the 2021 flotilla protest. “Yet it has continued and has now become a political issue in the north.”

This anti-Indian rage is another twist to the complex political relationship India has maintained in Jaffna, the heartland of Sri Lanka’s largest minority, Tamils, in the predominantly Sinhala-Buddhist island. During the island nation’s nearly 30-year civil war, in which government troops fought against the separatist Tamil Tiger rebels, Tamil civilians and political leaders turned to New Delhi as an ally. And since the war’s end in May 2009, India has helped to assist in the region’s post-war recovery and continues to back the Tamil political call for devolution of power.

But such Indian overtures are up against what the northern coastal communities see as “a man-made disaster unfolding in front of their eyes,” said Ahilan Kadirgamar, a political economist at the University of Jaffna. “They feel helpless in the way the Indian trawlers are undermining the social stability of their community … and know that an external actor is destroying what they see is theirs.”

The cost of making up for destroyed fishing nets has added to such woes. “We take about 40 nets in each boat and on some nights about 30 are destroyed by the Indian trawlers,” said fisherman Mathiyalagan. “The Indian trawlers don’t put on lights, they come in large numbers almost two kilometers away from our shores … and it is very frightening when you are surrounded by them and their noise.”

source : asia.nikkei