Indo-Sri Lankan relations have seen a marked upturn in recent weeks after a new administration took over in Colombo. Last month, during the visit of President Maithripala Sirisena, four substantive agreements were signed. There are also indications that India’s sensitivities regarding Colombo’s relations with Beijing are being addressed. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is >set to visit Sri Lanka this week, the first such bilateral visit at the prime ministerial level from India in years. Given this backdrop, it is jarring to note Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s r >emarks seeking to justify the shooting of Indian fishermen who cross the maritime boundary between the two countries. His claim that fishermen found in another country’s territorial waters deserve to be shot, goes against the international policy of looking at such transgressions as civil offences. It also goes against the established bilateral policy of India and Sri Lanka treating the fisheries conflict in the Palk Bay as a humanitarian and livelihood issue to be resolved peacefully. Following Mr. Wickremesinghe’s intriguing remarks in an interview to a Tamil television channel that there would be no shooting incidents if Indian and Sri Lankan fishermen avoided entering each other’s territory, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had to raise the issue at a recent meeting with Mr. Wickremesinghe, and underscore the essential humanitarian nature of the problem. The comparison with India’s approach to the Italian marines case was also inapt as it involved Indian fishermen being shot at from a foreign vessel and had nothing to do with any fisheries conflict.
It is surprising that the Sri Lankan Prime Minister so casually talked about ‘shooting’ when such incidents had subsided considerably in the last decade or so. In recent years, Sri Lanka, in a move that is understandable in the context of trawlers from the Indian side depleting the marine resources in the Sri Lankan waters, has been limiting its actions to arresting fishermen and seizing the trawlers involved. Through a bilateral agreement, the fishermen, too, are released after a short while, even though the detention of the trawlers continue to provoke angry protests in Tamil Nadu. There is little doubt that the root of the problem lies in trawlers from Tamil Nadu entering Sri Lankan waters, and engaging in unsustainable fishing practices using banned equipment. While negotiations between fishermen from both sides are needed before an acceptable solution is reached, any such agreement will necessarily have to involve Indian trawlers being phased out early. The answer may lie in Tamil Nadu fishermen being weaned away from fishing grounds in the limited space in the Palk Bay and Palk Strait and being encouraged to engage in deep-sea fishing.