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08-04-2024
Bureau Report + Agencies
NEW DELHI: A small, uninhabited island that is part of Sri Lanka has sparked a political row in India weeks before general elections kick off.
Katchatheevu, a strip of land spanning just about 1.9 sq km (0.7 sq miles), is located in the Palk Strait, a stretch of ocean which divides India and Sri Lanka. It lies to the northeast to Rameswaram town in India’s Tamil Nadu state and to the southwest of Sri Lanka’s Jaffna city.
The island has no source of drinking water and the only structure on it is a church which holds an annual three-day festival that draws devotees from both India and Sri Lanka.
Since 1921, rulers in both India and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) British colonies at the time had staked claim to fishing rights in the waters around Katchatheevu but in 1974, India ended the dispute by relinquishing any claim over the island; two years later, India and Sri Lanka signed an agreement that prevented people from both countries from fishing in waters belonging to each other.
Now, that decades-old decision is in the headlines again after India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi accused the country’s opposition Congress party which was in power at the time of “callously” giving away the island to Sri Lanka. The Congress has reacted sharply, accusing Modi of raking up the issue ahead of elections due to “desperation”.
The ostensible trigger for the controversy is new information accessed by a leader from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata 
Party (BJP) about the debates within the federal government about Katchatheevu in the 1960s but opposition leaders say the BJP is trying to turn Katchatheevu, a sensitive issue in Tamil Nadu into a controversy to gain votes in the southern state, where it has been trying hard to make inroads. Tamil Nadu will vote in the first phase of the general election on 19 April.
The controversy began on Sunday when Modi shared an article from The Times of India newspaper on X (formerly Twitter), saying “Eye opening and startling! New facts reveal how Congress callously gave away Katchatheevu.”
The article was based on documents obtained by K Annamalai, chief of the BJP in Tamil Nadu, under a law which allows Indians to access information from the government.
The documents quoted Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s prime minister at the time, saying that he attached “no importance at all to (Katchatheevu)” and that he “would have no hesitation in giving up [India’s] claims to it” but according to the report, some officials from the ministry of external affairs and other experts said that India had a “good legal case” to assert claim over Katchatheevu as they claimed the island was ruled by an Indian king “continuously and uninterruptedly” between 1875 and 1948.
In 1974, when Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi was prime minister, the Indian government ended the dispute with Sri Lanka over the island.
