Maritime Agreements through the lens of International Diplomacy: The Fate of India-Sri Lanka Relations

Abstract

India and Sri Lanka share a profound cultural and historical connectedness. With ‘Tamilness’ as a shared identity, the fisher folk of the two nations are more like siblings at sea. However, this relationship witnessed a degradation following the demarcation of the Palk Bay region in 1974. India and Sri Lanka entered into an International Maritime Boundary Line Agreement owing to an overlap of their respective territorial waters. While this was made to seem like a genuine act of concern for India’s maritime sovereignty, the process involved complexities ranging from manipulation of the delineation principle, ceding of the Katchatheevu Island to Sri Lanka, to non-ratification of the Agreement leading to questions on its constitutionality. While this agreement, in fact, awarded India with a larger share of international waters vis-à-vis Sri Lanka’s (1.02:1), along with protecting the interests of its fisher-folk, the island was ceded to the Sri Lankans despite historical records proving India’s sovereignty over that space. Seemingly, this wasn’t enough for the Indian citizenry to condone, that another agreement was signed with the nautical neighbour in 1976. This very settlement drew much flak from the countrymen, particularly the Tamil Nadu fishing community, who were now abridged of their fishing rights in the region. Consequently, livelihood concerns of the fishing communities find significant mention in the dissertation on two key facets: (i) the Indian fisher-folk having faced a curtailment of their fishing rights attributable to the 1976 Agreement; and (ii) the Sri Lankan fisher-folk fearing a dearth of marine resources on their side of the Palk Bay with incessant poaching by mechanised Indian trawlers. Extensive use of unsustainable fishing techniques, with bottom trawling emerging as the widely used method due to its high catch and rummaging feature, has waned the marine health of the Palk Bay region. This paper delves into a critical analysis of the aforementioned issues through employment of extensive academic literature. Exploration of such secondary data has been validated by author’s unstructured interviews with maritime and foreign policy experts including senior Indian Navy and Indian Coast Guard officers, former Chief of the Sri Lankan Navy, authorities at the Sri Lanka High Commission in New Delhi, researchers at public policy think-tanks, former defence attachés as well as journalists at the national dailies. Decisively, deep-rooted ties must stand unhindered particularly in the ways of disputes expressly caused by an island of merely 285 acres in size. Overall conflict resolution and subsequent welfare advancement calls for conjoint enactment of policies intended at mutually consistent motivations. The ulterior aim of this study is to construct policies that would deliver verdicts that are fair and just to the disputing parties, tension deescalating in tenor and conscious and protective of the ecology. Though this research cannot claim to have attained this goal optimally, its academic enrichment is indeed scholastically empowering, and aims to transcend boundaries in more than one way through it wide expanse across multiple academic disciplines.