New Delhi: With the general elections around the corner, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is aiming to turn the cession of Katchatheevu into a significant electoral issue to challenge Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and Congress, who were in power when the transfer occurred.
According to a report published in Times of India, former Prime Minister (late) Jawaharlal Nehru had dismissed the issue of giving up Katchatheevu to Sri Lanka as inconsequential. It also claimed that the island was given up despite the Opposition’s staunch protest.
The documents, obtained by Tamil Nadu BJP president K Annamalai via an RTI (Right to Information) application, highlight Sri Lanka’s persistent efforts to secure the 1.9 square km of land, situated approximately 20 km from the Indian shore. Despite New Delhi contesting these claims for decades, it eventually relented and acquiesced to Sri Lanka’s demands.
Following its independence, Sri Lanka, earlier known as Ceylon, asserted its claim over the island by stating that the Indian Navy (then Royal Indian Navy) required its permission to conduct exercises on the island. In October 1955, the Ceylon Air Force conducted its exercise on the island. The stance of Sri Lanka was evident in a memo by India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, on May 10, 1961, where he deemed the issue as inconsequential.
“I attach no importance at all to this little island and I would have no hesitation in giving up our claims to it. I do not like this pending indefinitely and being raised again in Parliament,” Nehru wrote.
Nehru’s memo is included in a document prepared by the then Commonwealth Secretary Y D Gundevia, which the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) shared as a background material to the informal Consultative Committee of Parliament in 1968.
“Eye opening and startling! New facts reveal how Congress callously gave away #Katchatheevu,” PM Narendra Modi said in a post on X on Sunday.
“This has angered every Indian and reaffirmed in people’s minds- we can’t ever trust Congress!” he added in the same post, sharing a link to the article that pointed to the indecisiveness of the Centre ultimately resulted in the transfer of the island to Sri Lanka during the tenure of Indira Gandhi’s government in 1974.
However, it was Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin who had revived the debate over Katchatheevu, while addressing a fishermen’s conference on August 18, 2023. He had reiterated the demand for retrieval of the islet, about 14 nautical miles off Rameswaram, from Sri Lanka to put an end to the problems of fishermen of the state. It had become a battleground for combats between Indian Tamil fishers and Lankan navy since 1983, leading to the loss of livelihoods, properties, and lives of Indians owing to accidental crossings of the international maritime boundary line.
