Contested Coastlines: Fisherfolk, Nations and Borders in South Asia
By Charu Gupta & Mukul Sharma
Routledge Pp251; Price Indian Rs 650
Interesting addition to the growing literature on South Asian issues. Maritime disputes are likely to dominate the strategic discourse as the countries of the region mount an all out quest for energy mines in the seabed. Already fishermen have given a new dimension to the discard between India and Pakistan and to the India-Sri Lanka tensions off Katchativu. Fishermen simply sail with the tide, guided neither by a GPS nor a good old compass. They go where they hope to get a good catch. That is why Thai and Korean trawlers are often seen in Indian waters.
Delhi has been grappling with the problem vis-à-vis Colombo for almost a decade; the issue has become aggravated in recent weeks and months. The problem demands statesmanship for a resolution, and not approaches conditioned by file notings and precedents.
India – Sri Lanka maritime border is more than 400 km long cutting across the Bay of Bengal in the north, the Palk Bay in the centre and the Gulf of Mannar in the south. In 1974 and 1976, the two countries signed agreements on how to sort out their boundaries in the sea and their territorial waters extending 12 nautical miles from the coast. The second agreement barred fishing in each other’s side of the line demarcated in the Bay of Bengal and the Gulf of Mannar. But there are islands given to one or the other country which cause confusion among the fishermen. The result is jailed fishermen in India and Sri Lanka.
Gupta and Sharma make a dispassionate plea against losing sight of humanist angle in the plight of fishermen. And as they say, fishermen have become a symbol of the immaturity of South Asian nations. Interventions at the highest level are becoming increasingly necessary for this very reason for the release of jailed fishermen. In the India-Pak context, exchange of imprisoned fishermen has even become a media event and a CBM- confidence-building measure.
India has a coastline of 7,417 km; of this 1663 km is Gujarat coast. Sea off Gujarat and the Gulf of Kutch in particular are rich in marine wealth. Adjoining Gujarat is Pakistan’s Sindh province, which also has a long seafaring tradition.
Sir Creek over which the two estranged neighbours have had several rounds of discussions, is a 100 km long estuary in the marshes of the Rann of Kutch between Gujarat and Sindh. It is not a flowing creek but a tidal channel which has no officially demarcated boundary separating Pakistan and India. Till 1954 there was free movement across the Creek and an agreement signed in 1914 by the governments of Bombay, Sindh and the Raja of Kutch helped. Not any longer.
The continental shelf is the area where the two energy hungry nations can strike oil and gas deposits. Unless the Sir Creek is demarcated fairly and properly, who gets how much of the sea off the Gulf of Kutch remains in the realm of speculation.. That explains why there is no ‘give and take’ in the bilateral negotiations.
There are indeed 17 creeks in the Rann of Kutch. Except Sir Creek, all the remaining 16 are with Pakistan.
The Bay of Bengal offers a unique problem to India and Bangladesh. Here islands mostly uninhabited keep shifting or sprouting up suddenly. Bangladesh has a concave coast reducing its continental shelf if the line is drawn from the coast; India has a convex coast and gets a larger share of the Gulf as continental shelf. India and Burma both reject Bangladesh’s stance that its shelf be measured from where its coastline is navigable and not choked with riverine effluvium.
Harekrishna Debnath, a leader of the National Fishworker Forum of India, told the authors of the book once: “Since the mid 1970s, after the International Conference on the Law of the Sea, a sense of EEZ and maritime boundary has deeply got involved with questions of sovereignty of a nation. All nations, particularly those with coastal lines, are therefore engaged in demarcating their maritime boundaries. However, while theoretically this has been realized, unlike land, it is not easy to demarcate sea boundaries. The process is also tied closely to the lives of millions of fisherfolk across the globe. India and Bangladesh are no exception to this. Between them, there is a less than 400-km area in the sea. Thus there is an absence of the 200-km EEZ on both sides, though it theoretically exists. This has led to a great amount of confusion. In this situation it is not only difficult but near impossible to maintain the LOS decision.”
Well, contested coastlines are a reality. Coastal integration is ideal. But any project of greater coastal bilateral and regional integration involves what are called “sovereignty tradeoffs.”
The question is how to go about to resolve the issues – real and imaginary -with least difficulty inflicted on the people for whom the sea is both mother and father and god besides the provider of daily bread. Like all questions that the South Asian region is grappling with, this question also has no short answers. Only Statesmanship will show the way. But not nationalism or grandstanding.
-m rama rao
