Editorial: Flogging a dead horse

The great dance of democracy playing out in India has offered its gladiators avenues to plunge new lows on the rhetoric lobbed at political adversaries. A recent episode involving digging up dirt on the erstwhile administration was orchestrated by the BJP when a top functionary chose to rake up the Katchatheevu controversy, in the middle of the election season. Last Sunday, PM Modi led a charge against the Congress for ‘callously’ giving away Katchatheevu island to Sri Lanka, slamming it as yet another ‘anti-national’ act of the party for which the country is still paying the price.

Modi had latched onto a media report, based on a reply Tamil Nadu BJP president K Annamalai received on the decision of the then Indira Gandhi government in 1974 to hand over the territory in Palk Strait to the neighbouring country. Annamalai’s plan was to target the Congress, an ally of the ruling DMK. The verbiage has stirred up a controversy in Tamil Nadu, where the issue of Katchatheevu has a significant resonance. Fishermen from here often bear the brunt of Lankan action against their alleged intrusion into its waters, which has led to arrests as well as seizure of fishing boats.

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, upset over this historic affront asked why the Modi government did not bother to retrieve the island during its 10 years in power, while terming the BJP attack as a move reeking of poll-eve desperation. It was fifty years ago that the Indira Gandhi government, in an ill-advised measure to maintain good relations with Sri Lanka and to help lakhs of Tamils living there, negotiated with its government to cede the island of Katchatheevu, which used to be the property of the Rajah of Ramnad, in the pre-independence years.

Following the negotiations, a settlement was made on Katchatheevu, a very small island of about 1.9 sq km, that India acknowledged as belonging to Sri Lanka. The BJP’s plans of divide and conquer, or rather driving a wedge into the splintered INDIA bloc is bearing fruit, going by the manner in which the ruling party in Tamil Nadu reacted to the allegations of the PM. The DMK Organisation Secretary RS Bharathi reiterated that in 1974, the DMK had held state-wide agitations to oppose and condemn the ceding of Katchatheevu to Sri Lanka. He went on to say that DMK President and CM MK Stalin, as well as late patriarch M Karunanidhi had amply demonstrated the DMK’s stance on the issue.

In line with the BJP’s parroted narrative of placing the blame of all things wrong with India at the feet of the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty, the ruling party has also brought up the issue of the Congress ‘allowing’ Aksai Chin to be illegally occupied by China and a portion of Jammu and Kashmir being under the illegal occupation of Pakistan. The party might be basking in the optimism that the issue might come in handy in its efforts to gain political traction in the Dravidian heartland during the Lok Sabha polls, considering it involves neighbouring Sri Lanka whose treatment of its own Tamilian citizens and Tamil Nadu fishermen has long been a charged political issue in the state. For a party that prides itself on setting futuristic goals for India, it seems questionable that making inroads into the deep south involves flogging a dead horse. So much for the double engine philosophy.