Katchatheevu made poll issue without considering India-Sri Lanka ties: Yashwant Sinha

NEW DELHI: Former Union minister Yashwant Sinha said the BJP has made the Katchatheevu island an election issue ahead of Lok Sabha polls without thinking of its implications on the India-Sri Lanka relations.

The decades-old territorial and fishing rights dispute around the Katchatheevu island is in the limelight again with the BJP and the opposition parties engaged in a war of words.

Sinha, who had served as India's finance minister, and external affairs minister, said the island falls on the Sri Lankan side of the maritime boundary.

"I am extremely dismayed that no other than the prime minister of the country has raised this issue. I am aware of the fact that Katchatheevu was an island which when the maritime, international maritime line was drawn fell on the side of Sri Lanka and therefore went to Sri Lanka.

"And that is why repeatedly the Ministry of External Affairs has held the position that there was no question of conceding any territory to Sri Lanka because the island fell on the Sri Lankan side," Sinha said.

"Therefore to raise this issue now, I can only say that it will spoil the relationship with Sri Lanka. And what will you do? Are you going to use force to take the island back? So this is nothing but an election issue," he said.

The island is located between Rameswaram in India and Sri Lanka. In 1974, the then central government accepted Katchatheevu as Sri Lankan territory under the "Indo-Sri Lankan Maritime Agreement."

"Now, in an election, you raise many issues. But you have to be conscious of the implications of the issues that you raise. Here, the prime minister has raised the issue without at all looking at the implications it is going to have on our bilateral relationship with Sri Lanka," he said.

Modi had targeted the Congress as well as the DMK over the ceding of the islet in 1974 by the then-party-led government. He had cited a media report to assert that new facts revealed that the Congress "callously" gave away Katchatheevu to Sri Lanka.

Commenting on the situation at India's northern borders, Sinha accused the government of misleading people and quoted a written reply given in Parliament saying China has occupied 38,000 square km of Indian territory in the Union Territory of Ladakh.

"I am not concerned with what China claims, I am concerned with the fact that according to a reply given by the Defence Minister, 38,000 square km of our land has been taken over by China. That's a Parliament question and you can't, you know, not say the right thing in reply to a Parliament question.

"Now, the Home Minister of India says not an inch of our territory has been taken by China. He is absolutely wrong. And he is misleading the people of India because his own colleague, the defence minister, has said that China has occupied 38,000 square km of our land," he said.

In a written reply to a question in Lok Sabha in February 2022, Minister of State for External Affairs V Muraleedharan said China continues to be in illegal occupation of approximately 38,000 sq km of Indian territory in the Union Territory of Ladakh for the last six decades.

Asked about Jammu and Kashmir, he said Article 370 is "dead and gone".

"If you are referring to the abolition of Article 370, I would say that Article 370 was already dead and gone. It was just a hollow shell. There was nothing left in Article 370. What the government of the day did was, it declared it dead and buried it," he said.

The former finance minister also raised red flags over statistics being put out by the Union government, and said, "I don't trust the statistics put out by this government."

Sinha said during his tenure as the finance minister, there was a strong system of compiling and disseminating statistics.

"In my time, I strengthened that system. I made the National Statistical Commission (NSC) an independent body, but it is not so anymore. I am sorry to say that the Statistical Commission has also been brought within the ambit of the government, and it has lost its independence. So, it is dishing out figures or concealing figures as the government wants," he said.

"People in the government and prime ministers are talking about all the progress that has been made. Did you know that in the 10 years of the UPA government and the 10 years of the Modi government, the amount of loan that the government of India has taken has just doubled?"

"The amount of money which is being borrowed by this government is huge, and therefore, they have to take huge amounts of loan, and their fiscal deficit is not what it should have been," Sinha added.

Sinha, a former IAS officer who resigned in 1984 to join politics, was with the BJP till 2018, when he quit alleging that the NDA government at the Centre was undermining democratic institutions.

The former Hazaribagh MP joined the Trinamool Congress in 2021.