Midweek Review

Alborada: Dawn Song or Dawn Rape?

Published

3 years ago

2022/03/9

By Carmen Wickramagamage

Ashoka Handagama’s latest film, Alborada, introduces itself as “the poem that Neruda never wrote.” What is this poem? Released on February 14 to coincide with Valentine’s Day, the irony of the timing is hard to miss for Alborada culminates in the horrific rape by Neruda, the great love poet, of a female latrine cleaner during his brief stay in Ceylon as the Chilean Consul. Hardly a subject that lends itself to poetry though the recitations in the film, in the original Spanish, of poems that Neruda did write are mesmerizing. Perhaps this explains why Garcia Marquez chose to characterize Neruda as “the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language”. What is Handagama’s intention in the film?

In interviews, Handagama has spoken of his film as a challenge to Western hegemony that he claims operated to push this ignominious act under the carpet. But he has made it clear that unearthing a little-known fact about a poet hailed today as a critic of capitalism and champion of the oppressed is not his only intention. He sees his film as making an intervention into the contemporary discourse on women’s right to bodily autonomy in the age of #MeToo. Handagama is clearly well-intentioned. It is therefore necessary to examine how Alborada intervenes, through its representation of the scene of rape, in the rape culture that naturalizes masculine privilege and feminine vulnerability.

Source of the story

The source of what we know about the incident is Neruda himself. While he may not have composed a poem about the rape, he did “confess” to it in his memoirs translated into English by Hadley St. Martin as I confess I have lived: memoirs (1977). Written some forty years later, one page of the eleven pages (out of three-hundred fifty) that he devotes to his Ceylonese sojourn concerns itself with this incident. Though it created hardly a ripple in Sri Lanka, in Chile, Neruda’s admission stirred up a storm when the Chilean Parliament voted in 2018 to rename the airport in Santiago after him, with women and human rights activists vociferously protesting against the plan citing this incident. Not that the incident was completely unknown in Sri Lanka but the rumour that was doing the rounds was more along the lines of “something” between Neruda and his “domestic”. Handagama has said that he first read about it in a book by Tissa Abeysekera which, according to Sarath Chandrajeewa, went this way: “the great poet, the Nobel prize winner who loved a scavenger woman in Wellawatte”. No mention of rape there. Transferring a brief reference in Neruda’s memoirs into film and making it the pièce de résistance of a visually powerful medium is a radical gesture but how radical is it in its contribution to the ongoing conversation on rape?

Handagama has tried to distance himself from Neruda, calling the film his “creation” just as Neruda’s memoirs were his but the film is in large measure faithful to Neruda’s recollections of his stay in Ceylon, highlighting the theme of solitude that runs like a refrain through the young poet’s account and offering a sympathetic portrait of a man ill at ease in the “narrow colonialism” of the British but intrigued by the sights, sounds and people of Ceylon. Just as Neruda is the subject of his memoirs, so is he in the film. In only one respect is there a significant deviation: the representation of rape.

The Incident

In Neruda’s account, his interest in the woman begins with his curiosity about the mysterious workings of his latrine. When he finally sees the woman who cleans it, he is not repulsed, calling her instead the “the most beautiful woman I had yet seen in Ceylon” (p. 99) and elevating her above the rest through appellations such as “queen” and goddess”. But, when she disdains his tokens of love in the form of silks and fruits, he exercises his white male prerogative over native women’s bodies by raping her: “One morning , I decided to go all the way. I got a strong grip on her wrist and stared into her eyes. There was no language I could talk with her. Unsmiling, she let herself be led away and was soon naked in my bed. Her waist, so very slim, her full hips, the brimming cups of her breasts made her like one of the thousand-year-old sculptures from the south of India. It was the coming together of a man and a statue” (p. 100).

Neruda plays down the violence of the encounter in his penitential recounting, resorting instead to euphemisms. The woman does not struggle. She “let herself be led” (Is she deterred by the “strong grip on her wrist”?). She does not scream for help (Is she aware of its futility given the isolated location of the bungalow?). She was “soon naked”, how she came to be naked elided, its place taken by an aestheticized description of the female form reminiscent of classical Sanskrit poetry that deflects attention from the violence. Some trace of the woman’s resistance is acknowledged in her unresponsiveness. At the climactic moment, when he forces himself on her, she turns into a sculpture in his eyes, turning Neruda in turn into a Pygmalion in reverse. Where Pygmalion (in Ovid’s Metamorphosis) manages to obtain his heart’s desire by turning a statue (thanks to Venus’ intervention) into the woman of his dreams, Neruda’s touch turns a living, breathing woman into a sculpture. The description ends with lines that have self-loathing write large over it: “She was right to despise me . The experience was never repeated” (p. 100).

Its Representation

How does Handagama render this incident in film? Unlike in the memoirs, here, the audience is prepped from the start for the impending climax through the sighting of the Parvati statue by Neruda on arrival, his frolics with members of the Sakkili community that has Ratné Aiya incensed, and the rhythmic chiming of the latrine-cleaner’s anklets that wakes him up at dawn from a night of love-making. When the rape finally occurs, it is portrayed on screen in all its brutality. The woman screams, she struggles valiantly to escape, she has to be forcibly detained and stripped naked before the final humiliation of rape. There is nothing subtle or indirect about it. Why this directorial decision to deviate? Is it that Handagama wanted to dispel any illusions that his audience may entertain about the great poet Neruda? Or did he want to force his audience to confront head on the brutality of rape against the backdrop of a rape culture that thrives on misconceptions regarding women’s consent?

I find Handagama’s directorial decisions problematic on many fronts. For one thing, in the eyes of the law, ‘rape’ is sexual intercourse without consent, what constitutes “absence of consent” carefully delineated to accommodate the different scenarios that qualify as “rape” in the eyes of the law. Here, the woman violently struggles, thus confirming a misunderstanding “if there is rape, there must be evidence of struggle.” In a culture where the tendency is to hold the victim responsible for triggering the rape situation, this is dangerous. In anchoring rape in “consent”, the law recognizes the extenuating circumstances where a victim may not be able to physically resist or even say ‘no’. In Neruda’s account, the circumstances that prevent the woman from resisting or saying ‘no’ vocally are very clear. In hindsight, he too acknowledges her ‘no’: “She kept her eyes wide open all the while, completely unresponsive” (p. 100).

Beyond the issue of consent, his portrayal of the scene of rape also raises questions on how to represent violence on screen. Much has been written on the intrinsic violence of representation in attempts to represent violence. The risk is doubled when it comes to sexual violence as Laura Mulvey and others have pointed out as it turns spectators into voyeurs who wittingly or unwittingly participate in the violence enacted on screen. In Alborada, we all join Ratné Aiya at the “keyhole” or aperture to gaze at the scene unfolding within, whether we derive a vicarious pleasure from that or not. Handagama tries to draw the attention of the audience to the very real pain of the woman by having a tear course down her cheek as she stares directly at the camera and at us while averting her gaze from the perpetrator. By doing so, he restores the flesh-and-blood woman to the scene of the rape where Neruda had seen a statue. Unfortunately, the protracted violence of the rape scene is in danger of slipping from pathos to bathos. Sarath Chandrajeewa has already said that he found the scene where the predator and his prey circle round the massive four-poster bed comical. I agree. The scene was too reminiscent of “ottu sellang”, a children’s game of “catch me if you can”, for me!

Life after rape

Feminist critics such as Sharon Marcus and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan have emphasized the importance of rewriting the normative rape script which sees the woman as victim and her defilement as marking her for life. In Sri Lanka, women are enjoined to protect their character (a euphemism for sexual purity) as if it were their life, its loss a fate worse than death. Marcus and Sunder Rajan, therefore, argue that it is essential to speak of rape survivors, not rape victims, who thereby refuse the powerlessness assigned to them in a “gendered grammar of violence”(Marcus).

In Neruda’s memoirs, at the end of the account, attention is redirected to Neruda himself albeit on a note of self-recrimination: “She was right to despise me” (p. 100). The woman’s subsequent fate is of little concern to him. In the film, the lines translate into an image of Neruda trading places with the latrine cleaner, first taking up the brush and cleaning the latrine and then walking towards the sea carrying the latrine bucket on his head in a show of abject humility. As for the woman, the camera follows her out of the bedroom and into the sea where she tries frenziedly to rid herself of the defiling touch, her facial expressions indicating her disgust. She is then seen swimming deeper into the ocean, with the ocean waters gradually submerging her completely. Only the red cloth survives to create patterns in the water as it did at the start of the film. Clearly, there is no life after rape.

The film, however, adds another scene in an attempt to locate the phenomenon of rape in the present. In this scene the woman resurfaces from the sea framed against a skyline featuring a jet-ski. How to read it? Is it to remind the audience that, some one hundred years later, nothing much has changed? Or is to hold out hope that in the age of #MeToo, something is about to change?

But, according to Sarath Chandrajeewa (in “Beyond the Fiction of Alborada“)who claims to have traced the identity of the woman raped by Neruda, the “real” woman did not drown herself. She returned to her community but was married off by her family to an older man because she had “lost her virginity” and, when her husband died shortly after, the now pregnant woman jumped into the funeral pyre of her husband and committed suicide, which some in the community described as “Sathi Pooja”. Chandrajeewa even speculates that the husband’s death from alcohol poisoning was “either because he was delighted with his beautiful young bride or perhaps due to grief” (!). This information that Chandrajeewa says he gathered as part of his research among the Sakkili community who lived in Wellawatte and Bambalapitiya in the 1970s raises many questions for me. Did the community that the woman belonged to (the lowly scavenger caste) uphold norms of feminine sexual purity that have their basis in the genteel classes? Did they practice “Sathi Pooja” of which there are no documented cases in Ceylon and which, even in India is very much tied to region, class and caste as scholars like Lata Mani and Gayatri Spivak have pointed out? Pregnant women in any case do not commit Sathi Pooja. They wait until they give birth. How much does Chandrajeewa “know” of their ways?

This is not the only attempt at endowing the woman with an afterlife. Another account of the nameless woman’s subsequent fate has been doing the rounds of late due to an article by Kumar Gunawardena in The Island in 2020 where he, drawing on a story titled “Brumpy’s Daughter” in Tissa Devendra’s On Horseshoe Street, claims that the raped woman’s story had a happy ending. According to Gunawardena, Neruda “did the right thing” by the woman, who now has a name, Thangamma, by marrying her off to his retainer Brumpy. And when a daughter (Neruda’s) was born in due course, she was named Imelda after Neruda’s mother at his behest and supported financially by Neruda through George Keyt. Devendra meets Imelda Ratnayake (last name from the foster father Brumpy) much later when he is heading a Kachcheri where she too works and attracts his attention because of her striking appearance. She ends up marrying a Chilean, a Neruda devotee, who had worked for a while in Ceylon. After her marriage, Imelda settles in Chile with her husband and meets Devendra again at a conference in Mexico. It was a feel-good story. But the feeling was short-lived. When Michael Roberts reprinted Kumar Gunawardena’s account in his blog Thuppahi, someone by the name of Manel Fonseka intervened to spoil it by declaring “If I’m not mistaken, Devendra’s whole story was exactly that! A STORY! No basis in truth”. If Manel Fonseka is right, Gunawardena, a medical doctor by training, had failed to recognize the difference between fact and fiction!

In all this, there is no room for the subjectivity of the woman who was raped. She does not speak. For Neruda, the reason is the language barrier though he turns that into something more by comparing her to a “shy jungle animal” belonging in “another kind of existence, in another world” (p. 100). Handagama restores some humanity to her by adding that artistically placed single tear but that’s where he stops. She never speaks. The gaze in the film is predominantly Neruda’s, the camera angles adopting Neruda’s perspective on the receding figure of the latrine cleaner reminiscent of a classical South Indian sculpture although, unfortunately, her walk could well be that of a model on the runway. Similarly, her face takes on a bronze sheen when Neruda intercepts her to remind us that, in his mind, she resembles a statue. Given the race, caste, class and gender of the latrine cleaner, it is unlikely we will ever know what happened to her. Chandrajeewa, who claims he found the “real” woman, assigns her an exceptional fate as a “mad” woman (suffering from “Idiopathic Psychological Disorder”) who commits Sathi Pooja. Even Tissa Devendra’s story ultimately fails to imagine for her a life that is not defined by the rape. I like to think that there was life after rape for her, that she, though no doubt traumatized, survived the rape without having to play the prescribed role in the normative script for the rape victim–forced marriage and unwanted pregnancy–although, gender norms at the time being such, she could not cry out loud #HeToo!

(Carmen Wickramagamage is Professor in English at the University of Peradeniya)

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Midweek Review

Canada plays politics with Sri Lanka again ahead of its national election

Published

2 days ago

2025/02/5

Sahan Weerasooriya

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre

UK Premier Keir Starmer reiterated his Government’s commitment to addressing justice, accountability of reconciliation in Sri Lanka and issues faced by Tamils, including advocating for human rights and justice for Tamil victims.

The often repeated declaration was made at the Thai Pongal celebration at 10 Downing Street on 20th January. The Indian High Commissioner in the UK Vikram Doraiswami was among those present. Perhaps Starmer hadn’t considered India’s culpability as the regional sponsor of a terror project in Sri Lanka that claimed the lives of as many as 70,000 combatants and civilians. Among the dead were former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and over 1,300 Indian soldiers.

Doraiswami joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1992, the year after the LTTE assassinated Gandhi at Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu. Would Starmer dare to raise India’s accountability and also look into the UK role in bolstering Tamil terrorism? The UK allowed a free hand to the LTTE with the group’s International Secretariat functioning from London without any restrictions. The LTTE wouldn’t have achieved status as a major terrorist organization if UK didn’t facilitate its operations. The writer’s assessment is that the British backing for Tamil terrorism was much more than that of Canada.

By Shamindra Ferdinando

Over 17 years after the decimation of the terrorist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), with a conventional fighting might militarily by our security forces, Canada and the UK are still seeking to punish Sri Lanka for pulling off that most unlikely victory against their deadly pet that they nurtured covertly.

Both the British and Canadian governments alike play politics at Sri Lanka’s expense. Canadian Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre recently stated that he would lead the world in seeking prosecutions in international courts of the Rajapaksas and other “criminals” who have persecuted the Tamil people. Influential groups of Sri Lankans of Tamil origin are represented in both the UK and Canadian parliaments.

Poilievre, whose party is widely expected to win the election, was speaking at the ‘Harvest of Hope’ event in Toronto on 18 January, marking Thai Pongal and Tamil Heritage Month. Obviously, the Conservative Party leader seems to be confident that he could win over Canadians of predominantly Sri Lankan Tamil origin at the October parliamentary elections.

Poilievre sought to appease the Tamil Canadians close on the heels of Premier Justin Trudeau’s announcement that he would resign after a successor is chosen. Rightwing Poilievre, early last year, declared he would seek to prosecute Sri Lanka at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and appoint lawyers to pursue charges against Lankan “war criminals” in international criminal courts.

However, the Conservative Party wouldn’t find it easy to entice Tamil Canadians as during Trudeau’s 10-year premiership, when Canada went out of its way to attack Sri Lanka. The Liberal Party, under Trudeau’s leadership, humiliated war-winning Sri Lanka at any given opportunity.

Recently, the Canadian media quoted Trudeau as having said: “I intend to resign as party leader, as Prime Minister, after the party selects its next leader through a robust nationwide competitive process.” Whoever replaces Trudeau will continue hostile policy towards Sri Lanka. One-time central banker Mark Carney and former Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland are in the fray. The Liberal Party is scheduled to announce the winner on 09 March.

All political parties represented in the Canadian Parliament, in May 2022, unanimously and arrogantly agreed that Sri Lanka perpetrated genocide during the war against the LTTE. On the basis of that unsubstantiated decision that had been endorsed by both Liberal and Conservative Parties, the Canadian Parliament recognized 18 May as the Tamil Genocide Remembrance Day. These overwhelmingly white accusers, however, forget the fact that like all of Americas, Canada, too, was established by committing numerous acts of genocide against its first citizens. And, to this day, they continue to perpetrate such acts with impunity. Such pale faces, with so much innocent blood on their hands, have the audacity to accuse small countries, like Sri Lanka, that refused to yield to terrorists, who were subtly supported by them, the same way they back even Islamic terrorists when it suits them as we clearly saw in Syria for example.

Sri Lanka brought the war to a successful conclusion on May 18, 2009 though LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran was only killed on the banks of the Nanthikadal lagoon at the dawn of the following day as his surviving band tried to breakthrough security forces lines.

What the Conservative Party Leader Poilievre could do to outdo Trudeau who had glorified Prabhakaran’s macabre project by targeting some Sri Lankan leaders responsible for eradicating the LTTE terrorism?

Over the years, those who had received Canadian citizenship, as well as others awaiting same, funded the LTTE as it killed and maimed thousands of Sri Lankans. Obviously, both Liberals and Conservatives, as well as other political parties, represented in Canadian Parliament, have conveniently forgotten thousands of Tamils killed by the LTTE. Canadian political parties are also silent on the origins of terrorism in Sri Lanka that may have claimed the lives of as many as 70,000 people. The dead included 1,300 Indian soldiers, members of rival Tamil terrorist groups, several dozens of politicians, like President Ranasinghe Premadasa as well as one-time Indian Premier Rajiv Gandhi, among many others.

Canadian political parties have bent backwards to appease Tamil Canadian voters. With their eyes on the still growing significant number of Tamil Canadian votes, they haven’t at least bothered to examine why Sri Lanka took on the separatist conventional military challenge. Canada never realized the need for a negotiated political settlement in Sri Lanka as long as the LTTE wielded conventional military power. Had the LTTE overwhelmed Sri Lankan military, Canada would have been one of the first countries to congratulate the triumph of terrorism here. That is the reality.

Fortunately, by the time Trudeau received the Liberal Party leadership in 2013, and became the Premier in late 2015, more than four years after Sri Lanka brought the LTTE to its knees, called “the deadliest terrorist group” even by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was not in a position to resurrect its military. In other words, once considered invincible by so-called experts, had been truly defeated. Canada, like many other like-minded countries, responded with shock and dismay at the way the LTTE collapsed after having vowed to defeat the military.

Sri Lanka created history by eradicating the LTTE militarily. Sri Lanka’s triumph dispelled the myth spread by interested parties that our armed forces were incapable of defeating a major terrorist group with conventional fighting means, like the Tigers.

Tamil electorate on a new path

Eradication of the LTTE is no longer a major issue at national or lower level elections in Sri Lanka. Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s superlative performance in the Northern and Eastern regions, at the last presidential and parliamentary elections in Sept. and Nov., last year, respectively, proved that predominantly Tamil electorates couldn’t be significantly influenced by post-war issues.

Regardless of much touted accountability issues and assurances to pursue the Geneva agenda, Tamil parties failed to garner the required support of the Tamil electorate. They overwhelmingly voted for Tamil candidates fielded by the National People’s Front (NPP) at the general election and thereby inflicted unprecedented defeat on the Illankai Thamil Arasu Kadchi (ITAK).

Finally, the JVP-led NPP won all the Northern and Eastern electoral districts. The Tamil-speaking people declared beyond doubt that they wanted to move ahead and not be entrapped in the past. They obviously realized that a politically motivated high profile Western campaign against Sri Lanka is not meant to help restore their shattered lives but play politics with an issue. Those who cannot stomach Sri Lanka’s triumph over terrorism still want to haul up the war-winning country before international criminal courts. However, ITAK, and smaller Tamil political parties, have now realized that accountability issues do not attract voters. Over 17 years after the end of the war, young voters, in no uncertain terms, had indicated that they aren’t interested in pursuing a political agenda, based on accountability issues.

Earlier, the ITAK-led Tamil National Alliance (TNA) wholeheartedly represented the LTTE interests.

Perhaps, the NPP, too, has realized that its often repeated promise to release political prisoners is irrelevant. Even if the NPP wanted to release some to deceive the people, no such prisoners are held by the government. There are only a handful of Tamil convicts and few others held in terms of the PTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act). The convicts are responsible for major attacks and high profile assassinations. Actually political prisoners are nothing but a non-issue and those demanding their release from detention are only fooling themselves.

It is high time Tamil political parties give up their primary strategy revolving around accountability issues. Having received the LTTE’s backing both in and out of Parliament at the outset of Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga’s second term, the ITAK is now struggling to come to terms with unfavourable situations in the North.

Failure on the part of M.A. Sumanthiran, PC, to retain his Jaffna district seat, meant that the ground situation had changed drastically. That was nothing but a severe warning issued not only to Sumanthiran but to all Tamil politicians who have been essentially advancing an accountability agenda like a beggar’s wound. However, Canada appeared to have failed to recognize the changing situation on the ground. Perhaps, the Canadian High Commission (CHC) should re-examine post-national election developments closely. The CHC should wait till the conclusion of the Local Government polls early this year to carry out reassessment as at least a section of the Tamil electorate may switch their allegiance back to the ITAK.

But, the writer is of the view that dynamics have changed and those genuinely concerned about the wellbeing of the Tamil people shouldn’t depend on accountability issues to promote political agenda. In fact, having played ball with the LTTE throughout the war and backed Prabhakaran’s decision to indiscriminately use hapless Tamil civilian human shields on the Vanni east front, the ITAK should be investigated for its culpability for war crimes. The ITAK had no shame at all as it fully cooperated with the LTTE’s despicable strategies. Today, the ITAK wouldn’t dare to mention that it recognized the LTTE in 2001 as the sole representative of the Tamil speaking people. Of course that was done at gunpoint. The late R. Sampanthan had no choice but to cooperate with Prabhakaran’s strategy meant to build a political front subservient to them.

Canada had no qualms in mollycoddling the ITAK in spite of that political party endorsing recruitment of child soldiers. The highpoint of the LTTE-ITAK/TNA relationship was the engineering of Ranil Wickremesinghe’s defeat at the 2005 Nov. presidential election that paved the way for Mahinda Rajapaksa’s victory, resumption of war in August 2006 by the LTTE and its decimation militarily by the armed forces.

Canada seeks Tamil Canadians support

Against the backdrop of the 2015, 01 Oct. Geneva Resolution that had been treacherously backed by the then Sri Lankan government, headed by Maithripala Sirisena, and Ranil Wickremesinghe as the President and Prime Minister, Canada took a series of measures to step up pressure on the war-winning country. In May 2022 Canada publicly announced that Sri Lanka perpetrated genocide. Trudeau dismissed Sri Lanka’s protests though Ottawa didn’t have absolutely anything to back its extremely politically motivated claims. Shame on Canada and its Premier.

It would be pertinent to mention that Premier Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, too, couldn’t stomach Sri Lanka’s triumph over terrorism. In fact, both Conservatives and Liberals competed with each other to censure Sri Lanka. They felt Canadians of Sri Lankan origin could be easily won over by censuring Sri Lanka.

In May 2014, the Canadian High Commission in Colombo asked the writer whether The Island could publish a hard-hitting statement issued by the then High Commissioner Shelley Whiting prominently ahead of Sri Lanka’s Victory Day parade. The writer, in his capacity as the News Editor of The Island, gave the HC an assurance that regardless of what Whiting had to say it would receive front-page coverage. The HC wanted to know whether any sections would be deleted. Assurance was given that it would be carried, sans any alterations. As promised The Island carried the Whiting’s statement that challenged President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s decision to celebrate the country’s triumph over terrorism.

Whiting, who had served at their Kabul mission prior to being posted to Colombo, declared that Canada wouldn’t be represented at the Victory Day parade that was to be held in Matara on May 18, 2014. In spite of proscribing the LTTE and the World Tamil Movement in 2006 and 2008, respectively, funds flowed to the LTTE. The LTTE couldn’t have sustained conventional fighting for over two decades without uninterrupted funding from the West. Canada remained a major source of funding until the very end when the Sri Lankan military decimated the LTTE militarily in a series of operations on the Vanni east front.

Having won the 2015 presidential election, Maithripala Sirisena, in consultation with Premier Ranil Wickremesinghe, cancelled the Victory Day parade. Canada must have been thrilled. Whiting’s condemnation of the military celebration was the only instance a foreign government called for the ending of the annual event held to mark a worthy victory clinched against so many odds.

In Oct. 2015, treacherous Yahapalana leadership (UNP-SLFP combine) co-sponsored a US-led accountability resolution against the Sri Lankan military. There hadn’t been a previous instance of any country moving/backing a resolution targeting its own armed forces and political leadership at the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

In May 2022 Canada declared Sri Lanka perpetrated genocide. In early January 2023, Ottawa sanctioned former presidents Mahinda Rajapaksa, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Staff Sergeant Sunil Ratnayake and Lieutenant Commander Chandana Prasad Hettiarachchi. Both Ratnayake and Hettiarachchi had been earlier sanctioned by the US, one of the worst human rights offenders, for committing what it called serious crimes.

Interestingly, no Western government has so far sanctioned war-winning Army Chief Field Marshal Sarath Fonseka though a number of senior officers, including General Shavendra Silva (US) and Maj. Gen. Chagie Gallage (Australia). The US threw its weight behind Fonseka at the 2010 presidential election. Having accused Fonseka’s Army of murdering thousands of Tamils, the LTTE proxy Tamil National Alliance (TNA) formed an alliance with the UNP and the JVP to defeat Mahinda Rajapaksa. Their project failed pathetically as the electorate inflicted a massive defeat on the celebrated Sinha Regiment hero. The drubbing was such Mahinda Rajapaksa polled over 1.8 mn votes more than Fonseka.

In the absence of cohesive policy on the part of Sri Lanka in countering unsubstantiated war crimes accusations, Western powers pursued an agenda inimical to Sri Lanka. The idea was to push Sri Lanka to offer a political package that addressed Tamils’ aspirations. In other words, Western powers wanted Sri Lanka to grant what the LTTE couldn’t secure through terrorism driven war.

Midweek Review

It reeks in the Palk Bay!

Published

2 days ago

2025/02/5

Sahan Weerasooriya

A group of Indian fishermen arrested in Sri Lankan waters for illegal fishing

A shooting involving Indian fishermen and Sri Lanka Navy personnel within the island’s territorial waters, and injuries sustained in apprehending the poachers is in the news, yet again. And as is often the case in these countless and never-ending confrontations and competing claims and counter claims in state rituals, we have two versions of the event. But one thing is indisputable: Indian fishermen had entered Sri Lankan waters illegally and thereby came within the jurisdiction of the island nation’s laws and legal apparatuses including interventions by its navy.

Naval action followed by competing statements by India and Sri Lanka are mere state rituals that have not been able to address long-standing practices that pre-existed the formation of nation-states. For the longest time, when national identities, citizenship, and maritime borders did not exist in the legal sense we understand them today, what we now call Sri Lankan and Indian fishermen waded undeterred into each other’s waters and engaged in fishing to their hearts’ content. They even lingered for extended periods of time in each other’s lands during specific fishing periods. I recall engaging in a conversation at the turn of the century with one such fisherman from South India who had decided to settle in Chilaw long ago. In his case and that of many of his comrades at the time, it was a matter of marrying into the Sinhala speaking fisher families. Over time, these people blended into local communities. At the height of these activities and even after both India and Sri Lanka gained independence, the long arm of the nation-states’ laws and national interests did not intervene in such activities beyond a point. But this changed as nation-states evolved into what Ashish Nandi has called ’garrison states’, militarised borders were drawn and bodies of laws developed governing cross-border travel.

Notwithstanding national borders and the associated practices of statecraft and competing nationalisms, fishermen in the two neighbouring countries have continued to wade into each other’s waters consciously disregarding what is known as the International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL) due to its invisibility. Such border violations are often deliberate and a matter of routine because fishermen often get away with this infringement. However, the kind of intrusion followed by violence now in the news is not the norm, but the exception.

In a statement issued on 28 January 2025, India’s Ministry of External Affairs noted that “an incident of firing by the Sri Lankan Navy during the apprehension of 13 Indian fishermen in the proximity of Delft Island was reported in the early hours of this morning.” It further noted, that “out of the 13 fishermen who were on board the fishing vessel, two have sustained serious injuries and are currently receiving treatment at the Jaffna Teaching Hospital.” But the statement from the Sri Lanka Navy differs in important details. It notes that Sri Lanka’s “Northern Naval Command observed a cluster of Indian fishing boats poaching in the Sri Lankan waters off Valvettithurai, Jaffna in the dark hours of 27 Jan 25.” This location is much closer to the Sri Lankan coast than what the Indian statement claims, yet it is evident from both statements that the incident took place well within Sri Lanka’s territorial waters. This discrepancy in the statements is intriguing as the two locations are approximately 62.4 km apart. Interestingly, the contested island of Kachchatheevu is 22.4 km from Delft, the location given in the Indian statement, and 84.7 km from Valvettithurai. Therefore, a careful reader may not be faulted in wondering if locating the scene closer to Kachchatheevu is deliberate, given that the island is a bone of contention between the two countries.

The Navy statement further states, “subsequently, the Northern Naval Command mounted a special operation to send away those fishing boats from the island waters, deploying naval craft. During this operation, the Navy seized an Indian fishing boat [that] continued to remain in Sri Lankan waters, while marshalling illegal fishing activities and collecting the fishing harvest. The operation also led to the apprehension of 13 Indian fishermen aboard the fishing boat.”

For Sri Lanka, this is not merely an accident that can be wished away as the somewhat clinical Indian statement does. It goes beyond protecting the maritime borders of the country, to preserving a crucial source of livelihood of many people in northern Sri Lanka and other parts of the island. It is both a bread-and-butter issue as it is a matter of national interest. Therefore, the Sri Lanka Navy has acted precisely in the manner that it should, as is expected and is within its mandate. Is it also not ironic that the bleeding hearts of southern Indian politicians who are up in arms about the so-called discrimination and abuse of their Tamil brethren in Sri Lanka by its government, seem to turn bone dry when their constituent fishermen callously plunder the resource-rich fertile waters of Sri Lanka, thereby remorselessly depriving their Tamil brothers and sisters of their livelihood.

The Sri Lankan statement further notes, “the Sri Lanka Navy boarding team was compelled to conduct noncompliance boarding as the Indian fishing boat continued to maneuver aggressively, without complying with the Navy’s lawful orders and its duty, during the process of taking the boat into custody. On this occasion, the Indian fishermen have acted aggressively, maneuvering their fishing boat in a hostile manner and behaving confrontationally with the Navy. However, while boarding the fishing boat in accordance with the authority vested in the Navy, the Indian fishermen, as an organized group, have attempted to assault naval personnel and made an attempt to snatch a firearm from a naval officer, endangering the lives of the naval personnel. In the process, an accidental fire has taken place, causing slight injuries to two Indian fishermen.” So unlike in the Indian statement which refers to ‘serious injuries’ the Sri Lankan statement refers to ‘slight injuries.’

What is seen here is not a deliberate act of shooting as the Indian statement and much of the Indian reporting on the incident insinuates, but an accident that has occurred due to the aggression and unlawful behaviour of Indian fishermen in a location in the sovereign territory of another country, they had no business of being in, in the first place. Intriguingly, none of these details are present in the Indian statement. It merely says that in addition to lodging a ‘strong’ complaint against the incident with the Acting High Commissioner in Delhi and the Sri Lankan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “government of India has always emphasized the need to treat issues pertaining to fishermen in a humane and humanitarian manner, keeping in mind livelihood concerns. The use of force is not acceptable under any circumstances whatsoever. Existing understandings between the two Governments in this regard must be strictly observed.”

India’s Ministry of Externa Affairs lodging a complaint with our Acting Hish Commissioner in Delhi and a similar complaint being made by its High Commission to our Foreign Ministry is the height of absurdity. While our Foreign Ministry and missions may be numb to such action, we should be mindful that the main infraction — Indian poaching — happened in our waters and therefore comes under the jurisdiction of Sri Lankan laws, in the dispensation of which accidents can also happen.

In any case, this statement itself may seem well articulated in the lofty corridors of performative and orchestrated diplomacy and the Indian Ocean conference circuit. But it makes little sense beyond as an example of excessive verbosity in the real world of cross-border poaching and naval action in the darkness of the night involving aggressive culprits and the threatened livelihoods of citizens of a sovereign country. Besides, it was just over six months ago that a young Sri Lankan sailor brutally met his end because of the aggressive manoeuvering of an Indian trawler in Sri Lankan waters. Therefore, these statements are naught but mere rhetoric, of no use to the Sri Lankan fishermen who — through no fault of their own — have to bear the brunt of Indian infractions and incursions into their bread-basket.

What is obvious in these rituals of statecraft is the woeful absence of proactive action on the part of Sri Lanka. If India can summon our Acting High Commissioner to their Ministry of External Affairs and lodge a ‘strong’ complaint over an accident stemming from an illegal Indian activity that took place in our waters, did our Foreign Ministry summon the Indian High Commissioner to protest against his compatriots illegally and perpetually entering our waters, behaving aggressively towards our navy and depriving a section of our citizens of their only livelihood? Did our Foreign Ministry ask him why they have opted to report basic facts wrong in their statement? Silence in such situations is not only extremely dangerous but also smacks of pusillanimity. This kind of institutionalized timidity on the part of Sri Lanka does not augur well for the country at the time we are celebrating our supposed ‘Independence,’ and is also counterintuitive to the notion of national interest.

This general lack of intent towards meaningful action is also evident in the Joint Statement of 16 December 2024, issued during President Anura Kumara Dissanayaka’s visit to India which states that “acknowledging the issues faced by fishermen on both sides and factoring in the livelihood concerns, the leaders agreed on the need to continue to address these in a humanitarian manner. In this regard, they also underscored the need to take measures to avoid any aggressive behaviour or violence. They welcomed the recent conclusion of the 6th Joint Working Group Meeting on Fisheries in Colombo. The leaders expressed confidence that through dialogue and constructive engagements a long-lasting and mutually acceptable solution could be achieved. Given the special relationship between India and Sri Lanka, they instructed officials to continue their engagement to address these issues.” Here, the omission of any reference to the destructive bottom-trawling fishing method is conspicuous by its stark absence. It is indeed unfathomable that the Sri Lankan team did not insist on the inclusion of this critical reference in the statement.

Rampantly used by Indian fishermen, bottom-trawling disrupts the seabed, marine ecosystem and biodiversity of the Palk Bay, while boosting India’s seafood exports and yielding high profits while destroying the Sri Lankan fishermen’s livelihoods. For this reason, Sri Lanka banned bottom-trawling in 2017. However, none of these are in the Joint Statement of 16 December 2024 or the Sri Lanka Navy statement of 28 January 2025, and have also not been taken up with the Indian High Commissioner in Colombo. This is not only a failure of Sri Lankan foreign policy in action but also a complete compromise of our country’s national interest.

In this context, the real culprits in the failure to resolve the problem definitively are the leaders of the Indian and Sri Lankan states — politicians and bureaucrats alike. Why has technology not been resorted to more thoughtfully in this situation where the required technology actually exists? For the longest time, both sides have been waxing eloquent about attaching non-tamperable and permanently switched-on transponders to fishing boats which will inform the Navies or Coast Guards of the two countries when maritime border violations take place. As a technologically advanced country, India has the higher capacity to produce the required innovative mechanisms and tools for this purpose that can be used in both countries for mutual benefit. Bilateral collaboration of this nature can actually bear fruit rather than the hollow discourses of rhetorical diplomacy and statecraft.

For India, these issues are important only insofar as they resonate with Tamil Nadu politics and therefore possible vote banks. In reality, it is never about the lives or livelihoods of poor South Indian fishermen or their confiscated properties. For Sri Lanka, it is a matter of ill-defined sovereignty and the livelihood of a significant section of the people in the north. At the same time, this unfolds in a situation where the Sri Lankan Navy is unable to patrol the country’s maritime borders effectively, a known fact which Indian fishermen exploit as a matter of routine.

If both countries are adequately serious beyond issuing mere statements after the fact, these incursions are easily stoppable. However, once the technology is put in place as a matter of law, both countries must enforce them to the letter, and patrol the borders more effectively. But, pending the fruition of such law, Indian fishermen, cannot be allowed to plunder Sri Lankan resources. It is also high time, the Sri Lankan government, with the kind of overwhelming mandate it has received from the people, make it very clear to the Indian state that endless incursions into our territorial waters and ravishing of the country’s natural resources can no longer be tolerated. And if legitimate deterrence is to be used in protecting our borders and resources as do all sovereign states including India, so be it. This is the minimum we expect from our government in its pursuit of our national interest.