Dear reader,
The past is a dark alley and there is great risk of stumbling if you stroll in without a light.
But some politicians have a fascination for the past and show a marked tendency to travel back in time repeatedly, especially when it is election season and the temptation to corner your rival is running high. When this exercise takes place in the context of a neighbouring country, the politics becomes a heady cocktail of conspiracy theories, blurred facts, and diplomatic fumbles.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent reference to the island of Katchatheevu, which lies between India and Sri Lanka, while addressing an election rally in Meerut in western Uttar Pradesh, left many in the audience barely able to pronounce the island’s name and wondering what the context was.
One felt tempted to do a parody of Neha Singh Rathore’s famous poll song (UP me ka ba?) and ask “Katchatheevu matlab ka ba?” (What is the meaning of Katchatheevu?).
The island is a stretch of uninhabited land about 300 metres wide, 1.6 km long, and spread across 285 acres. The Prime Minister was playing up the story as part of the BJP’s larger narrative of national security, attacking the Congress for the decision of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to hand over the island to Sri Lanka in 1974. Modi connected the handover to the problems being faced by fishermen of Tamil Nadu today, saying that they were paying the price for the mistakes of the Congress.
Modi was clearly playing to the gallery by raking up a decision taken 50 years ago, as the BJP is desperate to get a foothold in Tamil Nadu. The fishermen’s issue has a resonance in the coastal belt of Tamil Nadu and, deserted by its ally, the AIADMK, the BJP wants to benefit from its past association with Jayalalithaa. This was evident when Modi in an interview talked of his “special bond with Amma” and how Jayalalithaa had come to attend his swearing-in as Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2002 when many others were pointing fingers at him.
Well, as American fantasy and romance writer Laurell K. Hamilton says, “They say not to look back, but if you’re not sure what lies ahead, what else is there but looking back?”
Congress MP Manish Tewari posted on X, “You have to be a first-class knucklehead to believe that the lady who cleaved Pakistan into two, redrew the geographical map of South Asia in 1971 creating Bangladesh, the Late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi would give up Katchatheevu Island to Sri Lanka under any duress, coercion or compulsion. Let us not undermine our strategic standing in the region in pursuit of partisan politics.”
The BJP’s obsession with the past means that Jawaharlal Nehru continues to be its favourite whipping boy even 60 years after his death. At the same time, other issues it raises go back many decades before India even got freedom, so raking up a 50-year-old treaty is no surprise.
To compete, the Congress regularly flags Veer Savarkar’s mercy petitions written from the Andamans in 1911, a 113-year-old story.
When, in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the BJP sought to take credit with its “ghar me ghus ke maarenge” (we will go into their house and kill them) pitch after the 2016 Uri surgical strikes and the 2019 Balakot aerial strike, the Congress responded by going back 40 years to take credit for the creation of Bangladesh. Many Congress leaders recalled that the then BJP leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee had hailed Indira Gandhi as “Durga”.
Similarly, whenever the BJP faces criticism over its handling of dissent, its leaders cite the Emergency imposed 49 years ago. And when the BJP raises the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, the Congress rakes up the 2002 Gujarat riots. In fact, it could be reduced to a past versus past contest between the BJP and Congress each time the issue of communal riots is raised, with neither side having a satisfactory explanation for its role in each one’s respective tenure.
As the BJP tried to reach out to Tamil Nadu’s fishermen, its State chief K. Annamalai published an RTI reply according to which the decision to hand over the island to Sri Lanka was conveyed to the then Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi by the Congress government at the Centre in 1974. This made sense to the BJP because the Congress and DMK are fighting the upcoming election in an alliance.
But the devil lies not only in the detail but, in today’s age, also in digital memory.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge quickly fished out a 2015 statement made by Modi, at the time of the Land Boundary agreement signed between India and Bangladesh (when in a friendly gesture, 111 enclaves were transferred from India to Bangladesh and 55 from Bangladesh to India), when the Prime Minister had referred to the 1974 “friendly agreement” with Sri Lanka on Katchatheevu.
The BJP, as always, dragged Nehru into the debate, saying that the island was “nothing more than a rock for Nehru”, with External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar saying in a press conference on April 1 that Nehru had said in 1961 that he attached no importance to the island and would have no hesitation in giving up claims on it.
In response, the Congress fished out a response made by the MEA to a RTI query on Katchatheevu in 2015, which said that there was no acquiring or ceding of territory since Katchatheevu lies on the Sri Lankan side. Jaishankar was then the Foreign Secretary.
The last time Sri Lanka figured so prominently in India’s domestic politics was three decades ago, when in 1991 former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) members in Tamil Nadu and the post-assassination politics had seen an ugly trade of allegations by political parties.
But the fact is that Indian elections are showing a new fetish for dragging in international relations at election time, be it the undue focus on Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh during the CAA row in 2019 or Modi’s pre-2014 promise of showing “lal ankh” (angry eyes) to Pakistan. In the run-up to the 2022 Punjab Assembly election, Captain Amarinder Singh had created a political storm by saying that Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan tried to reinstate Navjot Sidhu after the latter resigned in February 2019. The BJP used this to the hilt to project Sidhu as being close to the Pakistani establishment. It is a different matter that Singh went on to quit the Congress and later joined the BJP.
With election season just beginning to heat up and two months of campaigning still left, watch this space for more of the past in present politics.
Thank you for reading Poll Vault, our election-ready newsletter. Watch this space as campaign season heats up. Until then...
Anand Mishra | Political Editor, Frontline
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