The sea at Dhanushkodi is a sheet of grey. With hardly any waves, it’s quiet, merging with the bleak landscape that nurses the wounds of a cyclone that devastated Dhanushkodi town in 1964. All that remains are the ruins of buildings that survived the storm and sea an old church, railway terminus, port and jetty, a post office. Nearly 250 fishermen families live a bare existence, fishing near the shores or selling shell handicrafts to tourists who arrive from Rameswaram to see the ruins. There’s no electricity or road.
The only mark of development is a primary school, a three-room concrete structure sticking out of the thatched homes. Until the cyclone ruptured its relationship with the mainland, Dhanushkodi, eastern tip of Rameswaram Island, was the last stop en route to Sri Lanka. People arrived here by the Boat Mail (train) from Chennai and boarded the 30-minute ferry to Talaimannar. There’s no ferry now; none comes here to journey to Lanka.
Yet, Lanka is an overwhelming presence here, as in every fishing village in the southern TN coast. The talk this election in the coastal hamlets of Ramanathapuram district is about Lankan naval boats stalking their men out in the sea. Hardly a day goes by without news of Rameswaram fishermen being apprehended by Lankans for crossing the international maritime border. These days, most of them are freed.
Sometimes the boat and fishing gear aren’t returned. In the past, the men would be jailed in Mannar for trespass or smuggling. It takes protests, petitions and talks involving governments to get them released. The few unlucky await their turn, investing their hope in the prayers of their families and efforts of community leaders. At Thangachimadom, a village in Rameswaram, families of fi ve men have waited for two years for their men to return. In the run up to the election, the Centre and the state together got over a hundred of them released from Lankan jails.
Talks are underway to settle the matter. “For 20 years this has been happening,” says Sethu, a fi sherman who lives in a shack beside the tarred road that runs along the sea and ends in a no-man’s land close to Dhanushkodi. “We can’t make out the international boundary in the sea and get caught by the Lankan navy,” he adds. Men here don’t own mechanized boats but work on them. Most of them, including Sethu, operate on rafts and fish close to the shore. Rameswaram has about 2,000 families who live off small boats and their problems are distinct from those who work on mechanized boats or trawlers. They rarely figure in the political discourse on the welfare of fishing communities.
2014 Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd.