Is Tamil Nadu Heading For A Jallikattu 2.0 Moment?

The recent 'revelation' by TN fishers freed by Sri Lanka after they had paid up Lankan rupees 50,000 each in fines, that their hair was tonsured in prison and they were forced to remove their garments other than the underpants, and were also made to clean toilets, as if with vengeance, has touched a raw nerve this time, just as another issue or issues had done it ahead of the Jallikattu protests, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.

IMAGE: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman (unseen) interacts with the audience after addressing a meeting with MSMEs and the Chamber of Commerce of Coimbatore, September 11, 2024. Photograph: ANI Photo

On other occasions, it could have been dismissed as the usual political gimmick of a divided Opposition at the national level and in a different equation at the state level.

Yet, the avoidable controversy over Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's exchange of GST ideas with a popular hotelier in Coimbatore city could also be an early signal to a possible revival of 'Tamil angst', as evidenced during the unprecedented 'Jallikattu protests' across southern Tamil Nadu, circa 2017.

If anything, the politics of it seems to have been reduced to BJP infighting in the state, with Tamil Nadu unit President K Annamalai promptly posting an apology to hotelier Srinivasan after a video footage of the latter began doing the rounds.

The video was about Srinivasan meeting Sitharaman privately in the company of local party MLA Vanathi Srinivasan, and offering an explanation, bordering on apology, to the minister.

Annamalai was the BJP's Lok Sabha candidate for Coimbatore in the national elections earlier this year, and his apology was followed by the district unit chief sacking a local party official, purportedly for 'deliberately leaking' the video.

In effect, it was Annamalai, away in the UK on a 'study tour' for six months, ticking off Vanathi Srinivasan (no kin of the hotelier by the same second name) on the one hand and telling the six-member supervisory team in his place to run the party affairs in his absence, as to who really was the boss, still.

IMAGE: A bull charges at participants during Jallikattu in the village of Avaniyapuram on the outskirts of Madurai. Photograph: ANI Photo

Politics of it all should begin and end there. Going beyond it, the way the ruling DMK, Opposition AIADMK and other regional and sub-regional parties criticised Sitharaman first and the video leak later on, it was a clear and early sign of subdued Tamil angst too finding stray expression after the Jallikattu protests over traditional 'Tamil pride' that the locals believed was not adequately understood in 'distant' Delhi.

The Jallikattu protests were predictable. Independent of the issue, one was even predicted over multiple issues over which a combination of Tamil cultural and livelihood issues intertwined.

Though the Jallikattu protests were generally understood to have been over the traditional bullfight, banned by the Supreme Court on the strength of an existing law against cruelty to animals, there were other provocations, too. Included in the list, or topping the list was a related concern flowing from the 'Cauvery water dispute' with neighbouring Karnataka.

In the season that preceded, that is, November 2016, more than Karnataka's denial of Tamil Nadu's share, as recommended by the centrally appointed Cauvery Water Tribunal, it was the BJP government in New Delhi making an overnight about-turn on certain aspects of the pending case before the Supreme Court that upset the Tamil mindset, even in regions where the river was not flowing.

While the court had put the ball in the Centre's court for its response to Tamil Nadu's plea, the attorney general told the Supreme Court one fine day that the Union of India did not have any role whatsoever in the matter after handing over the matter to the Cauvery Water Tribunal in the early nineties when P V Narasimha Rao was prime minister.

This negated the long held position, based on which the Supreme Court had passed orders binding on the Centre and the four stake holders, including Kerala and Puducherry, with the tribunal award as the guiding/binding marker.

The surprising U-turn taken by the Narendra D Modi government shocked Tamils, especially Cauvery delta farmers, and their younger generation who were well settled in IT/ITE or management jobs, either in Chennai or elsewhere in the country or outside.

The silent signals that emanated from then on, particularly on social media, and up to the annual mid-January ritual of the Supreme Court reopening the 'Jallikattu case' only to extend the ban by another year, went mostly unnoticed and unacknowledged, by the powers-that-be in Chennai and Delhi.

The rest, as they say, is history. Though social media-driven protests of the kind were new to South Asia (as against the 'Arab Spring' and the 'Orange Revolution' elsewhere), some see the Jallikattu protests as the precursor the more famous 'Aragalaya protests' in neighbouring Sri Lanka, circa 2022, and more recently in Bangladesh.

Today, there is a simmering discontent in the Tamil minds over the Sri Lankan fishers' dispute, in which fishermen from the state are being 'indiscriminately' arrested along with their boats, by the nation's navy -- only to be sent to prison with or without hefty fines.

Some fishermen and also a Sri Lankan navy sailor have died in the melee over the past months, leading to further tension on either side of the Palk Strait.

IMAGE: Karnataka activists burn an effigy during the protest over the Cauvery water dispute. Photograph: ANI Photo

Going beyond the original dispute, a couple of issues stand out. It is election time in Sri Lanka -- the presidential poll is on September 21 -- when in the past, the navy would not act or over-react to 'poaching' by Indian fishers.

Two, whether or not it is election time in either country, New Delhi would have intervened to obtain freedom for the imprisoned fishers.

This time round, neither has happened. What more, the Government of India is not being seen as doing enough to obtain freedom for the arrested fishers and the release of their boats from Sri Lankan custody.

Unlike in the past, there is no mention of Prime Minister Modi talking to Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who is contesting the weekend poll, or External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar communicating with his counterpart Ali Sabry in the matter.

As Tamil Nadu activists familiar with the Sri Lankan scene claim, Colombo now needs New Delhi at the ongoing UNHRC session in Geneva.

Even if it is not a genuine effort, it is a point for trade-off, but the Centre was not doing enough -- unlike over the past decade and more.

They also point out that the DMK state government of Chief Minister M K Stalin is stymied by the unprovoked BJP Lok Sabha election campaign pertaining to the bilateral Kachchatheevu pacts of 1974 and 1976.

Tamil Nadu fishermen understand the avoidable embarrassment that the campaign, launched by none other than Modi, caused to the DMK in particular, but to their own people otherwise.

As the fishers point out, after the end of the ethnic war in Sri Lanka in 2009, they have been careful not to make the bilateral fishers dispute into an issue for political one-upmanship within the state and the country.

Today, their protests are confined to their own coastal villages in the Rameswaram belt, and are apolitical too.

It's unlike in the distant past, where in the background of the ethnic issue, war and violence in Sri Lanka, the fishers' dispute came to be agitated across the state, starting with capital Chennai.

Different political parties and groups held competitive protests in favour of the Tamil Nadu fishermen's 'traditional rights' over 'historic waters', as alternating chief ministers M Karunanidhi (DMK) and Jayalalithaa (AIADMK) often pointed out.

But the key protesters came from the MDMK, PMK and VCK with their pan-Tamil tilt in Sri Lankan ethnic affairs more than the other two.

Even national parties like the CPI and CPI-M were not found wanting. Suffice to point out that the late BJP leader Jana Krishnamurthy had taken up the issue first when the Kachchatheevu accord was signed in 1974.

IMAGE: All India Fishermen Congress supporters protest at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi seeking the release of 175 boats and Tamil Nadu fishermen imprisoned in Sri Lankan prison. Photograph: ANI Photo

On the face of it, today, it is all about finding a negotiated settlement to the fishers' dispute between the two nations, their governments and their own fisher communities.

This is because the Tamil fishers in Sri Lanka, who are the affected party, are all-out against their brethren from across the seas, continuing with their 'destructive' bottom-trawlers and purse-seine nets.

A workable solution can thus be found only by encouraging the Rameswaram fishers to take to deep-sea fishing in a big way.

The state government, with financial assistance also from the Centre, began a subsidy scheme for Rameswaram fishers to take to deep-sea fishing with tuna long-liners and gillnet boats, with a mother-ship, for them to store their catch.

There are cultural and other issues relating to Rameswaram fishers shifting from over-the-night fishing to deep-sea fishing that requires them to stay in the seas for days together.

But that is only one part of it all. Just now, they are upset that the state government has stopped with CM Stalin writing to EAM Jaishankar for central intervention whenever a TN fisher and his boat are arrested by the Sri Lankan navy.

They are seething with unpronounced anger at what they consider outright indifference on the part of the Centre.

There are those who see it as 'political vendetta' on the part of the Centre for the state not electing a single BJP candidate in the Lok Sabha polls.

This thought is being shared by those outside the DMK. Rather, DMK cadres holding such a view are few and far between.

It is this kind of constituency that is silent and mostly apolitical that was upset first and angry later over the Cauvery water/Jallikattu issue.

The recent 'revelation' by TN fishers freed by Sri Lanka after they had paid up Lankan rupees 50,000 each in fines, that their hair was tonsured in prison and they were forced to remove their garments other than the underpants, and were also made to clean toilets, as if with vengeance, has touched a raw nerve this time, just as another issue or issues had done it ahead of the Jallikattu protests.

Will it all make for a run-up to Jallikattu 2.0 protests, for the second time in seven years? Yes and No.

Historically, it is not easy to trigger it all in the same generation or even the immediate generation so quick and fast. Telescoping public resentment in such ways is just not on.

Even the Jallikattu protests had to wait for two generations after the highly emotive 'anti-Hindi' agitation in the state in the mid-1960s. The latter was political and politicised.

The former was apolitical and the faceless leaders ensured that it remained so throughout and even afterwards, to the present.

But the tools of communication were what was the best in their respective times, the print media for the anti-Hindi agitation and the social media during the Jallikattu protests.

Today, as during the two past occasions, the agony and angst could be touched. But it is not being felt outside, at least not as yet.

And, thereby hangs a tale -- or, so it seems!

N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator.

Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff.com