Katchatheevu Island

Katchatheevu is a 285-acre uninhabited island in the Palk Strait, roughly midway between India's Rameswaram coast and Sri Lanka's Delft (Neduntheevu) Island, which became the subject of a maritime boundary settlement between the two states in the 1970s. Sovereignty over the island had been historically ambiguous: the Raja of Ramnad (Ramanathapuram) claimed proprietary rights dating to the seventeenth century, and during the colonial period both the Madras Presidency and Ceylon administrations asserted jurisdiction without definitive resolution. The island's sole permanent structure is St. Antony's Church, built in the early twentieth century, which remains a site of an annual festival drawing pilgrims from both countries. The legal disposition of Katchatheevu was effected through two instruments — the Agreement on the Boundary in Historic Waters between India and Sri Lanka signed on 26–28 June 1974, and a supplementary maritime boundary agreement of 23 March 1976 — which together delimited the maritime frontier and placed the island on the Sri Lankan side of the boundary line.

The procedural basis for the cession lay in the executive treaty-making power of the Union government under the Indian Constitution. Article 73 vests the executive with authority co-extensive with Parliament's legislative competence, and entries 10 (foreign affairs) and 14 (entering into treaties) of the Union List in the Seventh Schedule place external relations squarely within Union jurisdiction. The 1974 agreement was negotiated and concluded between Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Sri Lankan Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike. Critically, the government treated the matter as a determination of an already-uncertain boundary rather than as a cession of established Indian territory, which would have triggered the constitutional requirement — established in the Berubari Union case (1960) — that transfer of Indian territory to a foreign state requires a constitutional amendment under Article 368 ratified by Parliament. No such amendment was enacted, a fact that lies at the heart of subsequent legal challenges.

Under the terms of the 1974 accord, Indian fishermen and pilgrims retained access to Katchatheevu for the purpose of drying nets and attending the St. Antony's festival, but the agreement was silent on whether Indians could fish in the surrounding waters. The 1976 supplementary agreement, signed during the Emergency, addressed the broader maritime boundary in the Gulf of Mannar and the Bay of Bengal and, by its operation, restricted each country's fishing vessels to their respective sides of the maritime boundary, effectively foreclosing the historic fishing access that Tamil Nadu fishermen had exercised around the island. This combination — sovereignty to Colombo, limited access for ceremony but not for livelihood — generated the enduring grievance.

The dispute remains a live irritant in contemporary India–Sri Lanka relations and in domestic Tamil Nadu politics. The Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly has repeatedly passed resolutions demanding retrieval of the island, and Chief Ministers J. Jayalalithaa and M. K. Stalin have pressed the Union government on the question. Jayalalithaa filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court in 2008 challenging the 1974 and 1976 agreements as unconstitutional; that petition remains pending. The issue resurfaced acutely in March–April 2024, when an RTI reply obtained by the Tamil Nadu BJP and circulated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi was used to criticise the Congress government of 1974 for "callously" giving away the island, making Katchatheevu a campaign theme ahead of the general election. The Sri Lankan Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded that it regarded the matter as settled.

Katchatheevu must be distinguished from the related but separate problem of the International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL) enforcement and the recurring arrests of Indian fishermen by the Sri Lankan Navy. The island itself is a question of sovereignty and constitutional procedure; the fishermen's crisis is an operational law-enforcement matter arising from bottom-trawling incursions across the IMBL into Sri Lankan waters. It is also distinct from the Sethusamudram Shipping Canal Project, a separate proposal to dredge a navigable channel through the Palk Strait that has its own environmental and strategic controversies. Conflating these issues is a common analytical error; each rests on a different legal and policy footing.

The constitutional controversy endures because the government's characterisation of the 1974 agreement as a boundary determination rather than a cession has never been tested to finality. Critics, including legal scholars and Tamil Nadu's government, contend that Katchatheevu was Indian territory and that its transfer without a constitutional amendment violated the Berubari principle. The Union government's consistent position is that the island lay in disputed historic waters and that the agreement merely settled the boundary, requiring no amendment. Successive Ministries of External Affairs have ruled out reclaiming the island, noting that retrieval would require either renegotiation with Colombo or international adjudication, neither of which the executive has pursued.

For the practitioner, Katchatheevu illustrates several enduring themes in Indian foreign and constitutional law: the breadth of executive treaty-making power, the friction between Union foreign policy and federal-state interests under the constitutional scheme, and the difficulty of revisiting settled bilateral boundaries. For the UPSC GS-II aspirant, it is a touchstone case linking constitutional provisions (Articles 73, 368, the Berubari ruling) to a concrete bilateral dispute, to centre-state relations, and to the humanitarian dimension of the Tamil Nadu fishermen question. It remains a recurring fixture in diplomatic, electoral, and examination discourse alike.