Vellapalam, South India: Drifting on the strait between India and Sri Lanka, an Indian fisherman named Sakthivel cowered in his boat. A Sri Lankan naval officer, who took the man’s photograph, delivered a warning: If we find you in Sri Lankan waters again, you will never leave, the NDTV reported.

Returning to this Indian fishing village, Sakthivel quickly sold his boat and swore off fishing. He told friends that he was too frightened to return to the sea. But, uneducated and jobless, he knew only fishing. Then his first child was born. So he borrowed money, bought a new boat and again set out toward Sri Lanka, and never returned. He has been missing for almost a year.
“Now my husband is gone,” said his wife, Maheshwari, 21, who like most people in this village uses a single name. “How can I manage?”
At the bottom of the Indian subcontinent, a fishing war is straining relations between India and Sri Lanka as Indian fishermen, often poor and desperate, regularly cross into Sri Lankan waters and run afoul of the Sri Lankan Navy. Figures differ, but according to one report at least 100 Indian fishermen have been killed and 350 seriously injured in recent years – another example of the volatility of maritime issues in Asia.
The dispute is rooted in a complicated blend of local factors: the steady depletion of fish stocks, partly because of overfishing by Indian trawlers; the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, which saw relief funds partly used to expand the Indian fishing fleet even as fish populations declined; and the end of the long Sri Lankan civil war in 2009, which has meant the return of the nation’s fishing boats to waters once plied almost exclusively by Indians. Read more…