ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines Sri Lanka’s UNCLOS-based resistance to the Sethu canal project against the backdrop of Indo-Lankan discursive differences over Kachchativu (a tiny uninhabited Lankan island in Adam’s Bridge’s vicinity). A case is made for considering the Sethu project, the littoral territory of Kachchativu, and the Indo-Sri Lankan Palk Bay fishing dispute as being entangled with events unfolding in Adam’s Bridge’s history. This envisages how unsustainable it is to resolve the imbroglio around the Sethu project and demands for Ram Setu’s national heritage without safeguarding political measures for the Palk Bay crisis and the still-recuperating Indo-Sri Lankan ties that were left fragmented during the Lankan civil war. The analysis argues that the resistance of Lankan public intellectuals and civil society to Indian interests in Sri Lanka is paradoxically an opportunity for a cross-cultural epistemic solidarity and diplomacy, originating in the shared environmentalist concerns of the Gulf of Mannar, Palk Bay, and Adam’s Bridge. The Lankan opposition to the Sethu project has been an unchosen yet de facto ally of the Ram Setu Bachao Movement. But a sustainable resolution to resolving the Palk Bay and Kachchativu disputes requires a more comprehensive alliance. The multipronged interfaces of Adam’s Bridge’s cross-cultural and interterritorial legacies beg the question whether Indian and Lankan civil societies can lobby their governments into a bilateral dialogue to safeguard the shared ecological heritage of the Gulf of Mannar and Palk Bay, fostering innovative and sustainable themes of Indo-Sri Lankan dialogues that can be internationalized and harnessed to aggregate holistic geopolitical synergies.
