Call it the “Ram Setu” or “Hanuman Bridge”, the stretch of low-lying
banks that connect India to Sri Lanka across the Palk Strait is very
much part of the subcontinent’s Ramayana lore. Lord Ram, the story goes,
built this bridge with the assistance of Hanuman’s monkey army, walked
into Lanka to rescue his consort Sita from King Ravana. That the story
has little basis in science is beside the point. What is interesting is
the possibility that New Delhi and Colombo can now turn that myth into
reality by building a causeway across the 30 km of water between
Dhanushkodi near Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu and Talaimannar in northern
Sri Lanka.
Promoting connectivity, within and across national boundaries, has been a major priority for Prime Minister
Narendra Modi.
His Sri Lankan counterpart, Ranil Wickremesinghe, who is visiting Delhi
this week, has been a convert to connectivity long before Modi burst
upon India’s national scene. When he was PM of Sri Lanka more than a
decade ago, Wickremesinghe had proposed the construction of a land
bridge across the Palk Strait. An unenthusiastic Delhi and Chennai said
“No, thank you.” What gained political traction instead was the proposal
for dredging a shipping channel — the Sethusamudram — in the shallow
waters around the tip of peninsular India.
But the prospect that the Sethusamudram canal would cut across the
Ram Setu stirred significant opposition from Hindu groups. The
environmentalists too expressed strong reservations against a project
that could threaten the sensitive marine ecosystem in the Palk Strait.
The Sethusamudram project would have deepened the divide between India
and Sri Lanka. At a time when much of the world was moving towards
transborder transport and energy corridors, the Sethusamudram project
wanted to dig the moat between the two countries deeper.
At precisely the moment Sri Lanka was rediscovering its geopolitical
centrality in the Indian Ocean and developing ambitious plans to emerge
as the maritime hub of the world’s southern seas, Delhi seemed strangely
detached from the imperatives of deeper integration with Lanka. If
India increasingly viewed Sri Lanka through the prism of the ethnic
conflict between the Sinhalese and the Tamil minority, China began to
put the emerald island at the very centre of its Indian Ocean strategy.
Delhi’s inability to move forward on transborder infrastructure looked a
lot worse in comparison to the dramatic expansion of China’s physical
and economic connectivity to India’s neighbours — not just across the
Himalayas but in the Indian Ocean as well.
All of India’s neighbours are now part of China’s “one belt, one
road” initiative that seeks to integrate the Eurasian land mass as well
as the Indian and Pacific Oceans through massive infrastructure
projects.
Modi has promised to end India’s sleepwalking on regional
connectivity. In his address to the Sri Lankan parliament in March this
year, Modi cited the great Tamil poet Subramanya Bharathi to affirm
Delhi’s strong commitment to “build a bridge” to Lanka. Modi also
travelled to Talaimannar to inaugurate a railway line in northern Sri
Lanka that India had built in the last few years. While India’s
contribution to rebuilding infrastructure in northern Sri Lanka that was
destroyed by the civil war is impressive, Delhi must now focus boldly
on transborder connectivity with Sri Lanka.
Union Transport Minister
Nitin Gadkari
suggested a couple of months ago that Delhi was now ready to talk about
Wickremesinghe’s “Hanuman Bridge”. Gadkari added that the Asian
Development Bank was eager to support the project that could cost more
than $5 billion. The Hanuman Bridge would connect the road and rail
networks in both countries and ease the flow of goods and people across
the Palk Strait. Not everyone, however, sees the Hanuman Bridge in
positive terms.
Some in Lanka worry that the bridge would undermine its territorial
sovereignty and integrity. It was the opposition in Tamil Nadu that
compelled Delhi to turn its back on the Hanuman Bridge. This is not
surprising, given the prolonged civil war in Sri Lanka and its regional
consequences. It’s really up to Modi and Wickremesinghe to make the
political and commercial case for the causeway and address the issues
raised by opponents on both sides.
South Asian nations have been talking about building bridges across
borders for nearly two decades. Over the last year and a half, Modi has
lent a new urgency to these connectivity projects. Delhi has backed up
the PM’s rhetoric with some actions, most notably the signing of the
motor vehicle agreement with three eastern neighbours — Bangladesh,
Bhutan and Nepal — earlier this year. It’s the Hanuman Bridge, however,
that could become the most powerful symbol of the subcontinent’s new
regionalism.
The writer is consulting editor on foreign affairs for ‘The Indian Express’ and a distinguished fellow at the Observer Research Foundation 