Chennai's fishers fight on two fronts: a Secretariat on their shore and seven boats held in Andhra Pradesh

Chennai's fishing communities are fighting two battles at once this week, one over land and one over the sea, and in both they are asking the same thing of the new government: to treat the coast as a place where people live and work, not as empty space.

"Choose the fishermen"

On Tuesday, hundreds of fishermen and women staged a protest near Srinivasapuram against the State's plan to build a new Secretariat at Foreshore Estate, the stretch of shore known locally as Pattinapakkam. Residents walked in a silent march from their villages to the protest site, where black flags had been planted in the sand.

The protesters represent fishing villages across 64 hamlets from Tiruvallur to Chengalpattu. They want the Government Order on the Secretariat withdrawn and another site chosen. Their spokespeople were careful about their tone. Community leader K. Bharathi, who has led the campaign, said they still believed Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay had their welfare at heart, and recalled that Minister Aadhav Arjuna had said that, if asked to choose between the fishermen and the Secretariat, the Chief Minister would choose the fishermen.

The fears are concrete. "We won't have any freedom to carry on with our lives or unload our fish near the sands," community leader Kabaddi Maran told The Hindu.

The protest also revived older grievances. Roobesh, another leader, said land belonging to fishing villages had been taken over in the past for government staff housing, and that the land on which All India Radio now stands once belonged to Nochikuppam. He wants such land returned. Viji of Srinivasapuram said about ten thousand slum clearance board tenements, some built in K. Kamaraj's time and others in the 1970s, had not been maintained since the 2004 tsunami and must be demolished and rebuilt. He also asked the government to build homes for non-fishing families who live in the villages.

Seven boats, a hundred days

A few kilometres north, at the Kasimedu fishing harbour, the anger is about the sea. Boat owners have decided to stop work indefinitely until the State government secures the release of seven Chennai boats that have been held in Andhra Pradesh for more than a hundred days.

Manivannan of the Chennai Visai Padagu Meenavar Nala Sangam, an association of higher-horsepower boats, said the decision was taken at a meeting of everyone whose income depends on the harbour: owners, vendors, loaders, ice sellers and net menders. The strike will begin in about ten days, once boats on long voyages return.

According to M.E. Raghupathi of the same association, the boats were seized in April, just after the annual fishing ban ended. He said the seizure came after boats from Karaikal that had themselves been held were quietly taken away. Community leader M.D. Dayalan said every one of the seized vessels belongs to a single-boat owner, and that the government has announced no financial help for them. He added that thousands of workers from Andhra Pradesh crew Tamil Nadu boats, and that Chennai boats fish beyond the five-nautical-mile limit.

Boat owners told The Hindu that Kasimedu boats are detained in Andhra Pradesh almost every year and freed after a ransom is paid. This year, they said, the issue has become political there, and Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu has said he will stand with his State's fishermen. Nanjil Ravi, a community leader, asked the Tamil Nadu government to seek the Centre's intervention and pursue the matter with the seriousness it gives the Cauvery dispute, pointing out that fishing rights in Pulicat are also contested between the two States. Some fishermen also want the sale of Andhra fish at the Chintadripet and Vanagaram markets stopped.

Why it matters

The two disputes have different causes, but they have the same effect. On land, fishing families fear losing the shore where they land and sort their catch. At sea, a single seized boat can wipe out a family's capital. In both cases the people affected say they learned of the decisions only after they were made.

As of Thursday, the government had not announced any change to the Secretariat plan or any assistance for the owners of the seized boats, according to the community leaders quoted above.