Tamil Nadu tightens patrol, security in coastal district as Sri Lanka protests intensifies

As the situation in Sri Lanka escalated, the Tamil Nadu state government intensified security and patrolling along its coastal districts.

The Tamil Nadu administration believed that people taking the sea route to seek refuge in India from the island country could be not just those who have genuinely suffered in the country’s economic crisis, but also those who want to foment trouble.

The situation in Sri Lanka continuously devolved as protests against the powerful Rajapaksa family intensified in light of the country’s economic crisis.

Since March this year, nearly 80 Sri Lankan nationals, all Tamils, have already sought refuge in Rameswaram when the island country’s economic crisis first got out of control. All refugees are lodged at the permanent camp in Mandapam, near Rameswaram island.

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Sources in the government told DH that the Coastal Security Police of Tamil Nadu have been asked to constantly coordinate with the Indian Navy and the Coast Guard about movement on the seas. Rameswaram is just a 40-minute boat ride from Talaimannar in northern Sri Lanka—this is the route that many took to reach India in the past two months.

“Putting our personnel in coastal districts on high alert is a routine thing. Whenever there is a conflagration in Sri Lanka, we intensify our security and patrol. It is primarily because of the geographical proximity to northern Sri Lanka,” a senior police officer said.

He confirmed that patrol has been intensified, although there is no specific alert. “We are being cautious, and we ought to be,” he said. The high alert was also sounded because over 50 prisoners escaped from a Colombo prison over the weekend.

Government sources added that it had become necessary to keep a strict vigil as more Sri Lankan Tamils are expected to arrive in Rameswaram as the economic crisis shows no signs of ending. “We are also in touch with the Union Home Ministry on this issue,” the officer said.

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In the 1980s, Rameswaram and Kodiyakarai near Vedaranyam in Nagapattinam district were used as transit points to smuggle arms into northern Lanka by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and other Tamil militant groups, to fight the Sri Lankan forces.

In June 2018, more than 50 boxes of abandoned ammunition, machine guns and detonators were recovered from a private farm in Rameswaram.

At the height of the civil war in Sri Lanka in the 1980s, Tamil Nadu served as safe haven for terror groups that fought the island nation’s army. It was suspected that the recovered weapons could have been left by the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation or Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front—which had made Rameswaram island their base—when they left India in 1990, after the Indian Peace Keeping Force fiasco.