A day after 37 fishermen from Tamil Nadu were arrested by Sri Lankan Navy, chief minister J Jayalalithaa on Tuesday accused the Union government of being lackadaisical and insensitive in handling the issue.

“The meek and pusillanimous response of the Centre to these repeated attacks have emboldened the Sri Lankan navy to mount more and more unprovoked attacks on our fishermen,” Jayalalithaa said in a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a copy of which was released to the media.

As many as 22 fishermen from Rameswaram who set out for fishing in five mechanised boats on Monday were apprehended by the Sri Lankan navy and taken to Thalaimannar for further investigation. In the second incident on the same day, 15 fishermen from Jagadhapattinam of Pudukkottai district were arrested along with their boats.

In all, over 65 fishermen from Tamil Nadu are languishing in Lankan prisons and their 35 boats in the Island nation’s custody.

Jayalalithaa said the incidents of abduction and detention of Tamil Nadu fishermen had multiplied, even as Centre took little or no action to convey India’s strong protest or to use coercive diplomacy to put an end to these attacks. “None of my letters to you (PM) on this subject have evoked a substantive response,” the chief minister said.

Pointing to the recent visit of Union minister of external affairs Salman Khurshid to Lanka, Jayalalithaa said the statements emanating from these talks appeared to indicate that the very serious livelihood problem of hundreds of thousands of fishermen was being treated as a backyard squabble to be sorted out by the fishermen associations of both the countries. “To me this appears to be the height of casualness, indifference and insensitivity in dealing with this vexatious issue,” she said.

Jayalalithaa compared how the Centre responded to the recent incident of firing on Gujarati fishermen on the high seas, which saw it summoning the Pakistan envoy to register its strong protest, with the government’s meek response to the attacks on the Tamil Nadu fishermen. She said the continued “insensitive and ham-handed treatment” of the Tamil Nadu fishermen issue in Palk Bay was fast alienating the community, who justifiably felt they had been let down by their own national government. (TNN)