Aug. 16 (The Telegraph): A ghost which could have bedevilled Prime Minister Narendra Modi's passage to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Sunday has been exorcised.

The death of Arumugam Sekhar, who was in his twenties when he was shot by the American navy off the coast of Dubai three years and one month to the day Modi landed in the UAE, had already cost Manmohan Singh his planned visit to Abu Dhabi and Dubai in 2013.

It was a trip Singh was very keen on, hoping to attract money from the Gulf into India's infrastructure development. But in a rare instance of unity among rivals Jayalalithaa and M. Karunanidhi - and every other political party in Tamil Nadu - demanding justice for Sekhar, a fisherman from Ramanathapuram in the state - the then Prime Minister was forced to abandon his visit barely one week before it was to take place.

Wiser by the way his predecessor was diplomatically checkmated by state-level satraps, an unstated intent of Modi's visit to Chennai 10 days ago was to test the waters for any adverse domestic fallout if he went to the UAE, according to sources in the government.

But Jayalalithaa did not bring up Sekhar's case. Instead, sources in Chennai said, she brought up a more recent case of another Tamil Nadu fisherman, Antony Arun Anish, who was shot dead under circumstances not very different from that of his compatriot from Ramanathapuram.

Modi heaved a sigh of relief because Anish would not become a hiccup during the Prime Minister's travel to Abu Dhabi or Dubai.

Anish was employed on a boat which belongs to Qatar and he was shot allegedly by pirates in waters close to the coast of Bahrain. Anish's body was retrieved by Bahrain's Coast Guard.

Jayalalithaa sought the Prime Minister's intervention to bring the body to Tamil Nadu. Last week, Modi initiated steps to arrange for this, ensuring that Anish's death did not haunt the external affairs ministry the way Sekhar's tragedy did since 2012 and in a way exorcising a ghost from domestic and foreign relations.

Three years ago, the US navy had fired using .50-calibre machine guns from the USNS Rappahannock, a 31,000-tonne refuelling ship from their military sealift command at a small fishing vessel that had six Indians and two UAE nationals. The incident took place 16km off Jebel Ali in Dubai emirate.

The fatal shooting became an incident with striking similarities to the one in which two Italian marines are accused of shooting to death two Indian fishermen off Kerala's coast, also in 2012.

Like the Italians, the Americans said they had acted in self-defence to protect their ship from suspected pirates or terrorists. Sekhar died instantly while K. Muthu Kannan, R. Muthumaniraj and M. Panduvanathan, all from Ramanathapuram, suffered bullet injuries. The other four occupants of the fishing boat survived unhurt.

But unlike the Italians who were in no position to do so, the Americans used a combination tactic of their super-power arm-twisting skills along with common sense diplomacy.

As a result, the fatal shots fired from the USNS Rappahannock did not explode into anything remotely similar to the Devyani Khobragade incident, where the US refused to recognise the diplomatic immunity of India's deputy consul-general in New York and arrested her two years ago.

Notwithstanding the cancellation of Singh's visit, India's relations with neither the UAE nor with the US suffered, proof of which is Modi's presence in Abu Dhabi on Sunday and Barack Obama's cosy friendship with the Prime Minister.

Unlike the Italians, who offered large sums as solatium to the victims of shots fired from their commercial cargo ship, the Americans waited to see what the Tamil Nadu government would do for the three surviving fishermen from Ramanathapuram and the relatives of the deceased Sekhar.

Then they matched what the state government offered, leaving Jayalalithaa little room to continue making an issue of the incident.

The Americans got away cheaply by paying Rs 5 lakh as compensation to Sekhar's dependants and just Rs 50,000 to each of the three survivors.

But before doing so, they arm-twisted the Dubai government into reining in their chief of police, Lt Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim, whose investigations had established that the fishing boat was "in its right course and did not pose any danger" to the USNS Rappahannock.

At the diplomatic level, South Block consistently took the view that India had no direct role in the matter and that it was an issue between the US, which fired the shots, and the UAE, which owned the fishing vessel that was fired at. Domestic Indian agencies helped with the resettlement of the fishermen who came back to Tamil Nadu.

The injured fishermen's employer was as "generous" as the Americans. He paid the injured Rs 50,000 each and one-third that amount for two fishermen who were unhurt in the incident but did not want to work in the Gulf any more.

Once all this was done with, the US navy came out with closure: its inquiry report exonerated the personnel of the USNS Rappahannock. Before going out to sea, Indian fishermen now get fliers in Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam and some other languages - courtesy the Americans - advising them to stay clear of naval vessels.

One source in Dubai, who helped with the repatriation of the injured fishermen to India and is unhappy with the poor compensation, sarcastically remarked that after Modi's visit, fishermen may get fliers in Gujarati too.

Photo credit: The Telegraph