‘Will fight back’: Dal Khalsa warns against construction of SYL canal

“Punjab owns the waters of the rivers Sutlej, Ravi and Beas and no legislation or court could deprive the state of its legitimate right of ownership. We will defend the rights of the state at any cost and will not let anybody take away the waters forcefully with the state’s might and if it happens, we have the right to resist and fight back,” said Dal Khalsa leader Kanwar Pal Singh.

“Khalistani militants have laid down their lives and suffered imprisonment for years for defending the same waters. We won’t let their sacrifices go in vain,” he said in a statement.

Spokesperson for the group Paramjit Singh Mand said the contentious canal, one of the key issues of the Punjab conflict, led the state to many long-winded agitations. Clearly, the canal was planned against universally accepted Riparian principles with an eye on looting the scarce water resources of Punjab, he alleged.

Mand further said that more than 55 per cent of Punjab’s river waters are being diverted to non-riparian states like Rajasthan Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir, and Haryana either under duress or chicanery by the Indian leadership.

This allocation of Punjab’s river waters by successive Central governments has been unjust and illegal as it is violative of the Indian Constitution, which provides no authority to the Union to allocate or administer waters from the rivers of a state that flow only in its territories.

According to Kanwar Pal Singh, Rajasthan, a non-riparian state, receives 10.5 MAF (million acre-feet) of water from Punjab’s rivers though the state is not even part of the Indus basin. Similarly, Haryana gets 7.8 MAF of water, while it received only 0.9 MAF before the reorganisation of the states in 1966.