Jaya and a dying delta

On her agenda must be the unending Cauvery dispute which has remained spectacularly unresolved notwithstanding Prime Minister Vajpayee’s wholly bogus initiative to establish the Cauvery River Authority with himself — no less — as chairman.

Ever since then chief minister, M. Karunanidhi, adroitly accepted Vajpayee’s deft proposal in August 1998 — leading to Jayalalithaa’s parting of ways with the NDA a few months later and the atheist DMK’s embrace of the Ram Bhakt BJP — politics has flooded the state but the Cauvery has remained dry. A delta is being turned into a desert.

The Cauvery Tribunal, in its interim award of June 1991, concluded that the annual flow of Cauvery waters to the Mettur dam in Tamil Nadu could be slashed to 200 tmc, a third of the historical flow, provided — and this was the critical proviso — adequate quantities were made available during the crucial hundred days that the kurvai (summer) crop is cultivated: mid-June to mid-September. Therefore, the Tribunal stipulated the minimum weekly flows required for each of the 52 weeks of the year.

In flagrant violation of the weekly flow provisions, not even once in the decade since the award has Karnataka even approximated the required flows during the kuruvai season. Instead, once its own summer crop requirements have been more than met, Karnataka has used Tamil Nadu as a drain to flush its waste into the delta. This water closet treatment of Tamil Nadu is what, one presumes, Jayalalithaa is headed out to the Capital to protest.

The Cauvery Tribunal recognised that to maintain the traditional cropping pattern in the delta, it is essential for all to stick to the traditional date of June 12 — that is, tomorrow — to open the gates of the Mettur reservoir. But the Mettur reservoir is virtually dry, storage has never been lower than it is today on the eve of the kuruvai season.

Therefore, the same Jayalalithaa who protested the DMK government’s failure to adhere to the June 12 schedule in 1999 and compelled the DMK to open the gates on the due date in 2000, is now left with no alternative but to keep the gates firmly closed on the sad, sad day of June 12, 2002. The present storage will render the reservoir dry as the Thar Desert if it is opened without replenishment for even a week.

Amazingly, the prime minister has not convened the Cauvery River Authority to avert this impending disaster. He has left it to the gods ‘to fill the monsoon skies with black clouds heavy with life-giving water’ (no, that’s not a quote from Vajpayee, just a parody!).

What is the purpose of an Authority which never meets when it is required to; functions only to beg mercy at the feet of the Karnataka chief minister; and goes back into Kumbakarna-like slumber once a palliative is found to the immediate crisis?

After four years as chairman of the Authority, I seriously doubt the prime minister knows that 15 of the 35 blocks of the coastal Cauvery districts have been declared ‘‘dark areas’’, that is areas where any further deepening of bore-wells will only ensure the inundation of sea water, thereby converting the once most fertile soils of India into a saline wasteland?

Does the prime minister know that the problem of salinity has already reached such acute proportions that people are pleading, ‘‘Forget water for irrigation; please just get us potable sweet water first’’? Does he know that the massive project underway to transport drinking water a hundred kilometres from the Kollidam river (the drainage river of the Cauvery basin) to Vedaranyam (the embarkation /disembarkation point for the LTTE) — in a delta jiski godi mein khelti hein uski hazaron nadiyan — is endangered by the deep penetration of salt water into the underground reserves at the mouth of the Kollidam? And, if he does, what on earth is he doing to end the disputation and ensure that the Cauvery delta does not go the Eelam way? (That is not an exaggeration: Jaffna is closer to my constituency than Chennai).

If the Cauvery River Authority were only an occasional lunch club, I would have no objection to its continued existence. I object because it stands in the way of the Supreme Court resuming its hearings on the substance of the 1995 petition filed by Jayalalitha (when she spelt her name with a single ‘a’!).

The hearings were on the point of conclusion in 1997 (with all the tell-tale signs pointing to an outcome favourable to Tamil Nadu) when the Centre intervened with the request that the hearings be stopped as a scheme was being prepared to ensure the implementation the Tribunal’s interim award. Accordingly, the Supreme Court suspended — but did not terminate — the hearings.

That ‘scheme’ is this wholly fraudulent Cauvery River Authority, which, according to my count, has met only thrice in four years. Not once, not even in a single week of the 50 kuruvai season weeks that the Authority has been in operation, has Karnataka even once adhered to the stipulated weekly flows.

So, what is the point of continuing with this monumental farce? The hearings in the Supreme Court cannot resume unless the Tamil Nadu chief minister — Mother Cauvery — walks out of the Authority and returns for justice to the only forum which will give justice to the delta, the Supreme Court of India.

Let the hearings resume and let the highest court in the land pronounce on what are Tamil Nadu’s rights. And, as in the case of Ayodhya, so in the case of the Cauvery, let the verdict of the highest court in the land finally tell us what is right and just. For, from the prime minister, we can expect only poetry, not justice.