“Once the heart opens, the door also opens.” Chief Justice of India Surya Kant reportedly made this remark recently while hearing the ongoing 30-year-old Satluj-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal case, after Attorney General R Venkataramani told the three-member Bench that Punjab and Haryana “speak in a joint voice … They have opened their heart much more than what they were talking last time”.
The language of progress is familiar in Haryana’s 1996 suit seeking completion of the SYL canal. But coming just months before the Punjab Assembly elections early next year, the question is whether these cordial statements represent a genuine shift or another turn of phrase.
For long-time observers, the latter seems more probable, given the bad blood between the two states over this sensitive issue. Recent history bears this out. Last year, the two states were in a stand-off in the Punjab and Haryana High Court after Punjab refused to loan a small amount of water to Haryana from the Bhakra dam when villages around Hisar and Fatehabad were going thirsty.
Water is a contentious issue in the border state. It unites Punjabis in a heartbeat. Speak about giving any water to Haryana and you will hear a resounding “no” from Punjabis of all shades, even in genteel drawing-room conversations. This is why rapper Sidhu Moose Wala’s “SYL”, released after his death, drew such a humongous response before it was pulled down. “Paani chhado, tupka nahin dinde (forget about water, we won’t give a drop),” he sang.
Behind Punjab’s resistance
Punjab’s resistance is not merely political rhetoric. Roughly 73–76% of its blocks are overexploited. Farmers are having to dig deeper every few years, while border districts in southern Punjab, at the tail end of the canals, struggle to irrigate their crops.
Legally, Punjab continues to invoke the riparian principle — which gives states through which rivers flow primary rights to their waters — to challenge the 1981 tripartite agreement brokered by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi between the chief ministers of Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan. It reallocated surplus Ravi-Beas waters, assessed at 17.17 MAF (million acre feet), through a link canal to be constructed within two years. In 1982, Gandhi formally inaugurated digging work at Kapoori in Patiala.
The Shiromani Akali Dal launched the Nehar Roko Morcha within days. It soon evolved into the Dharam Yudh Morcha, launched from the Golden Temple complex after the Akalis joined hands with radical ideologue Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale on the issue.
As militancy ravaged Punjab, work on the canal slowed. In 1990, it ground to a halt when Babbar Khalsa International militants barged into the site office and shot dead SYL chief engineer M L Sikri and superintending engineer Avtar Singh Aulakh, along with 32 labourers.
In 2004, the Congress government headed by Captain Amarinder Singh passed the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act, legislating Punjab out of the pact. It was celebrated locally as a political masterstroke, although it left the Congress high command red-faced.
Amarinder later told me how he kept the legislation confidential from everyone except his legal team until he called a special Assembly session, where it was passed unanimously. He had not even taken party president Sonia Gandhi into confidence; she remained miffed for months.
The Supreme Court struck down the Act in 2016. That year, however, the Akali government returned the land acquired for the canal to its original owners, underscoring the formidable practical and political obstacles any attempt to revive construction on the Punjab side would face.
The SYL is more than a canal. It is a painful political memory of uneven water pacts by the Centre since 1955, when it allocated Rajasthan, a non-riparian state, 8 MAF, leaving undivided Punjab with 7.2 MAF of the Ravi-Beas waters.
Haryana’s argument
The SYL was designed as a 214-km link with 122 km falling in Punjab and 92 km in Haryana. Haryana finished its portion years ago. Its legal-entitlement argument is straightforward: its status as a successor state of undivided Punjab, the 1981 agreement, and successive Supreme Court rulings directing Punjab to complete its part of the stretch for Haryana to receive its share of Ravi-Beas waters. It is also facing water stress in southern and south-western districts, where the water table has dipped to 1,700 feet.
Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini has repeatedly asked Punjab to share waters with it. “We are one. I appeal to our elder brother to share water with us.” This year, Haryana earmarked Rs 100 crore for the canal.
Another piece of the puzzle
But there is another piece of this story that deserves attention.
The Ravi-Beas Waters Tribunal was set up in 1986 to re-verify water claims. Commonly known as the Eradi Tribunal after its first chairman, Justice V Balakrishna Eradi, it was in Punjab this summer for fresh field inspections. The present three-member tribunal, headed by retired Supreme Court judge Justice Vineet Saran, with Justices P Naveen Rao and Suman Shyam as members, visited sites to examine river inflows, canal outflows, hydraulic structures, and the shortage of canal water in Punjab’s border districts.
Interacting with the tribunal, CM Bhagwant Mann and officials reiterated that Punjab faces severe groundwater depletion and an acute shortage of canal water. The state, they said, had no surplus water for Haryana or Rajasthan. They also maintained that only Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, and Jammu and Kashmir fall within the actual basin area of the Ravi and the Beas.
A lot depends on the tribunal, whose task is to establish whether the water assumed to be available under the 1981 agreement still exists. But whatever its findings, the tribunal cannot build the canal or make Punjab accept a settlement its people consider damaging. For that, the two states will have to thrash out a solution. With compassion. Whether it is possible in the charged poll season is anyone’s guess.
(Manraj Grewal Sharma is National Editor, North, The Indian Express)
The SYL is more than a canal. It is a painful political memory of uneven water pacts by the Centre since 1955, when it allocated Rajasthan, a non-riparian state, 8 MAF, leaving undivided Punjab with 7.2 MAF of the Ravi-Beas waters. (File photo) 
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