Unlike his predecessors, why Vijay wants to discuss Cauvery with Karnataka

Vijay is now attempting something more delicate: reopening the political conversation without appearing to reopen rights already settled by law.

Tamil Nadu has proposed dates between July 31 and August 3 for a meeting with Shivakumar, but is still awaiting confirmation. If it takes place, it will be the first direct meeting between the Chief Ministers of the two principal riparian states in nearly 14 years.

Crisis looms

The immediate crisis is severe. Between June 1 and July 23, Tamil Nadu should have received roughly 32 thousand million cubic feet of water under the tribunal award as modified by the Supreme Court in 2018. However, it received only about 3.5 tmc ft. Even allowing for deficient southwest monsoon rainfall and proportionate reduction during a distress year, the state believes at least another three tmc ft should have been released.

The deficit is not merely a number written in a reservoir chart. It travels downstream into the Cauvery delta, where a delayed release can mean a lost crop, an unpaid loan or a farming household waiting for rain that has already fallen elsewhere.

K Kannan, former justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court and known for his expertise in mediation and laws for application to different types of disputes, told The Indian Express that Vijay’s move “deserves support”.

“Dialogue between elected governments is neither a concession nor a sign of weakness; it is an obligation flowing from India’s federal structure,” he said. “Governments that refuse to engage merely because differences persist abdicate one of their foremost Constitutional responsibilities.”

But Kannan cautioned against treating dialogue as a substitute for the law. “CMs can create an atmosphere conducive to cooperation, reduce political hostility and facilitate compliance with existing legal obligations,” he said. “They cannot, however, renegotiate rights and obligations that have already been determined through statutory mechanisms and judicial adjudication.”

That distinction lies at the centre of the controversy now surrounding Vijay’s outreach. Opposition parties, farmers’ groups and sections of the legal and technical establishment fear direct negotiations could allow Karnataka to bypass the Cauvery Water Management Authority or, worse, attach the immediate release of water to Tamil Nadu’s opposition to the proposed Mekedatu reservoir.

Justice Kannan described the water-release crisis and Mekedatu as “two disputes, two legal regimes”. “The first concerns the immediate release of Cauvery waters during the current distress year,” he said. “This issue is governed by the final award of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal as modified by the Supreme Court and implemented through the Cauvery Water Management Authority.”

“The second concerns Karnataka’s proposal to construct a balancing reservoir at Mekedatu. This raises altogether different issues relating to environmental clearances, interstate consent, project approvals and the continuing supervisory jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.”

“Conflating the two issues risks complicating both,” he added.

Tamil Nadu’s government appears aware of that danger. Its immediate objective is to secure water, not negotiate away its objection to Mekedatu. The state has separately sought an exclusive tribunal on the dam proposal and could insist that any discussion on the project take place outside the present emergency.

Minister defends move

Public Works Minister Aadhav Arjuna has said the government has no “narrow political agenda” and remains open to constructive advice, even from former Chief Minister M K Stalin. But he did not directly answer Stalin’s central objection: whether Vijay should hold bilateral talks without first convening an all-party meeting.

Arjuna instead defended the government’s record and accused the previous DMK administration of failing to argue effectively against Mekedatu in its final legal challenges. He said the TVK government would continue to pursue every legal and Constitutional route while remaining open to useful criticism.

The political advantage available to Vijay is obvious. The Congress governs Karnataka and is a junior partner in his government in Tamil Nadu. Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi attended Vijay’s swearing-in, and Shivakumar was among the early leaders outside the state to congratulate him. But rivers have rarely respected party discipline.

“Interstate river disputes seldom yield to party discipline,” Justice Kannan said. “State governments, irrespective of their political affiliations, remain answerable to their own legislatures, farming communities and urban populations.”

“No national political leadership can realistically compel a state government to release water contrary to prevailing public sentiment during a distress year without serious political consequences,” he said.

Past precedents

History supports that caution. Karunanidhi and Devaraj Urs spoke in 1972, M G Ramachandran and Karnataka leaders negotiated in the 1980s, Karunanidhi and J H Patel held five rounds of talks between 1996 and 1997, and Jayalalithaa met Jagadish Shettar in Bengaluru in November 2012 after a Supreme Court suggestion.

The conversations sometimes lowered political temperature. They did not settle the river.

Before the tribunal was constituted in June 1990, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka held 26 rounds of negotiations over 22 years. Twenty-one involved the Union Irrigation Minister. Five were bilateral. None resolved the dispute.

MGR himself spent two days in Bengaluru in October 1981 after an initially scheduled one-day meeting failed to produce an agreement.

“CM-level meetings have periodically taken place over the past five decades,” Justice Kannan said. “These meetings undoubtedly helped maintain political communication. They occasionally reduced immediate tensions and prevented public acrimony from escalating into constitutional confrontation.”

“Yet they rarely produced enduring settlements.” The reason, he said, is structural.

“Interstate river disputes are unlike ordinary political disagreements,” he said. “They involve competing agricultural interests, uncertain monsoons, hydrological constraints and powerful regional sentiments.”

“Every additional thousand million cubic feet released downstream is often perceived upstream as a corresponding loss to local farmers. Conversely, every deficit downstream threatens standing crops and rural livelihoods.”

Justice Kannan argues that the real choice is not between conversation and adjudication. “The real choice is not between political dialogue and legal adjudication,” he said. “The two serve different Constitutional purposes.”

“India’s experience with the Cauvery dispute demonstrates that neither litigation alone nor politics alone offers a complete answer. Litigation provides certainty but not always cooperation; political negotiations encourage cooperation but cannot override legal rights.”

The only workable path, he said, is “a hybrid one: political dialogue for managing immediate crises, coupled with institutional decision-making for determining enduring rights and obligations”. That may ultimately be the measure of Vijay’s experiment.

If Vijay returns from Bengaluru with an immediate release of water, without compromising Tamil Nadu’s legal position on Mekedatu, his unconventional outreach will look less like naivety and more like political invention. If the talks merely reopen settled questions, critics will say he walked into a room his predecessors had learned to avoid.

However, a river is never only water. It is memory, cultivation, fear and the future arriving unevenly across geography. Vijay can begin a conversation. He cannot command the monsoon, erase history or replace institutions.

But in a federal democracy, sometimes the first responsibility of power is simply to sit across from the other side – while remembering that the river, and the law governing it, belong to more than the two men in the room.