In April 1997, the attorney general requested the Supreme Court to end its hearings on the Cauvery saying the central government had decided to put in place a mechanism to implement the 1991 interim award of the Cauvery tribunal. In view of this pledge, the Supreme Court agreed to suspend its hearings. In August 1998, the Vajpayee government set up the Cauvery River Authority. There was no question of negotiating solutions; the solution was the interim award. And implementing that award was what the Authority was supposed to do. Vajpayee was hailed — among others by this paper — for his great act of statesmanship. In not a single year of the four that have gone by has the interim award been even remotely implemented. Indeed, in four long years, the Authority has met only thrice. The first time — November 1998 — Karnataka claimed it had flushed 16 tmc feet down the Cauvery in September. Tamil Nadu said only 8 tmc had been received in the Mettur Reservoir. In Parliament, a year and a half later, I asked the minister of water resources whether he had found the missing eight thousand million cubic feet (that is what tmc stands for). He confessed he had not even begun to look. So the Authority has no idea where this enormous quantity of water has disappeared between the top and the bottom of the Hogenakkal falls which divide Karnataka from Tamil Nadu! The second time the Authority met was in September 1999, conveniently after both states had gone to the polls for the mid-term Lok Sabha election. By then, the summer kuruvai crop in the Cauvery delta had already withered; so whatever the bone thrown to the Tamil dog, it was in any case too late. In July 2000, faced with intense pressure from its DMK ally at the Centre, Vajpayee persuaded Karnataka to give the Cauvery tap a tiny turn. Since then — two agonised years — the Authority has not met even once. What statesmanship! It is this column that has repeatedly urged the Tamil Nadu government to boycott this farcical Authority and return to the Supreme Court for justice. Therefore, this column can only welcome the Tamil Nadu chief minister’s decision of June 21, 2002 to not waste her time with Vajpayee’s good offices and to revive instead the suspended hearings in the Supreme Court. For the first time in history, the inflow at the Mettur Reservoir has been so low that even in August it has not proved possible to open the gates of the dam. Otherwise, the date of opening is invariably June 12 — and recognised as such by the Cauvery Tribunal. Now August is upon us and our near-octogenerian PM, nursing his copy of Time magazine, has not cared to visit the delta or even send his ministers to share the suffering of a blameless people. What can the delta conclude but that the Cauvery is not the Ganga, and so this Hindi-wallah PM could not care less? Is it statesmanship to have a state government go to the Supreme Court to complain that the central government has lied through its teeth to the highest judicial body in the land? The interim award is clear as crystal. Cauvery waters to the delta have been slashed to a third of the traditional flow on condition that two-third of the reduced annual flow be concentrated on that one-third of the year when the kuruvai crop is cultivated in the Cauvery delta (June-September). Could anything be more straightforward? True, the interim award was faulted on the valid ground that it did not provide for ‘‘distress sharing’’ in the event of a severe shortfall in precipitation during the south-west monsoon, as has occurred this year. The Cauvery River Authority could have been used to evolve an acceptable distress sharing formula. But nothing — absolutely nothing — was done to anticipate and provide for such a crisis. There is no ‘‘sharing’’ of distress; the distress in Karnataka is Nature-made; the distress in Tamil Nadu is made in Race Course Road. Is this responsible governance? I write this in the Thanjavur Fast Passenger as I return to Parliament from a weekend in my delta constituency. It was the weekend of Aadi Pathinettu (the eighteenth day of the month of Aadi), a great family festival in the Cauvery delta dating back thousands of years, a picnic for everyone, young and old, men, women and children. All go together to the banks of the overflowing Mother Cauvery to celebrate her bounty. The local papers this morning were plastered with colour photographs of families gathered at pathetic puddles in the middle of the Cauvery bed, mocked by the barren desert emptiness but trying desperately to retain the great cultural traditions of a great part of the Indian heritage. Where is Vajpayee’s vaunted ‘‘cultural nationalism’’? Does it extend to the Dravidian people? Not since the BJP’s marauding ancestors, the Aryan hordes, drove out the Dravidian people from the Indus Valley and into the forests of the Vindhyas and below, has the Dravidian people been treated as shabbily as this government of Aryavarta is now treating them. While Vajpayee and his cohorts give aid and comfort to Eelam-backers like Vaiko and his ministerial colleague, Kannappan, Jayalalithaa is trying to keep Tamil Nadu in the Indian Union, shutting its ears to the siren call of the LTTE’s Tamil Eelam. But over this weekend of Aadi Pathinettu, I have despaired. For my travels took me to the ancient temple at the village of Neikuppai built on the lip of a huge tank where the faithful used to bathe before turning to thank their gods within. On Aadi Pathinettu, the tank is completely dry. The ghat runs down forlorn to the dreary desert sands of a waterless waste. Not only an economy, an entire culture, an entire way of life is being laid waste. If the Cauvery problem is not solved, Tamil Nadu could go the way of Kashmir. Does Vajpayee wish that to be the monument to his indifference? Write to msaiyar@expressindia.com
