Saturday, Oct 12, 2002
Saturday, Oct 12, 2002 |
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Tamil Nadu
By J. Venkatesan
A three-Judge Bench, comprising Justice V.N. Khare, Justice Arijit Pasayat and Justice S.B. Sinha, which also issued notice to the Karnataka Water Resources Minister, H.K. Patil, and the State Chief Secretary, A. Ravindra, directed all of them to file their response on or before October 22. The Bench, however, exempted them from personal appearance for now. The Bench directed the listing of the second contempt petition for further hearing on October 24 along with the earlier petition against Mr. Krishna and four others for disobeying the September 3 order of the court (directing the release of 1.25 tmcft of water daily) and the directive of the Cauvery River Authority issued on September 8 to release 9,000 cusecs of water a day. Senior counsel for Tamil Nadu K.K. Venugopal submitted that not a single drop of water had been released by Karnataka after the October 4 order was passed. He said Karnataka's game plan was to divert and utilise the waters to its six lakh acres of land so that Tamil Nadu would become totally dependent on it for food. Karnataka was also consistently defying the orders of the court, the CRA and the Cauvery Tribunal and releasing only the "overflows.'' "Do they want something serious to happen in Tamil Nadu? Do they want balkanisation of States,'' counsel asked and accused Karnataka of adopting a stand of "your farmers and my farmers.'' Tamil Nadu had suffered a loss of about Rs. 2,930 crores as the entire `kuruvai' crop had been lost and `samba' would also suffer the same fate. In its October 8 petition, Tamil Nadu had said that the gross and aggravated contempt committed by Karnataka not only undermined the high prestige and dignity of the court but was also evidence of a serious breakdown of the constitutional machinery in the State. Under Article 262, Inter-State river waters were a national resource to be shared among the States through which they flowed. An upper riparian State could not lay claim to all the waters for its own people to the exclusion of the needs of the people of the lower riparian State. "Yet that is exactly the approach taken by Karnataka,'' the petition said. "Not only are they prepared to ignore the orders of the CRA chaired by no less a constitutional authority than the Prime Minister, they have shown that they are willing to commit even gross and aggravated contempt of the orders of the apex court. Such disobedience amounted to constitutional anarchy insofar as it endangers the rule of law and the quasi-federal structure that underpin our constitutional scheme,'' the petition said. The petition further said: "It is unfortunate that the Chief Minister of a State should embark upon a `padayatra' obviously to heighten the resistance of the farmers with a view to ensuring that the implementation of the orders of the apex court would be resisted'' and sought to punish him for contempt of court. The petition also sought a direction to the Centre to ensure implementation of the orders, including by issuing appropriate directions under Article 256 of the Constitution.
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