Saturday, Sep 07, 2002
Saturday, Sep 07, 2002 |
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By Our Special Correspondent
In a letter to the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, Ms. Jayalalithaa said the Central Government's motives were suspect in convening the meeting on September 7 despite Tamil Nadu's objections. Pointing out that the Karnataka Chief Minister, S.M. Krishna, during the last meeting of the Cauvery River Authority on August 27, had insisted that he was not ready to discuss the issue of pro-rata distress sharing in that meeting and that any discussion on release of waters to Tamil Nadu could be held only after the end of September, Ms. Jayalalithaa said his "sudden desire" for an emergency meeting of the monitoring committee and the CRA "seems very suspicious, to put it mildly". The Supreme Court order asking Karnataka to release water had given a ray of hope to the Cauvery delta farmers, but Karnataka now wanted these emergency meetings. "There is a fear in the minds of the people of Tamil Nadu that the Government of India, which convened the meeting of the CRA only four times in four years, had rushed to convene an emergency meeting of the monitoring committee at the behest of Karnataka as a prelude to the CRA meeting only so as to nullify the relief given by the Supreme Court." Although the State Public Works Department Secretary informed the Government of India that it would not be possible for the Chief Secretary to attend the meeting at short notice, the member-secretary of the Cauvery Monitoring Committee wanted a duly-nominated representative of the Chief Secretary to be deputed to attend as it was an emergency meeting. In this context, Ms. Jayalalithaa recalled that when she wrote to Mr. Vajpayee asking for a meeting of the committee on August 23 last, the meeting was convened only on September 6. Since no solution was found to the problem, she asked the Prime Minister for a CRA meeting on September 14, but the meeting was held only on October 10, 2001. This year, she had written to Mr. Vajpayee on June 1 and June 11 for convening a CRA meeting, but these letters had met with no tangible response. She also personally took up the issue with him on June 12, but the CRA meeting was convened only on August 27 and that too only after a specific directive of the Supreme Court. Mr. Krishna, she said, had publicly proclaimed that he would bring pressure to bear on the Central Government to call for an emergency meeting of the CRA and that he would ensure that the meeting was held within a span of two or three days before the Prime Minister went abroad. "When the genuinely aggrieved State of Tamil Nadu was running from pillar to post trying to move the Government of India to convene meetings of the monitoring committee and the CRA, scant heed was paid to this State by the Government of India," she said. Despite the fact that an important Cabinet meeting was slated for September 7, which required the presence of the Chief Secretary, "Tamil Nadu is forced to attend this meeting of the monitoring committee.'' Tamil Nadu, she said, was attending out of the fear that making use of the provisions of the business rules of the committee, "a decision unfavourable to the State might be taken by the other member-States, which it might not be out of place to mention, come under the umbrella of the same political dispensation".
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