The Hindu : The Cauvery dispute

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Oct 03, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

The Cauvery dispute

By Supriya RoyChowdhury

Precisely because the concept of mutuality has been lost from the public domain over this issue, the Tribunal's much-awaited decision may have little positive impact.

THE SHARING of river waters across political boundaries is an institutionalised practice in many contexts. There are many examples of settlement of river disputes with continuing arrangements for international cooperation. In India, the Indus Basin Treaty with Pakistan, signed in 1961, and the Indo-Bangladesh Joint Rivers Commission, which generated an Agreement in 1977, periodically reviewed, for sharing of the Ganga waters, stand as testimonies to successful international cooperation on water sharing. Within India, 16 of the 18 major river basins cover two or more States. Conflicts over water sharing have been settled through negotiations, and States have also collaborated in developing projects on inter-State waters, such as the Bhakra Nangal, the Damodar Valley, the Tungabhadra and many other projects.

The continuing Cauvery river waters dispute between the States of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, provides a window on how in specific contexts institutional dysfunction and the hardening of regional identities can prevent the emergence of workable compromise formulae, which, after all, constitute the backbone of collective living. In the present scenario of escalating tensions, it is too easy to take stubborn postures, underlined by regional loyalties and driven by the threat of economic hardship. It is also easy to lose sight of the fact that but for the political boundary that divides the two States — which is after all a political construct — the issues are essentially human, common and universal: the universal human need of farmers for water from a river that is flowing through their lands, to nourish their crops. But this universal dimension of the problem is lost sight of in the entirely particularistic paradigm within which the Cauvery waters dispute has been framed.

While the present drought has underlined the escalation of the crisis, the Cauvery dispute is characterised primarily by the unwillingness of the parties concerned to negotiate over conflicting interests, and to adhere to institutional mechanisms and decisions. Thus, for example, the failure of years of bilateral negotiations between the two States led to the creation of the Cauvery Tribunal in 1990, which after 12 years is now shortly expected to provide an adjudication of the dispute. However, the events following the Tribunal's Interim Order (IO) of 1991 provide little scope for optimism that the final order, when it emerges, would provide a definitive resolution of the problem. The Interim Order that Karnataka should annually release 205 tmcft of water to Tamil Nadu was perceived as highly unfair by many sections of the population in Karnataka, and the resulting bitterness between the two States which erupted into violent and destructive confrontations is history.

The following years of Karnataka's non-compliance with the IO could be tided over only because of good monsoons, but in 1995-96 Tamil Nadu appealed to the Supreme Court, for an immediate release of 30 tmcft by Karnataka. The Supreme Court referred Tamil Nadu to the Tribunal, but when the Tribunal's directive to Karnataka to release 11 tmcft of water went unheeded, Tamil Nadu went back to the Supreme Court. The Court then directed the Prime Minister to evolve a consensus solution, or to come up with a decision of his own. The then Prime Minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, ordered Karnataka to release six tmcft of water, which was complied with. This was followed by the formation of the Cauvery River Authority (CRA), a political body designed to oversee the implementation of the IO, and the Cauvery Monitoring Committee (CMC). However, no substantive resolution of Tamil Nadu's grievances could be arrived at through these structures.

Thus it is that the dispute has gone back and forth between different governmental agencies, in a manner of ad hocism par excellence, underlined by the inability of the relevant agencies to evolve acceptable compromise solutions and by the all-too-known Indian style of quiet non-compliance. The current crisis has followed this established pattern. As the drought situation in the current year began to close in, the inadequacy of the existing institutional mechanisms to address the problem surfaced sharply. In response to an appeal by Tamil Nadu in June this year, the Supreme Court on August 3 directed the release of 1.25 tmcft of water per day to Tamil Nadu. The Karnataka Chief Minister, in principle, accepted the Order, but amidst gathering clouds of popular protest in his State against the idea of releasing waters. It was in this context, that the CRA in a hurriedly convened meeting on September 7 issued an order for release of 0.8 tmcft of water per day. This reduced apportionment, which superseded the earlier Supreme Court order, came notwithstanding stiff opposition by the Tamil Nadu Government, and against the backdrop of Jayalalithaa's sustained criticism of the CRA's partial role, and her recent walkout of a CRA meeting. The Cauvery Monitoring Committee, which arrived on a fact-finding mission on September 24, was refused permission by the Tamil Nadu Government to inspect the Mettur dam and delta region on the ground that the matter is before the Supreme Court. Subsequently, a Central team was given permission to inspect the dam only after the Court gave a directive to that effect.

This impasse at the institutional level has now become overshadowed by an overwhelming upsurge of farmers' protests in Karnataka. As the flow of water to the Mettur reservoir from the Kabini began, thousands of farmers gathered to stop the release, the protests culminating in the grotesque death of a farmer who along with some others had thrown himself into the Kabini in an ultimate gesture of defiance. The support being offered to this movement by urban groups such as the Karnataka Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industries, and more recently by the film industry as well as by sections of academics underlines the regional colour being imparted to the struggle. And yet, the struggle, in essence, remains one of livelihood of Karnataka's farmers who, in substantive terms, may have more in common with fellow farmers in Tamil Nadu than with members of industry or film stars in their own State.

The question of livelihoods is critical, and on both sides there is a justifiable sense of acute threat, given the loss of monsoon crops this year. Economic liberalisation has created a situation where small and marginal farmers are already on the edge of distress, testified to by the large numbers of farmers' suicides in States such as Karnataka and Kerala. Falling prices of agricultural products as a result of import liberalisation, the declining effectiveness of the public distribution system, rising input costs, and reduced public spending on social sectors have all reduced the peasants' sustaining capacity in a bad year. Unfortunately, the current debate over water has lost sight of these larger issues underpinning farmers' distress.

In such a situation, however, it is not difficult to frame farmers' hardships in non-negotiable, zero sum game terms, nor to give it a regional colour. In that sense, there is really no fundamental difference between the frenzy of popular protests in certain districts of Karnataka, and Ms. Jayalalithaa's political intransigence expressed in walkouts from the negotiating fora, her calls for dismissal of the S. M. Krishna Government and so on. Each of these domains speaks of a failure to recognise that distress sharing means just that, and not merely reducing one's own distress. The failure of bilateral negotiations, predicated on the incapacity to adjust one's interests, had led to the formation of the Tribunal. But, precisely because the concept of mutuality has been lost from the public domain over this issue, the Tribunal's much-awaited decision may have little positive impact, realistically speaking.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Opinion

Stories in this Section

A problematic phase

One-off phenomenon

The Cauvery dispute

Leadership in times of terror

Make farming sustainable, equitable

Speaking out of turn

A case of two legitimacies

Talk with Kashmiris

Saving the innocent

Tough laws nedded

Rectify the imbalance

Education & Industry