The river Cauvery has yet again become a battlefield. The river as a battlefield without a terra firma to imagine is a kind of drowning metaphor. Two full days in the previous week was shutdown time in Karnataka. It was more a kind of self-flagellation exercise, a summoning of a default posturing tool, than anything that would lead to a constructive relief with regard to the sharing of the river water with Tamil Nadu.
The two days of bandhs were not meant to, and were unlikely to, change the opinion of either the Cauvery Water Management Authority or the Supreme Court. They had ordered Karnataka to release water even after the drought and distress argument was made.
The day after the second bandh, a taxi driver in Bengaluru who had suffered wage loss for two full days, asked in desperation: “This problem was there when I was born and will exist when my grandchildren are born, how can anybody solve it?” The taxi driver’s common sense was correct about both the larger aspect of the complex dispute that had a history of nearly 200 years, and at the micro level, where rhetoric and response have remained intransigent for decades.
In a hurry to create a flat, unitary slogan for nationalism, we seem to have forgotten the multitudes that make a nation. There are sub-nationalisms that are distinct from the currently popular variety of nationalism, and these sub-nationalisms too are constructed to fiercely guard a state’s territorial, linguistic and water interests. That has in fact become the cultural extension of the idea of federal autonomy. As a result, the parties that claim to be national may find it extremely difficult to get an entry point on the three aspects in the states.
We do not know what exactly the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress will say or do when it comes to inter-state water disputes, especially in cases where law or court judgements have never been accepted as a final solution—where emotion trumps reason. It is easier for the two main Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the All India Anna Dravida Kazhagam (AIADMK), and in Karnataka the Janata Dal Secular (JDS) to take a clearer position on these aspects. Their imagination need not be vast, visionary and amorphous, but specific and real. That is what is being heard in the last few weeks.
There has been a continuous demand for the Narendra Modi-led BJP government to sort this out, for the prime minister to intervene and mediate, but there is only silence. What happens when prime ministers get involved in inter-state water disputes is known from our recent past—PV Narasimha Rao, HD Deve Gowda and AB Vajpayee were put in a quandary and put to a severe test of patience and loyalties.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in the last couple of years may have been very vocal about India being a ‘union of states’ but still may not find it easy to intervene on the Cauvery issue. He has remained quiet on all wrenching federal issues. He may expect his party’s local units to respond with deliberate duality. Also, one does not know what Mallikarjun Kharge, the Congress’s national president from Karnataka, thinks of the distress situation. He certainly did not speak up in parliament nor has he made a statement outside. The regional parties are pushing the BJP government to intervene, and for the Congress to straighten its political ally in Tamil Nadu.
There was only one unusual thing this time as the Cauvery dispute erupted. BJP’s parliamentarian from Karnataka, Lahar Singh Siroya, went to meet MK Stalin, the Tamil Nadu chief minister. He pleaded unsuccessfully with Stalin to meet Siddaramaiah, his Karnataka counterpart, for a mediated distress settlement than an impersonal and long outing in the courts. He said he was a non-Kannadiga and a non-Tamilian and it gave him a unique vantage to make this non-partisan push in the name of a humanitarian crisis. He did not want to viewing it as a regional conflict. He argued that in the age of migration there cannot be a state-specific interest because Tamil and Kannada speakers are distributed across the border. He refused to mix politics and offered a more rational argument to make for his party and the Congress.
There is a new book that meticulously documents the colonial origins of the Cauvery dispute. The very title of the book by C Chandrashekar, a retired IPS officer, decolonises the river’s name by calling it Kaveri Dispute: A Historical Perspective. Although written from the point of view of the erstwhile Mysore’s historical disadvantage as a princely state against the Madras presidency under British rule, it endeavours to place the several attempts and agreements to harness the Cauvery water in a broad and fair context—right from 1794 when Tipu Sultan laid the foundation for a dam across the river. It thankfully escapes the sub-nationalist rhetoric we are familiar with in such writings, but hinges on archival study.
The little-known HD Griffin arbitration from 1913-14, which has all but disappeared from public memory, is an eye-opener in Chandrashekar’s book. It represented Mysore’s interests better but was rejected. It is forgotten between the more discussed 1892 and the 1924 agreements that have come to cast a long legal shadow on the Cauvery dispute in independent India. The book asks a series of rhetorical questions, which are extremely relevant. It asks when the British paramountcy lapsed after independence in 1947, why did the uneven agreements between Indian territories not lapse? It also wonders why the Mysore king did not raise this when the Government of India Act was passed in 1935 or when he signed the standstill agreement in 1947.
Sadly, the unevenness the British nurtured and hierarchies they created even in water sharing agreements, where princely Mysore as an upper riparian state could not do anything with Cauvery without the permission of Madras Presidency, remained central to the dispute even in free India and after the reorganisation of states. Anyway, the final verdict of water sharing in 2018 was accepted by both sides but the distress formula is not in place, and can never easily be in place. Sub-nationalist rhetoric will never allow the other’s distress to be bigger or genuine.
Sugata Srinivasaraju
Senior journalist and author of Strange Burdens: The Politics and Predicaments of Rahul Gandhi
(sugata@sugataraju.in)