The people of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu may realise soon enough that there’s no simple solution to the sharing of Cauvery river waters, and violence over it only begets more violence. Relations between upper riparain entities, be they nations or states, and those lower down, who depend on fair sharing of precious water resources, has historically been difficult. An absolute priority in the wake of the intensifying Cauvery row violence on Monday is to tampen down the emotive responses of protesters, and then tackle the rising chauvinism in the long term. The row over the river is over a century old and sporadic incidents of violence only lead to vitiating the atmosphere in both states. The blame game over where the chain of violence began is irrelevant compared to the damage to normal life that is wrought, particularly in Karnataka, whose capital Bengaluru is now an globally-branded IT city that must work smoothly 24x7 to be the world’s efficient back office.
The rise of chauvinism isn’t a new story either. While there has been a worrying rightist element to the phenomenon in Karnataka in the past few decades, Tamil Nadu has suffered in the last five decades from the pull of regional Dravidian forces. The point is lumpen elements of fringe political outfits like Vatal Nagaraj’s Kannada Chalavali Vatal Paksha and Thanthai Periyar Dravidar Kazagam can flourish only by stoking the kind of trouble we now see in both states, where symbols of the people of a particular state are being targeted. Such groups from the political fringes can’t be allowed to hijack the rule of law. The rulers must step up and take responsibility for reining in troublemakers. It is up to the highest law officers of each government to first restore normalcy as leaders try to tackle long-standing issues like chauvinism and its effect on harmony between the states.
The apportioning of river waters has been made over to a Centrally-founded authority after various significant Supreme Court rulings over the past decade. As the court order pointed out, while amending its earlier ruling on the quantum of water release, Karnataka cannot orchestrate a “we were robbed” campaign to obfuscate straightforward legal issues. The tone and tenor of its application for relief and the tendency to postulate the law and order situation as a factor in the obeying of court diktats has been deprecated by the judges, and quite rightly so. That Karnataka has ongoing as well as incipient water sharing problems with all its neighbours also point to the huge difficulties of managing finite resources. It is best that the compendium of issues is left to a Central authority to deal with, lest people are permanently scarred by the tensions over water.
