According to Tamil legend, the Cauvery River came into existence around 1800 years ago when the Chola king, Kanthaman, prayed to the great sage, Agasthya, that his realm might be filled with water. The sage answered the prayer by tilting his great pot, and its waters flowed from the highlands of what is now Karnataka all the way to the Bay of Bengal. The river became known as the ‘mother to the people’.
The river’s almost mythical status was hinted at by the renowned Tamil scholar, Dr Prema Nandakumar, who had cause to write, on 20 October 2002, that for Indians, ‘A river is more than just the waters that flow in it. Cauvery is a goddess.’ In its long history, the Cauvery has nurtured the kingdoms of the
Cholas, Cheras, Pandyas and Pallavas, leaving along its fertile banks a splendid architectural, spiritual and musical heritage. Today, the Cauvery still rises from the hills of Karnataka and empties into the Bay of Bengal after a journey of over 850 km. Along the way, it irrigates 453,400 hectares of agricultural land in the Mandya and Mysore districts of Karnataka before sustaining 918,000 hectares of rice paddies around Thanjavur in the state of Tamil Nadu.
But this mother/goddess is now the subject of bitter infighting among her children.
On 8 August 2002, the Cauvery Water Tribunal (an independent agency set up in 1990 to handle water disputes along the river) ordered the state of Karnataka to release the waters of the Cauvery to alleviate hardship being experienced downstream in Tamil Nadu, where the monsoon rains had not arrived. The tribunal’s ruling was followed by an identical Supreme Court edict on 3 September.
Karnataka stalled, playing a dangerous game of compliance and defiance. A poor local farmer named Guruswamy protested against the release of Cauvery waters to Tamil Nadu by jumping to his death in the Krishnarasagar dam in Mandya district. The following day, Karnataka’s Chief Minister, S.M. Krishna, suspended the release on the grounds that its own farmers needed the waters because the monsoon hadn’t fully arrived in Karnataka either.
Kannada (the indigenous language of Karnataka) film stars supported the chief minister’s stand, demanding that no water be released to Tamil Nadu. Their action prompted retaliatory fasts and protests by Tamil film stars in Chennai. A state-wide strike across Tamil Nadu was accompanied by inflammatory threats to cut electricity supplies from Tamil Nadu to its neighbour. In