CAUVERY CUTS THOUGH SLOGAN OF ONE NATION

Laws and courts have failed to solve the inter-state dispute for two centuries. It is easier for state politicians to take up positions, trickier for national leaders

- SUGATA SRINIVASARAJU

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.