A Vote for Water

Parched farmers will decide who will win in the Mysuru and Mandya regions of Karnataka

- Anisha Reddy

WEARING a green shawl on his right shoulder, Chandrashekar, a 60-year-old farmer leader from Karnataka’s Mandya district, arrived at the interview location in just about five minutes after a brief phone call. He stands under the shade of a large banyan tree, wiping the sweat off his forehead with the cloth. “I am never usually this free,” he says, catching his breath. Chandrashekar, like most farmers in the sugarcane bowl of the state, used to spend a good part of their afternoons on the field, growing bhatta (paddy), sugarcane and ragi. But in this scorching hot mid-April afternoon, farmers in Mandya find themselves idle. Their fields have run dry, and so have their main sources of income. A palpable sense of anger looms across the farming belt of Mysuru and Mandya, which are situated amid the tall pine trees and paddy fields in southern Karnataka. The region is also traditionally known to be the Vokkaliga heartland of the state. A predominantly rural community that is associated with farming, the Vokkaligas are key to any party’s electoral performance in southern Karnataka. In the months leading up to the Lok Sabha elections, the farmers here weren’t asking for a lot… they just wanted neeru (water). 

The Fight for Cauvery

The Cauvery river, which many consider as sacred in south India, rises in the Western Ghats at Talakaveri, flows across the Deccan plateau in south India through the states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry and then into the Bay of Bengal. The dispute over the river water dates back to the pre-independence era when the then princely states of Mysore (now Karnataka) and Madras (now Tamil Nadu) contended for control over the river’s waters.