Even for those skeptical of the Centre’s intentions in the dispute between Chhattisgarh and Odisha over sharing of Mahanadi water from the very beginning, the affidavit filed by it in the Supreme Court today flatly refusing to form the much awaited and much delayed tribunal on Mahanadi came as a bolt from the blue. After all, it had made a solemn commitment to the apex court only on October 9 this year that it would form the tribunal by November 19. The deadline came and went without the Centre acting on its commitment.
The reason cited by the Centre while declining to form the tribunal has to be taken with a bagful of salt. The tribunal cannot be formed since the Odisha government had not furnished the required ‘facts and figures’, counsel for the Union government Wasim A. Kadri told the media. The question that inevitably follows is: was the Centre not aware of this when it made the commitment on October 9? If it was, why did it not say so then? It does not take rocket science to understand that the specious excuse has been cooked up to wriggle out of its commitment to the Supreme Court. One can only hope that the apex court will see through this unabashed act of partisanship and ask it to form the tribunal. Four months earlier, on July 25, 2017 to be precise, the Centre had told the apex court that the draft of the tribunal was being prepared.
It is also clear that the counsel’s contention that the dispute can be solved through talks between the two states is an afterthought that amounts to flogging a dead horse. That the row cannot be solved through talks was made abundantly clear a year back when the Odisha government filed the complaint petition in the Union Ministry of Water Resources asking for formation of a tribunal. This was after a meeting between the chief secretaries of the two states, followed by a tripartite meeting brokered by the MWR that was attended by the Chief Ministers of the two states, failed to arrive at any consensus on the issue. Any hopes of a negotiated settlement were put to rest when the Odisha government rejected the unilateral formation of a joint committee by the Centre and skipped the two meetings convened in March and May this year.
It is not as if the Centre was not aware of the fact that negotiations had reached a dead end. On August 1 this year, Union Minister of state for Water Resources Sanjeev Kumar Balyan had told the Rajya Sabha that the Centre was in the process of forming a tribunal since it was convinced that the negotiations had failed. The revival of the negotiation option at this stage is thus a desperate exercise in obfuscation on the part of the Centre with the sole objective of delaying things.
In hindsight, it does not seem all that far-fetched to surmise that the idea of a ‘permanent tribunal’ was floated by the Centre primarily as a ploy to avoid having to constitute the tribunal on Mahanadi. After the Centre filed the affidavit in the Supreme Court today, it is also clear that Petroleum minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s assertion in December last year that the Mahanadi dispute would be dealt with by a ‘single tribunal’ to be formed under the existing system was nothing but a face saving exercise.
The least the Centre could have done to prove its credentials as an honest broker in the Mahanadi dispute was a direction to the Chhattisgarh government to stop all construction work on barrages on Mahanadi pending a settlement of the vexed issue – something that the Odisha government has been demanding since the very beginning and the Union and Chhattisgarh governments have resisted till the very end.
BJD leader and spokesperson Pratap Keshari Deb may well have a point when he, in his reaction to today’s affidavit, sought to link it to the Assembly elections in Chhattisgarh in the middle of next year. The BJP led Modi government indeed looks determined to help Raman Singh win a fourth consecutive term in office. But in the process, it is unwittingly ruining whatever little chance it had of coming to power in Odisha – Mission 120 be damned! May be it has already realized it doesn’t stand a chance against the Naveen Patnaik juggernaut and hence feels that backing Chhattisgarh would be a better bet!
The lengths – and depths - to which the state government went to foil the farmers’ rally proposed to be held in Bhubaneswar today by the Navnirman Krushak Sangha (NKS) make one wonder if it was really worth the trouble. The heavens would not have fallen if the farmers had been allowed to hold their rally, scheduled to begin at the Hi-Tech Square on the outskirts of the city and culminate in front of the state Assembly. After all, it is rally season in the capital city and block grant teachers and Gana Sikshaks did hold their demonstrations on Monday and Tuesday respectively, didn’t they?
From Bolangir to Keonjhar and from Puri to Koraput, it seemed as if the state police had just one thing to do since yesterday: stopping farmers converging on the capital for today’s rally in their tracks. Thousands of farmers coming to the rally from all over the state were offloaded from trains at the Cuttack and Bhubaneswar railway stations. The commissionerate police actually got into the act even earlier – on Monday, to be precise – when it first detained and then arrested Akshaya Kumar, the convenor of the Sangha and Sheshdeb Nanda, his close associate. The commissioner’s explanation that the two were arrested on the basis of the warrants pending against them is laughable to say the least. If that was the case, one wonders what prevented the police from arresting them earlier.
Commissionerate police followed up the arrests with the arrest of Soumya Ranjan Patnaik, the chief advisor to the Sangha, and withdrawal of the permission for the rally that had already been given. Every vehicle entering the capital city was frisked since yesterday to ensure the farmers don’t enter the city. With an unprecedented 50 platoons of forces deployed to ‘maintain law and order,’ Bhubaneswar appeared to be a garrison city on Wednesday. Such arrangements were not seen even during BJP President Amit Shah’ rally earlier this month which was, by all accounts, a much bigger affair than the Sangha could have mobilised.
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It certainly appeared that the extraordinary police bandobast had more to do with the Sangha’s past record than any realistic assessment of the security threat. It was if the Sangha was being punished for the ‘audacity’ of a few of its members, who had dared to block the Chief Minister’s cavalcade while he was on his way to the secretariat on December 24, 2013, forcing him to take a detour and enter his workplace through the back door.
If the police, clearly acting as per the orders of its political masters, made a hash of security arrangements, the ruling party compounded the folly by shamelessly defending the police action. While Agriculture Minister Pradeep Maharathy came up with the astounding claim that he was ‘not aware’ of the demands of the Sangha, BJD chief whip Ananta Das made no effort to conceal his utter contempt for the organisation. Unable to counter the spirited attack by the Opposition in the House, the treasury benches could do no more than pounce on the term ‘Alsatian dog’ used by Leader of Opposition Naransingha Mishra to describe the police.
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The unprecedented crackdown on farmers is symptomatic of the gross indifference and worse towards the community by the industry-obsessed Naveen Patnaik government. A separate budget for Agriculture and four Krishi Karman awards in the last five years (a case of coming third in a three-horse race) notwithstanding, the apathy of the government has been in ample evidence in the past. The nonchalance with which it brushed aside the suicide by over a hundred farmers last year - attributing them to everything from ‘family quarrel’ to ‘alcoholism’ – and its failure to pay the bonus of Rs 100 per quintal to the drought affected farmers announced by the Chief Minister at the Bargarh last year till date are entirely in sync with its utter apathy for farmers, who even now constitute nearly 60% of the state’s population.
It remains to be seen if the BJD will have to pay electorally in the panchayat polls for its indifference as Sangha leaders have said it would. If the farmers of the state make good their threat, they would be doing themselves a great service because it is the only language that the ruling party understands.