Centre Shapes New Deal On Cauvery

The Centre yesterday hammered out a package on the vexed Cauvery water dispute between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, which it hoped would satisfy both. AIADMK leader J Jayalalitha has threatened to withdraw the support of her block of MPs if adequate water is not released to Tamil Nadu.

After two meetings along with the chief ministers of Kerala and Pondicherry yesterday, chaired by Prime Minister AB Vajpayee, both the disputant chief ministers took the proposal back to discuss it with experts before resuming the meeting today. The package deals with how the Cauvery tribunal's interim award should be implemented and not just the release of a certain amount of water for this season, according to senior officials.

 

The Vajpayee government was said to have made a deal with both chief ministers that their respective parties would bail out his government in any vote of confidence that might still be caused by the AIADMK on this issue. The DMK and the Janata Dal have six members each in the Lok Sabha.

On her primary demand for the dismissal of the Tamil Nadu government, a cabinet minister said one view in the government was that the centre should call Jayalalitha's bluff since an alternate government, dependent on Left support, would be even less likely to comply.

A senior Congress leader, however, claimed that Jayalalitha had now said that she viewed the BJP as a bigger enemy than the DMK. Senior Congress leaders have been agog at the statement of their party chief, Sonia Gandhi, on Tuesday that they must be ready to shoulder responsibility at any time. The stage is being set for a change of guard at the centre relatively soon, they say.

Along with the threatening sounds from various coalition partners, including the Akali Dal yesterday on the Uttarakhand issue, the Cauvery water issue seemed the most potent destabilising factor yesterday _ after the Vajpayee government got past the possibility that its Action Taken Report on the Jain Commission Report could become an instrument to bring it down. The debate on the issue ended relatively tamely in the Lok Sabha just before the end of the budget session yesterday afternoon.

Home Minister LK Advani had invited a half-dozen Congress leaders to his chamber in Parliament four times since Kapil Sibal opened the debate in the Rajya Sabha for the Congress.

Sibal stated that his party rejected the ATR but Advani convinced the Congress leaders that he was willing to do whatever they wanted him to on this issue and that his proposal for a monitoring agency within the Central Bureau of Investigation was not meant to shelve the matter.