The politics between Punjab and Haryana over sharing of river water has taken centre stage as, instead of sharing water with Haryana, the Punjab Assembly has directed the Punjab government not to allow anyone to construct the canal and asked it to send the bills of cost of water to Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi. The government has already denotified the land of the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) and given it to farmers. With Assembly elections due early next year, the issue is likely to emerge as a major poll plank for all the political parties.
The political equation has also changed in Haryana as Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar held a meeting on Thursday of all political leaders, including former CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda and Leader of Opposition, Abhay Singh Chautala from INLD, at the Haryana Niwas, Sector 3, in which they decided to meet to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Pranab Mukherjee, seeking their intervention to resolve the deadlock over the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal with Punjab.
However, the Akali Dal-BJP government in Punjab, in a bid to woo voters, held a special Assembly session on Wednesday, in which it passed two unanimous resolutions against the construction of the SYL canal and sharing “even a drop of river water” with Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi, in a move that the Akali Dal-BJP government described as the “final burial” of the contentious canal.
The Assembly was convened for a special one-day session following a Supreme Court ruling that declared as “unconstitutional” a 2004 state law that scrapped all water-sharing arrangements with neighbouring states, including Haryana. The first resolution that Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal moved directed the state government — CM, Cabinet ministers, all government officers and officials — not to “hand over land of Punjab to any agency” for the SYL canal construction and “not to allow anyone to work for the construction” of this canal. In the second resolution, the House directed the state government to demand “cost/royalty” payment from other states — Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi — for the river water supplied to them in the past five decades after Punjabi Suba was created on 1 November 1966. The resolutions were adopted in the absence of 42 Congress legislators, who resigned last week to protest the top court’s ruling.
At the heart of the water dispute is the 212-km-long SYL canal, meant to transfer water from the two rivers to Haryana. “I will rather shed every drop of my blood than allow even a single drop of water to flow out of my state in defiance of the riparian principle,” Badal said in the Assembly, reiterating that no water will be allowed to flow to Haryana.
“We will not implement the court order at any cost,” Badal said in the Assembly.
State Congress chief Amarinder Singh hit out at the Badal government’s “refusal” to acknowledge that the state had no surplus water.
Former Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda demanded the immediate imposition of President’s Rule in Punjab until the SYL canal is constructed.