Letter from Chennai: Of political minuets and water wars ...

Tamil Nadu's political heavyweights maybe devising new alliances this week, with the former chief minister and head of the opposition Dravida Munnetra Kazhgam (DMK) M. Karunanidhi setting the pace by driving down to Vellore to meet Marumalrachi DMK leader Vaiko in jail.

On Thursday it was Defence Minister George Fernandes' turn. Vajpayee's trouble-shooter had a 40-minute meeting at the state secretariat with Chief Minister Jayalalithaa.

And on Friday, Union Home Minister I.D. Swamy had a half an hour meeting with her.

So far as Karunanidhi's meeting with Vaiko was concerned, the Kalaignar (as Karunanidhi is called) dismissed any political implications. He said that it was only an indication of a "brotherly relationship".

Members in both the parties are thoroughly confused. They are not prepared to buy the "courtesy call" explanation.

The Jayalalithaa-Fernandes meeting has set tongues wagging. Neither gave any hint of what they had talked about. More significantly, Fernandes who often meets Karunanidhi during his trips to Chennai, seemed to avoid him.

While I.D. Swamy dropped in on Jayalalithaa on Friday at the Secretariat, he too avoided any meeting with NDA ally Karunanidhi. One explanation is that Swamy talked about the crisis in the Tamil Nadu-Karnataka Special Task Force set up to nab Veerappan.

The meetings suggest new political alignments. But then Jayalalithaa has, in various ways, been trying to mend her relations with the BJP.

Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy who is carrying on a vitriolic campaign against Congress President Sonia Gandhi, feels that the AIADMK might support a move in the House to indict Sonia for allegedly giving wrong information to the House. (Swamy has accused Sonia of having wrongly given her name - originally Antonia Maino - and claiming a diploma from Cambridge University and so on.)

BJP leaders including its President Venkiah Naidu, former president Jana Krishna-murthy and Arun Jaitley, have supported her Anti Religious (Forcible) Conversions Bill and asked other states to emulate her.

On the other hand the minority groups along with the Congress have joined forces to oppose the Bill. The DMK, which has fallen out with the State unit of the BJP, is backing this opposition.

The DMK has further come out openly against the Prevention of Terrorism Bill, particularly after the incarceration of Vaiko.

Jayalalithaa's AIADMK which supported POTA in Parliament still swears by it against allegations that in the arrest of Vaiko, POTA had been grossly misused. Karunanidhi may possibly be enticing the MDMK to come out of the NDA, break with the 'Hindu' BJP and form a new front.

While this political minuet is going on, and general elections still a possibility, Jayalalithaa is trying to get as much financial aid as she can from the Centre to bail the State out of its current crisis. It is in this situation that there is talk of an alternative to the state's dependence on the doubtful supplies of water from Karnataka.

The National Water Develo-pment Agency (NWDA) has a variation on the theme of linking northern and southern rivers of India. It is preparing a feasibility report for interlinking the southern rivers, Mahanadi, Godavari, Krishna, Periyar and Cauvery.

This is projected to cost somewhere around $500 billion. The study for the Andhra Pradesh section has been completed.

Along with this the NWDA is also preparing the Himalayan rivers interlinking report. It is a regional programme involving Nepal and Bhutan. It provides for constructuion of storage reservoirs across the Ganga and Brahmaputra in India and Nepal and Bhutan.

It is proposed to link the two rivers. The cost is another mind boggling $1,000 billion.