This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Scattered tyres, set alight, had already shut the road back into Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) when Javed Parvesh tried to return on Monday, after a morning at the Cauvery river with his son. Angry crowds were now saying they would die for the same waters in which the pair had been rafting. “We will give blood, but not Cauvery,” their banners read.



One man was dead and buildings and buses across Bengaluru had been torched and looted by the time a curfew calmed southern India’s largest city on Tuesday.

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The preceding days had seen protests across Karnataka over a supreme court decision ordering the state to release a greater share of the river into neighbouring Tamil Nadu.

Riots erupted on Monday in Bengaluru, aimed largely at Tamils, their businesses and Tamil Nadu-registered vehicles.

“A huge mob was moving around the city holding the Karnataka flag and stopping traffic,” said Parvesh, a journalist from Kerala holidaying in Bengaluru. “I saw at least two or three trucks from Tamil Nadu on fire.”



KPN Travels, one of the largest bus companies in south India, and Tamil-owned, had 40 of its fleet vandalised or torched. “People were throwing things at the bus, breaking windows,” said the company’s general manager, who declined to be named.

“Eight employees have been injured. The cost is very high. It’s 40 lakh rupees [£45,000] per bus, and it’s 40 buses, so you do the calculation. A lot of buses, lorries and other things owned by Tamils have been attacked. This was even though all vehicles are registered in Karnataka and we are paying tax there,” he said. “It is a great shock for us.”

Colleges and businesses in the technology hub, including Amazon and its local competitor Flipkart, were also disrupted in the day-long violence that led to 350 arrests.

Karnataka is suffering a drought that its chief minister, Siddaramaiah, has described as the severest in 42 years. Three seasons of poor monsoon rain have seen farmer suicides in the state spike to more than 1,300 last year, from 321 the year before.

Conditions are only slightly better in Tamil Nadu, where farmers have begged the government to declare the state “drought-hit” and begin distributing relief.

A tribunal oversees the distribution of water from the Cauvery basin, which traverses both states and parts of Kerala and Puducherry (formerly Pondicherry). This month the supreme court ruled the Karnataka government had been hoarding its supply, and ordered it to release 15,000 cusecs (cubic feet per second) daily into Tamil Nadu.

The two states have bickered for more than a century over how to share Cauvery waters, drawing regular intervention from the supreme court and national government. Eighteen people were killed in anti-Tamil riots after a similar court order in 1991, according to official figures.

Monday’s violence was fuelled by reports that a petrol bomb had been hurled at a hotel in Chennai, the Tamil Nadu capital, owned by a Kannadigas – the Indian cultural group that originates in the Karnataka area. Videos apparently showing pro-Kannadiga groups harassing Tamils, and vice versa, had also been circulating on social media and were picked up by TV stations in both states.

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Extra police were posted at the states’ border on Monday and cars bearing Tamil Nadu number plates were denied entry into Karnataka for their own safety.

There have been regular predictions that “water wars” between Asian states will be a major security threat to the continent in the coming decades, particularly over the Brahmaputra river that cuts through Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and China.

But intra-state water disputes are also a growing problem in India, where the per capita water supply has slipped to 1,469 cubic metres, well below the 1,700 cubic-metre level (pdf) that qualifies a country as “water stressed”.

“Water availability has already [dropped] below crisis levels,” Shashi Shekhar, the secretary of the Indian water ministry, said on Tuesday.



Research published in February estimated 1 billion Indians faced water scarcity for at least a month each year, and for 180 million it was a year-round problem.

Increased urbanisation, population growth and unpredictable weather patterns linked to climate change all played their role, but India must also change the way it uses its dwindling supply of the resource, Shekhar said.

“India is one of the most inefficient users of water in the world. For every one unit of production, whether it be agricultural or industrial, instead of using one unit of water, we’re using three,” he said.

Some states had also chased commercial opportunities in crops that were inappropriate for their climates. “For example, Punjab was always a maize state, Karnataka was always a millet state. But over the period of time they’ve switched to paddy and sugar cane, which consume very high quantities of water,” Shekhar added.

“Water availability is dictated by nature. You have to learn to live within those terms, because you can’t just generate more water. If we keep indulging in profligacy, as we do, then this kind of violence, what we have seen in [Bengaluru], will keep happening all over the place.”

