Let the position be stated without hedging, because four decades of hedging is what has brought Punjab to where it stands. Not one cusec should go to Haryana beyond what it draws today. That drawal is a protected use and nothing more. It stands fixed by reference to the appointed day, 1 November 1966, and not to any later date of convenience. It falls proportionately as the river falls, and it falls alongside every other allocation rather than alongside Punjab’s alone. It is to be taken uniformly through the year, without the luxury of drawing freely in the filling season and pleading shortfall in the depletion season. What is not drawn in a year of plenty is gone, and gone physically rather than notionally: run past Madhopur down the Ravi and past Hussainiwala down the Sutlej, into the Chenab and out of the Republic; or evaporated off the surface of Gobind Sagar; or lost to seepage in a hundred kilometres of unlined channel; or drawn at Harike by a State that did want it that year. Water not taken is not water banked. It does not accumulate in some notional account to be encashed in a year of scarcity, because by then it is in Pakistan or in the air. And Punjab is to spend nothing of its own on the earthwork required to move it.
Four propositions. Applied to the arithmetic of 2026 and to the Tribunal’s own formula, they extinguish Haryana’s claim rather than merely reducing it.
The Appointed Day, and What It Appointed
Haryana did not exist before 1 November 1966. Whatever it holds, it holds as a successor to the undivided State, and the statute that created it divided the rights and liabilities of the old Punjab in relation to the Bhakra Nangal and Beas Projects as they stood on that day, not as notification, agreement or advocacy might later enlarge them.
What stood on that day goes back to the meeting convened on 29 January 1955 by Gulzari Lal Nanda, then the Union Minister holding the irrigation and power portfolio, at which the surplus Ravi–Beas waters were first parcelled out: 7.20 MAF to the undivided Punjab, 8.00 to Rajasthan, 0.65 to Jammu and Kashmir. The written plan that joint Punjab placed before that meeting, and on the faith of which the allocation was made, showed the south-eastern districts that are now Haryana drawing 0.62 MAF (0.32 through the Hansi Canal, 0.30 through the Bhakra Canal). Every other acre-foot in that 7.20 was earmarked for works in what is now Punjab: the Upper Bari Doab, the Sirhind Feeder, Shah Nehar, the Bet lands of the Ravi and Beas, the Eastern Canal, the Chakandher tract and the PEPSU area of the Bhakra command.
Chaudhary Lahri Singh, who asked for that 0.62, was neither an outsider to the tract nor a junior functionary at somebody else’s table. He was the Irrigation Minister of the undivided State of Punjab, and he was from Sonepat, a son of the very region that is now Haryana, holding the very portfolio in which the plan was framed, in a Cabinet headed by Bhim Sen Sachar. The submission showing 0.62 came from his own department, on the advice of engineers working to him. Had he asked for 3.50, the Centre would in all likelihood have allotted the undivided State 10.70 MAF and this entire history would read otherwise. He did not ask. And a successor State inherits the rights its predecessor actually held on the appointed day, not the rights the predecessor’s Irrigation Minister might, with seventy years of hindsight, be said to have undersold.
Haryana’s inherited entitlement is 0.62 MAF. Everything above it is an accretion, conferred by executive notification in 1976 and by an agreement of 1981, on hydrological assumptions that have since collapsed.
The Yamuna Had Already Done Its Work
Two objections arrive together here.
The first is that Punjab elsewhere accepts a figure of 1.62 MAF, and that a case resting on 0.62 and 1.62 at once rests on nothing. It does not. The two numbers measure different things. 0.62 is what Haryana inherited; 1.62 is what Haryana holds. The first is a right, fixed at the appointed day. The second is a drawal, accreted afterwards. Punjab does not seek to disturb possession; it denies that possession has ripened into title. And a defendant pleads in the alternative as a matter of ordinary practice: that the claimant has no inherited entitlement beyond 0.62; that in any event whatever it does have is already being delivered through existing channels; and that in any event its incremental claim does not exceed 0.9 MAF. Three defences, descending, each independently sufficient.
The figure 1.62 came from no tribunal and from no notification. The 1976 order gave Haryana 3.5 on paper. What 1.62 measures is the quantity the Bhakra Main Line and the Narwana Branch physically carry, a number produced by concrete rather than by law, and Haryana has spent four decades asking the Republic to treat a construction outcome as a constitutional entitlement.
The second objection is the one that moves people: that the south-eastern districts of the undivided State were poor relations, denied their due at the table in January 1955 by a government that looked north and west and never south. It is a serious charge, and the answer comes from Haryana’s own side of the argument.
Those districts were not neglected in 1955. They were already provided for, from a different river. The Western Jumna Canal Extension Projects had developed the utilisation of Yamuna waters across that tract in the pre-Partition era, long before reorganisation was contemplated, a point Haryana’s own commentators have made in print while arguing something else entirely. The 0.62 was an accurate engineering assessment of a region whose irrigation was substantially met from the east and which required only a marginal supplement from the west. Chaudhary Lahri Singh asked for 0.62 because 0.62 was what the tract needed once the Yamuna had done its work. He was the Irrigation Minister sitting at that table, he was from Sonepat, and he was right. Haryana’s own commentators call him an illustrious son of Haryana while faulting him for asking too little, conceding in the same sentence that the figure was fixed by one of their own, holding charge of the subject.
That the region’s requirements have since grown is true, and irrelevant. A growing need is a claim upon new water rather than upon somebody else’s existing share: fresh storage on the Ravi, the second Ravi–Beas link at Dharamkot which would capture the 0.58 MAF the Central Water Commission says still runs down to Pakistan, augmentation from the Yamuna, reuse, lining, and every other measure Haryana’s own budget already funds. Need generates a claim against the Union’s capital account. It does not retrospectively enlarge an inheritance.
Set the two figures side by side and the space between them becomes the plainest statement of Punjab’s case. Haryana inherited 0.62 MAF. It draws 1.62. It is already up by a full million acre-feet, obtained on the strength of instruments rather than of rights, and it now asks for a further 2.21 on top of that.
The Farman of 29 January 1955
Punjab’s own advocates blur a distinction here, and the blurring costs them.
The plan showing 0.62 MAF for the south-eastern districts was Punjab’s own. Punjab’s engineers prepared it between November 1954 and January 1955 at the Centre’s request, and it was submitted under the Irrigation Minister’s authority. Nobody extracted it. It was an honest assessment of what the tract could then use, and it stands.
What was extracted went to Rajasthan.
On the same day, 29 January 1955, a note issued from Pandit Nehru’s hand allocating 8 MAF of the Ravi–Beas surplus to a State through which neither river runs. It was marked secret. Secret from whom, the Jago Punjab Manch has asked in these pages: not from Pakistan, but from the people of a Punjab still bleeding from Partition. The Manch set the account out in The Tribune of 2 September 2026, and it was put on record earlier, in the same newspaper, in July 2025.
Four features of that instrument have gone largely unexamined.
Chaudhary Lehri Singh questioned its veracity in writing, and so, it is recorded, did the then Finance Minister. His letter has stood uncontroverted by the Government of India for seventy-one years.
He then declined to sign the minutes for seven months, and signed at last under protest, after pressure was applied. A minute signed under protest by a minister who has formally disputed its accuracy records a submission to superior force rather than a meeting of minds.
The note went before neither the Punjab Cabinet nor the Vidhan Sabha. An instrument disposing of more than half a State’s water, never laid before the government that owned it or the legislature that represented it.
And Clause 5 provided that the cost of the water would be worked out later. It never was. When the Centre issued the notification of 24 March 1976, it carried forward the clause allocating water to Rajasthan and left behind the clause requiring payment for it, quarrying the same document selectively twenty-one years later, in the middle of the Emergency. The 1981 agreement then compounded the difficulty by describing the decision of 1955 as an agreement, which on this record it was not. The United States Bureau of Reclamation, having studied the question for four years, had advised the Centre in 1954 against irrigating the Rajasthan desert at all and recommended using the water nearer the rivers. That advice was set aside.
All of this bears on Haryana, which was neither a party nor yet in existence, because Haryana’s entire claim descends from that instrument. The 3.50 MAF of 1976 and the 3.83 of 1987 are not free-standing entitlements; they are shares carved from a residue that the note of 29 January 1955 created by first removing 8 MAF. Every figure Haryana relies upon is downstream, in the legal sense as well as the hydrological one, of a note extracted under protest from a Punjab Irrigation Minister who was himself from Sonepat, never shown to a Cabinet, never laid before a legislature, and stripped of its only clause favourable to Punjab before being pressed into service.
A State does not acquire an unimpeachable title by inheriting a share of an impeachable one.