Punjab Outlook

When Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann came out of the Northern Zonal Council meeting and bluntly declared that Punjab has no surplus water to give, adding that instead of the Sutlej–Yamuna Link (SYL) canal the country should be talking about a Yamuna–Sutlej Link (YSL) to bring Yamuna waters into Punjab, many dismissed it as mere political rhetoric. Topographically and hydraulically, such a canal would indeed face enormous challenges. But beneath the Punjab CM’s articulation lies a hard political and constitutional truth: for seven decades, successive central governments have systematically denied Punjab its rightful place in the Yamuna story.

This is not merely a technical dispute about gradients and canal design. It is about the erasure of a historical entitlement and the selective, even partial, application of internationally accepted riparian principles to Punjab’s detriment—beginning from Independence itself, well before the Indus Waters Treaty was inked with Pakistan in 1960. For decades, Punjab has been treated as a state from which water can be extracted, but to which no corresponding rights need be conceded. CM Mann’s intervention, precisely because it is bold and uncomfortable, forces the country to confront an injustice it has long preferred not to acknowledge.

II. The 1954 Agreement: A Forgotten Foundation
At the heart of this injustice lies the largely forgotten 1954 agreement between undivided Punjab and Uttar Pradesh on the distribution of Yamuna waters. That accord gave undivided Punjab two-thirds of the Yamuna’s supplies at Tajewala – an enormous share by any standard. It was a formal inter-state agreement, not a casual administrative understanding; it was never expressly rescinded, annulled, or declared void. It embodied a recognition that Punjab, as it then existed, was a Yamuna basin and riparian state with a major stake in the river.

III. Reorganisation Without Justice: The 1966 Shift
Then came the Punjab Reorganisation Act, 1966. Haryana was carved out, Himachal Pradesh’s boundaries shifted, Chandigarh was separated, and the river geography of “Punjab” was legally redrawn. The Act, however, did not wipe out past rights. On the contrary, Section 78 made clear that the rights and liabilities of undivided Punjab in respect of river waters and projects would devolve upon the successor states. That very logic was later invoked to justify Haryana’s claim on Ravi–Beas waters, even though those rivers no longer flow through Haryana’s territory. The successor-state doctrine became the legal bridge across which Haryana walked into Punjab’s river system.

But when Punjab attempted to walk across the same bridge toward the Yamuna, the Central Government quietly pulled the planks away. The 1994 Memorandum of Understanding on the sharing of Yamuna waters in the Upper Yamuna basin – signed by Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and the National Capital Territory of Delhi, and later extended to Uttarakhand – simply left Punjab out. Not as a marginal player, not as a junior partner, not even as an observer. Out altogether.

IV. The Fallacy of “Non-Riparian Punjab”
The formal justification was deceptively simple: after 1966, the Yamuna does not flow through Punjab, therefore Punjab is not a Yamuna basin state. That argument is, at best, an extremely narrow reading of hydrology and, at worst, a convenient fiction. River basins are defined by catchments, not by where the main channel happens to run along a political boundary. The Yamuna–Sutlej interfluve extends into eastern Punjab; parts of the Kagar belt and beyond are hydrologically linked to the Yamuna system. Even the Government of India’s own Irrigation Commission in 1972 recognized that post-1966 Punjab still lay, in part, within the Yamuna basin.

More fundamentally, if the successor-state logic is good enough to give Haryana a share in the Ravi and Beas – rivers it is not riparian to – why does that same principle magically lose force when it comes to Punjab’s pre-1966 share in the Yamuna? If Haryana can invoke pre-reorganisation status to claim Punjab’s eastern rivers through the SYL, on what moral or constitutional basis is Punjab barred from invoking pre-reorganisation status to claim a seat at the Yamuna table? The principle is being applied not consistently, but selectively, depending on who the beneficiary is.

V. Bhagwant Mann’s Counter-Claim: Turning the Debate Around
This is the asymmetry that Bhagwant Mann has, perhaps more clearly than any recent Punjab Chief Minister, chosen to highlight. His suggestion to convert the SYL into a YSL canal is not, in its essence, an engineering blueprint; it is a political and constitutional counter-claim. It says: if canals can be built to carry Punjab’s waters out to meet others’ entitlements, why is it inconceivable that infrastructure should be imagined to bring Yamuna waters into Punjab under its own historical entitlement? It turns the debate from “Why won’t Punjab share?” to “Why was Punjab never allowed to claim?”

That shift in framing is not a minor rhetorical flourish; it marks a clear break from the cautious, almost apologetic posture that characterised the Badal era. To be sure, Parkash Singh Badal and his government did oppose the SYL. The Punjab Termination of Agreements Act, 2004—piloted by Captain Amarinder Singh—was more than a symbolic gesture and did, in fact, buy the state valuable time until 2016. But once the Supreme Court struck down that Act as unconstitutional in November 2016, the Badal dispensation slipped into a defensive crouch.

It was left to the author, then serving as Financial Commissioner (Revenue), to undertake the risky but necessary step of transferring the SYL canal lands to their original owners over a single long weekend, through over 4000 mutations (intqals)—acting on the basis of a Cabinet executive notification, even as Haryana’s application was pending before the Supreme Court, where a status quo order was arguably still operative (my video in Punjabi)¹. Beyond that episode, however, the government largely went through the motions in court and in official forums, never mounting a sustained or aggressive challenge to the deeper injustice embedded in the broader water architecture—particularly the Yamuna arrangements that disregarded Punjab’s 1954 entitlement. Before it was voted out in 2017, the Shiromani Akali Dal had already begun losing political ground, and the party has remained in the wilderness in Punjab ever since.

VI. Legacy of Silence: How Past Governments Lost the Narrative
In practice, the Badal-led governments accepted the frame that Delhi and much of the national media imposed: that Punjab was the problem state, obstinately refusing to carry out solemn agreements and court directions, and that Haryana and Rajasthan were the aggrieved parties. Punjab’s leadership spoke of stress and scarcity, but did not relentlessly foreground the asymmetry by which only Punjab’s rivers were sliced and parcelled out, while Yamuna – in which Punjab had an older, documented entitlement – was treated as someone else’s river altogether. It was a politics of quiet, incremental bargaining, not of open constitutional confrontation.

VII. CM Mann’s New Position: A Constitutional Challenge, Not Rhetoric
Bhagwant Mann’s approach is qualitatively different. He has named the 1954 agreement. He has publicly cited the Irrigation Commission. He has described the Centre’s posture as biased and discriminatory. And he has placed the Yamuna issue on the same plane as Chandigarh, the Panjab University question and the Ravi–Beas dispute – as part of a continuum of federal injustice rather than an isolated technical quarrel. This is not just another Chief Minister complaining about water; it is a deliberate attempt to reopen the terms of debate that Delhi thought were sealed in 1994.

Critics will argue, with some justification, that talk of a YSL canal oversimplifies the physical realities. You cannot wish away gradients, existing command areas and ecological constraints merely by invoking history. But this criticism misses the point. CM Mann’s central claim is not that the YSL will be dug tomorrow; it is that Punjab has been written out of arrangements in which it had a clear moral and historical stake, and that this erasure must be challenged. In that sense, his rhetoric is doing the job it is meant to do: forcing recognition that the “Yamuna settlement” is not as settled as Delhi imagines.

VIII. The Centre’s Role: Selective Federalism
The role of the Central Government in this saga has been anything but neutral. It was the Union that mediated the 1994 Yamuna MoU, structured the Upper Yamuna River Board, and blessed an allocation formula that divided the river among five (later six) entities while pretending the 1954 Punjab–UP agreement did not exist. It was the Union that pressed Punjab to complete the SYL in the name of national interest, but never pressed Yamuna states to even acknowledge Punjab’s prior share when they sat down to apportion the river in 1994. And it is the Union that, even today, resists giving Punjab so much as formal observer status in the ongoing renegotiation of the MoU as its 30-year term runs out.

What Bhagwant Mann has done is to call this bluff. By framing the issue in terms of bias, double standards and historical injustice, he has raised the costs – political and moral – of maintaining the status quo. That does not guarantee Punjab will win its claims. It does, however, ensure that those claims will no longer be quietly brushed aside as “irrelevant” because the Yamuna happens not to flow on a particular side of a post-1966 line on the map.

IX. Why the Debate Matters: Beyond BCMs and Cusecs
This matters far beyond the immediate arithmetic of cusecs and BCMs. For Punjab, living through an acute groundwater crisis and a looming agricultural reconfiguration, the question of surface water access is existential. For India’s federalism, the question of whether a state’s historical entitlements can be erased by executive convenience is equally existential. If Punjab’s 1954 Yamuna rights can be ignored because it is politically simpler to settle among others, then no inter-state agreement anywhere is truly secure.

X. The Road Ahead: From Assertion to Institutional Strategy
A realistic path forward will combine the assertive politics Bhagwant Mann has begun with hard, patient institutional work. Punjab can and should demand observer status in Yamuna negotiations, seek judicial clarification on the continuing relevance of the 1954 agreement, push for updated basin mapping that reflects the Yamuna–Sutlej interfluve, and build political coalitions around the principle that successor-state logic cannot be a one-way street. CM Mann’s rhetoric can open the doors; lawyers, hydrologists and diplomats will have to walk through them.

But the first step—and one that had been missing for far too long—is the willingness to speak without equivocation about the Yamuna waters and the Centre’s double standards, if not outright hypocrisy. On that count, Bhagwant Mann has broken a long-standing pattern. Where earlier leaderships often hedged and apologised for Punjab’s firm stand on water, he has chosen instead to hold up a mirror to Delhi and its preferred narratives. That alone does not remedy the Yamuna injustice—but it finally names it. And in a federal system that has grown accustomed to Punjab silently absorbing the costs of “national interest”, that is no small achievement.

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