# Tamil Nadu Asks the Centre to Take Back a Sentence, Because on the Cauvery Sentences Become Precedent > Chief Minister Vijay has written to the Prime Minister objecting to a Jal Shakti ministry answer in the Rajya Sabha on Mekedatu. The demand is not that the reply be debated. It is that it be withdrawn. - Source: India Max - Canonical URL: https://indiamax.net/article/vijay-mekedatu-letter-modi - Author: Vikram Shetty - Section: Politics - Published: 2026-07-28T09:30:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-28T09:30:00.000Z - Tags: Cauvery, Mekedatu, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka --- Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Vijay has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi over a single answer given in the Rajya Sabha. The Minister of State for Jal Shakti, Raj Bhushan Choudhary, told the House that the Supreme Court judgment of 16 February 2018 does not expressly require Karnataka to obtain the consent of lower riparian states before building a structure across the Cauvery. In a demi official letter sent on Tuesday, Vijay called the reply disappointing and asked that it be withdrawn. Asking for a withdrawal rather than a correction looks like an overreaction until you follow how clearances on inter state rivers actually get granted. A written answer is not a ruling and binds nobody. But it is the Union government stating on the record how it reads the court, and that reading is what a file cites years later when an approval is being processed. Tamil Nadu is not arguing with a sentence. It is trying to stop the sentence becoming the settled reading it gets quoted back at. The legal case in the letter rests on the difference between a judgment not saying something and a judgment permitting it. Vijay points to the Constitution Bench in State of Karnataka versus State of Andhra Pradesh, the Alamatti matter, where the court held that Karnataka could not build to the disputed height without the consent of the other riparian states and without the approval of the Centre. He also cites the Cauvery tribunal's handling of Kerala's Pambar hydro electric project, which involved a consumptive use of just 0.1 thousand million cubic feet and still drew a direction that Kerala and Tamil Nadu jointly agree the schedule of releases so downstream irrigation was not affected. That second example carries the weight of the argument. If a tenth of a unit of consumption was enough to require a jointly agreed release schedule, the objection to Mekedatu is not really about how much water a reservoir would hold. It is about who controls the timing of what flows downstream. Vijay's letter leans on Clause XI of the award, which bars an upper riparian state from acting in ways that affect scheduled deliveries except by mutual agreement, Clause XVIII, which lets each state regulate water inside its territory only in a manner consistent with the tribunal's order, and Clause XX, which allows the award to be modified only by agreement among the party states. There is a practical point in the letter that cuts through the case law. Karnataka submitted a detailed project report in 2019 and the Central Water Commission returned it for revision so that it complied with the tribunal award. Tamil Nadu reads that as the Centre's own machinery already treating compliance as a precondition rather than a question still open for argument. On that reading the ministry's answer in the Rajya Sabha is not just legally loose, it is out of step with what the Centre's own technical body did with the file. The letter asks for three things beyond the withdrawal. No statutory or administrative approval for Mekedatu unless it is demonstrably consistent with the tribunal award and the 2018 judgment. Full protection of lower riparian rights on both the quantity of water and the regulated pattern of releases. And any future consideration of the project only after a technical and legal examination that takes in the concerns of every downstream state, which brings Puducherry and Kerala into a dispute usually reported as a quarrel between two. What is worth noticing is that the position has not moved. Vijay leads a party that has been in office a short time and won on the promise of being unlike what came before, and on the Cauvery he has written more or less the letter his predecessors wrote. That consistency is the point rather than a lapse. State positions on river water survive changes of government because the constituency is the same regardless of who is in power, and the delta farmers downstream do not vote on the basis of which party is making the argument for them. Karnataka's position has held across its own changes of government for the same reason. Nothing in the letter forces an outcome. The Centre can decline to withdraw the answer, and the project remains where it has been for years, held up short of clearance rather than refused. What the letter does is put the Union government on notice that its stated reading of the 2018 judgment will be contested the moment it is used to support a clearance, which is a slower kind of politics than a protest but tends to be the kind that decides these disputes. --- Originally published by India Max. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://indiamax.net/article/vijay-mekedatu-letter-modi.