Unmoved by the blitzkrieg from Kerala about the “imminent collapse” of the Mullaperiyar dam, those in support of Tamil Nadu’s stand on the dispute argue that their neighbour’s catchy slogan ‘safety for Kerala, water for Tamil Nadu’ does not capture the devil that is in the detail.
While Kerala has pegged its campaign for a new dam completely on the safety aspect of the older one, which it claims is a question of thousands of lives downstream, activists here charge that the dispute is not about the structure but about the water it holds.

Mullaiperiyar or Mullaperiyar? Where one stands on the dam dispute between Tamil Nadu and Kerala can be easily revealed by how the name is spelt. Here, “i” makes all the difference: a letter of the alphabet and also a pronoun that is a damning indicator of subjectivity — an absolute lack of objectivity — on both sides.