Only last August, the two States along with Kerala and Pondicherry signed the the agreement amid much fanfare but now Karnataka is refusing to release water from its reservoirs to Tamil Nadu.

Telephone calls from Vajpayee to Karnataka chief minister J H Patel have not yielded the desired results. An enraged Tamil Nadu chief minister M Karunanidhi is flying in three of his ministers to the Capital to meet Vajpayee.

The deepening inter-State row has forced Vajpayee to get pro-active and as a first serious step, he has directed that a meeting of the monitoring committee of the Cauvery River Authority be convened on September 24 to resolve the latest stand-off in the century-old dispute. The committee is chaired by the Union Water ResourcesSecretary and the chief secretaries of the two States, Kerala and Pondicherry, and the chairman of the Central Water Commission are its members.

The highly-politicised dispute has assumed a new dimension with all the dramatis personae on the same side of the political fence. If the ruling Janata Dal (United) has teamed up with the BJP in Karnataka, its counterpart in Tamil Nadu, the DMK, is leading the National Democratic Alliance in the State. If the ongoing row exacerbates into a serious one, it is the BJP which will be the most embarrassed for it was Vajpayee who brokered the Cauvery deal last year.

AIADMK chief J Jayalalitha has already tried to cash in on the breakdown of the accord and targeted both Karunanidhi and Vajpayee for acting against the interests of Tamil Nadu farmers.

The latest dispute arose when Karnataka pleaded inability to release water as per the calendar set out in the interim award of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal. Its case is that the State has been suffering from lack ofadequate rainfall while the present storage position at Mettur dam in Tamil Nadu was enough to take care of the withering crops in the Thanjavur delta.

According to Karnataka Government sources, the State will not be able to release water till the KRS reservoir is full. `It is only 70 per cent full now. If we have to release water to Tamil Nadu we have to pray for rain. If it doesn't we can't help,' they said.

Tamil Nadu insists that Karnataka's case does not hold water and has demanded immediate releases from Karnataka's reservoirs to save the withering crops.