Anyway, the Kerala-Tamil Nadu stand-off now is deteriorating to a highly emotive issue, leaving lakhs of people on each side with sharply different stakes in it. Almost every political outfit of consequence in Tamil Nadu is rallying around the issue, leaving little elbowroom for M. Karunanidhi’s DMK government to negotiate. Not different is the predicament of his Kerala counterpart, V.S. Achuthanandan, who cannot afford to back down from the state’s 27-year-old position in the issue.

But while both sides are keeping up an effective din and getting proactive - people in Tamil Nadu are blocking most roads to Kerala, and the Kerala government is calling up the army and airforce to prepare for the projected catastrophe, and is even getting the navy to dive deep and look for chinks in the dam’s underwater — a key question remains.

Kerala has been holding up the dam’s threat potential, but what really is the threat potential? Though it has accused Tamil Nadu of attempting to shield the truth by preventing even naval divers from looking up the dam’s submerged parts, the fact is that the only scientific study that Kerala can claim to support its claim is one by the government-owned Centre for Earth Science

Studies, which says the dam could burst if an earthquake over 6 on the Richter scale hits it real close. The state hasn’t had a quake that big yet.