With tensions rising between India and Pakistan in the wake of a deadly terrorist attack earlier this month that killed more than 40 Indian police officers in Kashmir, New Delhi has decided to retaliate in part by cutting off some river water that flows downstream to Pakistan. The decision to build a dam on the Ravi River, whose waters are allocated to India by treaty but a portion of which had been allowed to flow through to Pakistan, adds an extra source of conflict between two nuclear-armed neighbors that have repeatedly clashed over the disputed Kashmir territory.
To understand the issue better, Foreign Policy spoke with Sunil Amrith, a professor of South Asian studies at Harvard University and the author of Unruly Waters, a look at how water shapes South Asia’s history, politics, and economic development.
Foreign Policy: India and Pakistan were torn apart at Partition, including critical water resources that had been shared under British India; is this the mother of all transnational water conflicts?
Sunil Amrith:
It probably is, at least in the suddenness, the arbitrariness, and the brutality with which it emerged. In Asia, many of the other transnational water conflicts were slower to escalate—for example, it wasn’t until the 1980s that neighboring states had the capacity or the ambition to dam and divert the upper reaches of the Himalayan rivers. In terms of the numbers of countries and interests at stake, the Mekong is perhaps the ur-transnational water conflict in Asia, but in the sense of a conflict that was created with the stroke of a pen, the conflict over the Indus delta is quite distinctive.
FP: From the vagaries of the monsoon and famines in the colonial period to the development and dam-building boom in the Jawaharlal Nehru years, how central is control of water to India’s concept of nationhood, especially under Prime Minister Narendra Modi?
SA: The control of water has long been central to many visions of freedom and nationhood in India; that is one of the key arguments in Unruly Waters. This goes back to at least the late 19th century, when a diverse group of Indian nationalists, British water engineers, and administrators began to see irrigation as India’s salvation. The dam-building boom of the Nehru years epitomized the ambitions of a proud post-colonial state and its planned conquest over the vagaries of nature and climate. Nehru famously called large dams the “temples of the new India.”
Under Modi, the control of water has continued to be of symbolic value. The government has also committed itself to the gigantic river-linking project, at an estimated cost of at least $90 billion. But none of this started with Modi. I think in terms of their approach to water management, there is a long thread of continuity across the past several Indian governments.
FP: In this case, India seems to be exercising its legitimate claim to the waters in the Ravi. Do you see this escalating, to the point that India starts to infringe on Pakistan’s allocated waters in the western rivers or even abandons the Indus Water Treaty altogether? What happens if it does?
SA: The World Bank-brokered IWT of 1960 is a paradox: It is touted by many scholars of international relations as an example of successful cooperation between hostile states, and at the same time it’s a frequent target of complaints from politicians on both sides of the border.
Following the failure to broker a deal where India and Pakistan would manage the water resources of the basin collectively, the Indus Treaty sought to legislate their division: The waters of the Sutlej, the Beas, and the Ravi were awarded to India; and the west Indus, the Jhelum, and the Chenab to Pakistan.
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