BLOG

WATER POLITICS

Via the July 2013 issue of Asia Policy, a look at South Asia’s perception of Himalayan water security:

South Asia has emerged during recent decades as a major theater of tension and conflict around shared rivers. The region is made up of predominantly rural, poor, and agrarian societies. While in recent years India has been showcased as an emerging economic power, the benefits of Indian economic growth have mainly been concentrated in the southern and western areas. Rural populations in eastern India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh continue to have a high concentration of poverty. Persistent agrarian poverty has heightened tension over shared rivers. Concern is also growing among South Asian states that China’s quietly but rapidly expanding dam-building activity in the Himalayan region will increase political tensions in South Asia, potentially leading to conflict.

This essay explores the myriad sources of water-related tensions between India and Pakistan in the Indus Basin and between India and Nepal and Bangladesh in the Ganges Basin. The essay first reviews the nature and sources of tensions among these South Asian neighbors. It then discusses newly emerging concerns about the potential impact of Chinese activities in Tibet on the lower riparian states in South Asia.

The Importance of Water Sharing

Although water wars rarely, if ever, take place between nation-states, water can play an important role in broader political conflict and tensions. Few regions in the world are home to as much interstate tension as South Asia. Pakistan and India were born out of war, and relations are still strained today with even simple transport and trade links severely restricted. Despite the fact that India helped Bangladesh gain its independence, the two countries still have problems, including sharing the waters of the Ganges, Teesta, and other rivers. Overarching all these disputes is the perception of India as the regional hegemon. India’s actions on water issues are thus often viewed by its neighbors with suspicion. Adding ominously to this mix is China’s growing use of eastern Himalayan waters.

Despite these tensions, water forces the nations of South Asia to interact with each other. Nearly all the water in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Bhutan comes from a river shared with at least one other South Asian state. Even in India, where the large Deccan Plateau is hydrologically removed from the rest of the subcontinent, over 30% of water resources are shared. This water is crucial for lives and livelihoods in South Asia. The region is among the most populated in the world, with densities ranging from less than 300 people per square kilometer in the west of South Asia to over 1,000 in Indian Bihar and Bangladesh. While India has been recognized as an emerging economic power, it, like the region as a whole, remains predominantly rural, poor, and agrarian. The Ganges-Brahmaputra- Meghna Basin covering eastern India, Nepal, and Bangladesh has been dubbed South Asia’s “poverty square,” with substantially more people below the dollar-per-day poverty line than in all the countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined.1 The fruits of much of South Asia’s growth have been in southern and western Indian towns and cities—those generally not supplied by transboundary waters.

Obstacles to Water Sharing

Challenges in the west. When India and Pakistan were formed in 1947, the new boundary cut across long-established irrigation systems and the Indus tributaries that fed them. In 1960 the World Bank facilitated the signing of the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) between the two countries, under which India, as the upper riparian, ceded 80% of Indus waters to Pakistan (approximately 220 billion cubic meters) and kept the remaining 20% for its northwestern plains. While substantial tensions remain, the IWT has survived half a century and three wars between the neighbors. Islamabad remains understandably concerned that New Delhi might use water as a political tool and has challenged every move by India to undertake even IWT-approved run-of-the-river hydropower generation projects. These use flowing water merely to run turbines without reducing supplies to downstream users. General Ashfaq Kayani of Pakistan has often cited water as the justification for his India-centric military stance.2 In India, too, there is growing doubt, especially in Jammu and Kashmir, about former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s generosity in committing, for all time to come, the bulk of the Indus water to Pakistan when India’s own northwest remains perennially parched. India is also frustrated because, as a lower riparian on the Brahmaputra River, it has received nowhere near the same considerate response from its upper riparian neighbor, China.

The problem in the east. Whereas the primary water issue in the west is scarcity, in the east it is abundance. Controlling the 380 billion cubic meters of annual flood flow in the Ganges River Basin presents a unique opportunity for hydropower generation in Nepal and flood control in Indian Bihar and Bangladesh. The technical problem for India and Bangladesh is that the flat plains of the lower Ganges Basin offer no sites for storing water. Dams in Nepal could yield an astounding 40 gigawatts of hydropower (57 times the country’s current hydropower capacity) and provide flood control to the lower riparian states but are a cause for environmental, social, and political concern. For example, agreements signed by Nepal and India during the mid-1950s on the Kosi and Gandak tributaries to promote goodwill instead strained the relationship between the two countries because of issues related to compensation for land.

This strain was not fully mended even after rewriting the agreements a decade later to address Nepali concerns. While some progress has been made, much more could be done if Nepal’s national politics were to stabilize and New Delhi could assuage fears that dam construction might infringe on Nepali sovereignty and primarily benefit India. India now takes much pride in what it views as a win-win collaboration with Bhutan on hydropower generation. Bhutan now earns over 60% of its rapidly growing GDP from hydropower sales to India.3 Similar collaboration with Nepal could produce comparable benefits, and the two countries have created the Nepal-India Joint Ministerial Level Commission on Water Resources. However, early cooperation between India and Bhutan rested on an agreement to let India “guide” Bhutanese foreign and defense affairs. Addressing the real or perceived threat to sovereignty will be necessary for water cooperation to become politically viable in Nepal.

As the lowest riparian state in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna Basin, Bangladesh is most susceptible to flooding. Yet even in one of the world’s most water-endowed countries, water scarcity has emerged as a prime concern in the dry season. When India constructed the Farakka Barrage to divert a portion of the Ganges waters to a Calcutta port, tensions built up in Bangladesh and created political upheaval. Under a 1996 treaty, India has promised minimum low-season flows from the Farakka Barrage to Bangladesh. While the accord at least establishes a mechanism for sharing water and resolving disputes, India’s actual track record has caused Bangladesh considerable heartburn—yet another sign of a smaller country’s mistrust of the regional power. In September 2011, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh tried to make a similar commitment to Bangladesh on the Teesta tributary. However, the newly elected chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerji, nipped the proposed Teesta accord in the bud at the last moment, greatly embarrassing the Indian prime minister.

China. The elephant in the South Asian drawing room, however, is China, which possesses territorial control over the vast Tibetan Plateau, the world’s largest repository of freshwater. Unhindered by the dense human populations found elsewhere within its own borders, China has embarked on mammoth water projects on the plateau. This aggressive dam building has already made the downstream riparians in Southeast Asia—Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia—nervous. While continuing to build more dams upstream on the Mekong and Salween rivers, China is also now working on very large hydroelectric and river-diversion schemes on the Yarlung Tsangpo River, known as the Brahmaputra River in India.

Beijing reveals little about its current and future projects. According to observers, however, China has already constructed 10 dams on tributaries of the upper Brahmaputra, with 3 more under construction at Dagu, Jiacha, and Jiexu. It is also constructing a 510-megawatt dam at Zangmu as part of a plan to build 28 dams on the Brahmaputra before the river enters India. Most worrisome for New Delhi is a gigantic 38-gigawatt hydropower project that China is planning at the “great bend” at Motuo, where the Brahmaputra drops 2,500 meters into India.

Unlike all the co-riparians in South Asia, who have some mechanisms in place for discussing and negotiating water issues, China refuses to discuss such mechanisms. Despite high-level Indian officials having repeatedly raised their concerns about Chinese dam building on the Brahmaputra and its possible impacts on India, Beijing has refused to participate in an intergovernmental dialogue, a joint water commission, or a forum to discuss the creation of a treaty to deal with the water issues between the two countries. As the upper riparian state, China has in the past even refused to provide flood alerts or warn India about water releases from dams. In June 2000 a breach in an upstream dam in Tibet raised the Brahmaputra’s water levels in Arunachal Pradesh by a massive 30 meters, leaving 26 dead and 35,000 homeless. This damage could have been contained if China had alerted India. Instead, Beijing refused to even acknowledge the dam burst for months after the event. Similar unannounced releases of excess water by China also caused flash floods in Himachal Pradesh in 2000, 2001, and 2005. Bangladesh, as the lowest riparian state on the Brahmaputra, will bear the brunt of dam building by China in Tibet (and India in Arunachal Pradesh) but has even less influence than India in this runaway appropriation and development of the river’s vast potential.

What Could the Future Hold?

One major obstacle to improved transboundary water governance within South Asia is political fluidity. None of the South Asian co-riparians, India included, have strong, stable, and confident governments capable of taking a long-term, diplomatic view of opportunities as well as threats. A second problem is strident nationalism, coupled with fears of India as a hegemon. A case in point is India’s construction on a 2.9-hectare piece of Nepalese territory in the border town of Tanakpur. Under the agreement, India offered Nepal irrigation for 5,000 hectare and 20 megawatts of power per year as compensation. But the Nepali opposition used the small incident to bring down the government. This in turn led to a drastic amendment to Nepal’s constitution requiring a two-thirds majority in the parliament to sign any water treaty with India.

A related barrier to cooperation has been the difficulty in disentangling water disputes from other bilateral problems and disassociating them from national political struggles. Discussions on water security between India and Bangladesh are influenced by issues such as the Bangladeshi migrant influx in India’s northeast, Chakma refugees, porous borders, and insurgent groups in India’s northeast. The Teesta accord mentioned earlier would have been highly favorable to Bangladesh and was offered to earn Dhaka’s support in clamping down on two of the most lethal insurgent groups in India’s northeastern region that operate out of Bangladesh. Yet, as mentioned above, the treaty was aborted because of state politics within India. Negotiations between India and Pakistan on water security are obviously colored by the broader territorial dispute in Kashmir and long-standing distrust, while Nepal’s insecurities as a land-locked state dependent on India for trade and transit play a major role in its discussions with India. All three countries—Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal—share in common a distrust and touchiness about India as the regional hegemon.  India, in turn, is frustrated in its attempts to reason with China, which exercises control over and has ambitious plans for the headwaters of all the rivers that flow into the subcontinent.

What can be done? Within South Asia, the overall improvement of bilateral relations would be a major step toward the improvement of water security. But since water security could also be a catalyst for cooperation, it may be prudent to find ways to build initial cooperation in this area as a step in solving other problems. Smarter internal politics will also be required to ensure that the central decisions of transboundary diplomacy have broader domestic support and do not turn into political tools. One positive development is the growing popularity of Track 2 discussions at civil society levels, where nongovernment players, with no power or role in government- level negotiations, offer open forums to air grievances and explore solutions before they become political.

On the surface at least, bringing China to the table appears to be one of the most vexing obstacles to water security in the Himalayan region. There are signs, however, that the time for change may be here. China is already India’s largest trading partner, and their trade continues to grow. Harming this relationship would be economically disastrous for both countries. Li Keqiang just made India his first foreign visit as Chinese prime minister, with the stated purpose of building mutual trust and cooperation. Growing trade and economic interdependence in the Himalayan region may offer the best chance for a win-win resolution of regional water issues.