The disastrous consequences of playing with rivers

THE painting, 'At the Water's Edge' (1890), by Paul Cézanne is a study of light and reflection where the composition threatens to dissolve into patches of colour. I am not sure what he had in mind when he gave the title, but Kashmir's Pahalgam massacre has pushed the two neighbouring and warring nations, India and Pakistan, at the water's edge over River Indus, that lends its name to India and the subcontinent from the original Tibetan and Sanskrit Sindhu.

Rising in southwestern Tibet near Lake Mapam at 18,000 feet, the gorgeous Indus is one of the largest river systems that has flowed through millennia, often shifting its course, like rivers do.

I haven't seen many paintings of the Indus river, except one by Singaporean artist Choo Keng Kwang and another of the 'Hyderabad Fort across Indus River' by RM Grindley (1808) at the Victoria and Albert Museum. But we have seen many photographs and it is a terrifyingly stunning landscape across glaciers and gorges that reach depths of 17,000 feet, flowing across mountain ranges and plains, entwining nation states and civilisations within its embrace.

In recent years, there has been a lot of writing about rivers and their histories and what they mean to people. In one of my curatorial efforts around an edition of 'ArtEast', a festival around art and livelihood, we decided to explore the Ganga and the Brahmaputra. In one of the sessions, I recall a speaker referring to the book 'The Conquest of Nature' by the great British historian of Germany, David Blackbourn, who posits a question on the conquest of nature: When do you decide to conquer nature? "The very idea of conquering nature has, within it, a lot of assumptions about the power of technology, the power of humanity and a very different kind of attitude to the river as an entity."

Now that India wants to weaponise the Indus, we could return to Blackbourn, who wrestles with this question: How can we pretend to know how a river thinks, even if we were to assume that the river is an entity?

But we can surely attempt to find out what people think about rivers. The people who live along these rivers. That led us to begin a series of conversations, River Dialogues, to try and revive the river imagination not just through measuring cusecs of water, but through flora and fauna, music, invoking folklore and creation myths.

We know the disastrous consequences of playing with rivers. Over the last 200 years, attempts to transform the Nile have not worked. The building of the great dam of Aswan cut off the flow of silt which kept the delta of the Nile fertile. Not only that, it also led to the spread of Bilharzia or Schistosomiasis, a deadly disease spread by snails, and it helped in the growth of malaria.

A dammed river is no longer a river. And increasingly, a river, as ecologists continuously remind us, is a living entity and, as Blackbourn writes: The "conquest of water led to a decline in biodiversity and brought damaging invasive species…. Hydrological projects also wiped out human communities, and with them valuable forms of knowledge: carefully calibrated ways of living with and from the water."

While the Pakistan army chief made a provocative statement a few days before the Pahalgam massacre, saying that Kashmir is the "jugular vein of Pakistan", in reality, it is the Indus that threatens to push the two nations to a war-like situation.

In addition to the routine military posturing and tactical ground operations, India, the upper riparian state, has decided it would hold the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), in place since 1960, "in abeyance." This is a first in many India-Pakistan face-offs.

For decades, security experts have been apprehensive of water wars and this could well be a tester. However, suspending the treaty is not the same as saying water will not flow down the Indus river. Though the Jal Shakti Minister of India has used his right of political rhetoric to threaten Pakistan, saying not a drop of the Indus waters would be given, most of us know that it is not possible to suddenly stop the flow. In 2016, India warned that "blood and water cannot flow together" following a militant attack in Kashmir, but China reportedly came to Islamabad's rescue by blocking a tributary of the Tsangpo.

India has only run-of-the-river hydro-projects that cannot store such a large amount of water nor does the Indus Waters Treaty allow for that. This could well be a diplomatic bait to renegotiate the treaty and allow building of infrastructure for the storage of water. Currently, India can't utilise more than 20 per cent of the water of the Indus basin due to inadequate capacity. It also runs the risk of flooding its own geography.

Since 2022, India and Pakistan haven't convened any meetings to resolve the water disputes. In 2023, India proposed the treaty be renegotiated, with changing demographic and climate conditions.

Diverting rivers also means price of the water. To divert water is expensive and may not be feasible. Even China has been hesitant about diverting the Tsangpo water.

The Indus wasn't waiting for Pahalgam. Parineeta Dandekar from South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) writes: "The war with climate change is already going on with massive changes in hydrology in Indus basin in general and Chenab basin in particular."

The Chenab basin has the largest number of completed, under-construction and planned hydropower projects among the western rivers of the Indus basin in India. Any hasty decisions to push for more reservoirs and dams without cumulative studies will push both India and Pakistan to the brink of a natural disaster.

Based on an extensive travel and fieldwork in 2024 from the origin of the Chenab to Akhnoor, where the river exits India, community interviews, review of government reports and scientific studies in the Chenab basin, Chenab headwaters and communities, the report by SANDRP cautions development of any large projects in a place that is seismically active and has been witnessing repeated climate disasters.

Hydro engineering in this fragile terrain has irreversible geological and ecological consequences for the river and various entities that live within and around the rivers, and for the people who live along the river, downstream and upstream.

People living in areas around the origin of the diversion will also suffer and millions could be displaced. Stopping the water flow may be a smart diplomatic move, but playing with the river's course could prove hazardous in the long run.

Kishalay Bhattacharjee is Dean, Jindal School of Journalism and Communication.