Water will find a way, in India & Pakistan

WATER, water everywhere, said the poet, a line that is really a drumbeat in your brain as you look around the Mand area in Sultanpur Lodhi, where the Beas has burst its banks and flooded the paddy crop — a story The Tribune is also following, on the loss and devastation of one half of its two-crop agricultural cycle.

Watching Punjab’s rivers rise these past few weeks has been a lesson in both History and Geography. We know that the confluence of two Persian words, Panj and Aab, gave rise to the portmanteau word ‘Panjab’, meaning “the land of the five waters”; it is attributed to Ibn Battuta, the traveller from Tangiers who is believed to have roamed this region in the 14th century.

But here’s the irony : Prior to Battuta, Punjab was known as Panchnad, a Sanskrit word that means the “land of the five rivers” — a word that dates from the time of the Mahabharata, and which, even today, is the name of the river in Pakistan into which all five rivers of undivided Punjab — the Jhelum, Chenab, Sutlej, Beas and Ravi — fall, before the one mighty portmanteau river pours itself into the Arabian Sea.

Note, then, how Nature (with a capital N) abhors small men-made divisions and partitions, either during 1947 — when blood ran like water — or after, as recently as April 2025, when in the wake of the horror of the Pahalgam massacre, a furious India put the circa 1960 Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) in abeyance. The IWT had held, despite two wars and one limited conflict, because it had rules about treating the waters of Punjab’s rivers.

On the eve of Operation Sindoor, India shut down the sluice gates of the Baglihar dam on the Chenab in Jammu and announced that not a “single drop of water” would be allowed to flow into Pakistan in retaliation for Pahalgam. For the first time in decades, Jammu folks flocked to walk the dry Chenab bed and post Instagram pictures. Pakistani authorities reacted nervously, fearing the worst for their crops and human habitat.

Three months later, it is Geography’s turn to turn the tide on geopolitics. As Himachal Pradesh and Punjab experience their strongest monsoon in decades, the reservoirs in the Bhakra, Ranjit Sagar and Pong dams — that give life-sustaining water to all of north India all year round — have filled to capacity, forcing officials to release water into Punjab’s three eastern rivers in order to keep the structure of the dam safe. But that’s not all. Questions on both sides of the border are now being raised — for example, should officials have not released water from these North Indian dams, which has contributed to flooding on both sides of the border?

Ajnala. Kapurthala. Sultanpur Lodhi. Ferozepur. Kartarpur Sahib. The rollcall of Punjab’s towns that seem to be floating these days is giving rise to several memes — among them, “bheegta Punjab,” a take-off on “udta Punjab.” Flooding is so widespread in the Ferozepur region that it has obliterated familiar markers on the Radcliffe Line. Parts of the border fencing that divides India from Pakistan has been submerged. As far as the eye can see, water and land have merged with the horizon. It’s as if Geography is taking its revenge on History.

Meanwhile, common sense is replacing fury. India may have suspended the IWT, but it has been sending water data to Pakistan via its high commission in Islamabad. That’s because India understands its responsibility as an upper riparian state — imagine what would happen if China, the upper riparian in the case of the Brahmaputra, which begins as the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet, refused to send water data to lower riparian India? Shudder at the thought.

In any case, so much water flows down the Chenab and the Jhelum in Jammu & Kashmir, especially during the monsoon, as much as 136.2 million acre feet (MAF) annually, that the run-of-the-river Baglihar and Kishanganga dams have no option but to allow the water to flow into Pakistan. That is why suspending or holding the IWT in abeyance doesn’t mean much on the ground — the water, as is its wont, will flow from the hills to the sea. The hills, in this case, happen to be the Himalayas and the sea, the Arabian Sea. Water disdains maps and treaties and pacts. It will find a way.

A larger question, however, has insinuated itself into the big picture, that of dam storage, rights and responsibilities. Udhampur MP and the influential junior central minister Jitendra Singh has blamed the IWT for denying India permission to desilt its dams on the western rivers (Chenab, Jhelum). But read the IWT carefully — Singh’s contention is only partially correct, as the IWT only prohibits desilting during the monsoons; India is free to desilt at any other time. Moreover, the IWT is silent on desilting dams on the eastern rivers (Sutlej, Ravi and Beas), and as my colleague Lalit Mohan reports from Ropar on the news pages of The Tribune, the Bhakra Nangal dam’s carrying capacity has been reduced by 19 per cent because of the accumulation of silt over the decades. In fact, the big story is that the Bhakra dam has never been desilted since it was built in 1963.

If this is true about the Bhakra Nangal on the Sutlej, could it also be true about the Pong and the Ranjit Sagar dams, on the Beas and Ravi rivers, respectively? And if this is true for all three, does it follow that dam officials had to release water from these dams this monsoon — which caused the flooding in Punjab — because they were concerned about protecting the integrity of the dam structure?

Let’s ask the forbidden question : If these dams had been desilted over the years, would they have been capable of carrying much more water, especially at a time of extraordinary rain as has occurred this monsoon? Meaning, would Punjab’s extraordinarily resilient villagers have remained home and dry?

Perhaps it’s time to put people front and centre, to treat Nature tenderly, with kid gloves, to separate her from Politics. The rise and fall of dynasties and empires, shape-shifting maps — Nature follows her own rules. Let us respect them.