The Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) is usually seen as one bright example of successful international mediation in India-Pakistan relations. It is often cited as a counterpoint to the long inutile United Nations intervention in Kashmir. Standard narratives, however, usually miss how even in the case of IWT, political narratives counted far more than technical considerations of developing efficient water usage in the Indus basin.
The American water expert, David E. Lilienthal, began his tour of the subcontinent in February 1951, and followed it up with his writings, presenting a modernist understanding on developing water resources. Lilienthal’s proposals caught the eye of Eugene Black, then World Bank president, who on September 6, wrote to then Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and then Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquat Ali. Both leaders responded positively though neither saw genuinely integrated development as a possibility. Towards late 1960, domestic compulsions of Nehru and then Pakistan President Ayub Khan partly pushed them into signing the IWT but both faced strong criticism with the treaty being called a ‘sellout’ or ‘appeasement’ or ‘surrender’ and this sense has not completely disappeared.
Political considerations
For Lilienthal too the outcome was equally disappointing. His visualising of the Indus basin in its natural space transcending territoriality was destroyed by the reality of political borders. His attempts to use shared ethos of colonial engineers and later invoking shared Punjabi connections stood negated. Given the intransigence of both India and Pakistan, the Bank emerged as an influential stakeholder taking the driver’s seat and, by mid-1950s, the ‘Bank plan’ had divided rivers between India and Pakistan which eventually became the final treaty.
Indus Divided explains these historic drifts by connecting water-sharing negotiations to evolving perceptions on sovereignty and territoriality and how it makes water, not a developmental resource, but a tool of territorial sovereignty. While India adopted the stand of ‘absolute sovereignty’ claiming that upstream power wholly owns the water flows within its borders, Pakistan invoked principles of ‘territorial integrity’ implying that downstream state has the right to continue receiving water to which it was accustomed to.
Their May 4, 1948, Inter-Dominion Accord had provided for Pakistan making payments for release of water presupposing India singularly ‘owning’ this water. Such predispositions were further compounded by the fact that the Indus, Chenab, Jhelum flow through Kashmir. India included water claims of Jammu and Kashmir in its proposals, thereby asserting India’s sovereignty over Kashmir, but Pakistan did not incorporate water requirements of even Pakistan-Administered Kashmir (PAK). Pakistani sovereignty over PAK was questioned by violent protests of 1957 as its Mangla Dam displaced 100,000 people. In the 1970s, another 80,000 were displaced by its Tarbela Dam. But Pakistan’s resettlement of these people into Pakistan also strengthened their demographic integration.
Nehru visited Karachi in September 1960 to sign the IWT and projected it as heralding a new era, yet reflecting their caution, Article XI (1) read “Nothing in this Treaty shall be construed as affecting existing territorial rights over the waters of any of the Rivers or the beds or banks thereof.” So, while India agreed to allow free-of-cost water flows into Pakistan, it did not relinquish its sovereign claims over river beds. India was allowed to continue with (not expand) its existing ‘agricultural uses’ as also to build hydroelectric projects on western rivers that were given to Pakistan. This was to sharpen Pakistani claims to Kashmir with President Ayub Khan saying that India’s agreement that three western rivers belonged to Pakistan meant that the territory through which they flowed belonged to Pakistan.
Renewed U.S. interest
Cold war geopolitics lured the United States and its allies to pour vast amounts of aid into Indus Basin Development Fund in order to demonstrate their superiority over the Soviets. By 1959, six countries—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, West Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States—had agreed to underwrite IWT by financing $897 million of which $177 million were grants from the U.S. This is what made IWT a reality. Both sides could use each other’s rivers for ‘domestic use’ and for making non-consumptive purposes like navigation, fishing and flood protection. The IWT also provided a 10-year transition period during which Pakistan was to receive progressively diminishing water supplies through eastern rivers.
As regards its implications beyond Kashmir, demarcation of borders in divided Punjab was facilitated by the IWT. Till early 1960s, with precise location of the border being unclear, ad hoc arrangements sometimes led to low-level crisis. Then there were conflicts triggered by shift in the course of meandering rivers or islands in the Sutlej that exposed or submerged cyclically. Adding to anxieties, India inherited only three of the 16 pre-Partition Punjab’s canal systems though much of their river heads were located in Indian-controlled Kashmir. But other than IWT, from the 1960s groundwater exploitation had become integral to India’s green revolution which was centred around Indian Punjab.
In the east, however, attempts to replicate IWT faced a distinct reality of India’s equations with East Pakistan being dominated by West Bengal politics that till date continues to mar India-Bangladesh water-sharing. Despite being lower riparian to Ganga and Brahmaputra, East Pakistan was not in dearth of water but had excess of it needing different strategies.
So when Pakistan built a dam at Kaptai on Karnafuli river, Nehru did not object even though it resulted in part of Indian side getting submerged and inflow of over 40,000 refugees. Pakistan, later Bangladesh, however remained worried about India’s Farraka barrage. So, while New Delhi often slowed down its progress by delaying funds to provincial government thereby annoying them, anxieties of partitioned Bengal complicated ground realities.
In this competitive controlling of water flows within national territories, colonial experiences combine with pressures of post-colonial nation-building, Cold war geopolitics and development narratives. Of late, intensive urbanisation producing power deficits are creating new anxieties.
The writer believes that as long as water arrangements authorities are not privatised, the connection between water and territorial sovereignty is unlikely to cease.
Indus Divided: India, Pakistan and the River Basin Dispute ; Daniel Haines, Penguin Random House, ₹599.
