Political impact of India’s river-linking project: view of a neighbor

By Dr. Upendra Gautam

This international historic gathering, that is, "the International Conference on "Regional Cooperation on Trans-boundary Rivers: Impact of the Indian River-Linking Project" (ICRCTR) was, this is how I see it, focused on water justice. I salute the people of Bangladesh for pioneering this initiative towards water justice, which is an issue of the utmost significance in our space and time especially in view of our human civilization, which is more spiritual than nuclear, more common than privileged, and more universal than unilateral.

Long ago, it was no less a person than Mahatma Gandhi, the Great Sage of India, who had pronounced this fundamental truth about good neighborhood: "One who serves his neighbors serves all the world." Naturally, we expect the Government of India (GOI) to heed with Mahatma’s words of wisdom. But dismayed and shocked as we are, the GOI chose to go a self-centered unilateral way to propagate and promote the River-Linking Project (RLP), the subject of this conference, leaving even behind their traditionally divisive bilateralism in the region.

The GOI’s RLP envisages river development in two components. First component includes 14 Himalayan river links in India's north. The second includes 16 peninsular river links in India's south. The Himalayan river links include Nepal, the upper riparian country in the Ganga basin. It comprises potential storage projects in Nepal. The project eventually links one component with another.

Apparently inspired by China's on-going multi-billion US dollar South-North Water Diversion Project, which is within China’s territorial jurisdiction, India's RLP in the present incarnation plans to take over the international rives in their both upstream and downstream riparian flows. This planned takeover is in no way under India’s sovereign territorial jurisdiction and water right regime. Even then, according to RLP work schedule, Indian National Water Development Agency (NWDA) will complete the RLP feasibility studies by 2005-6. And it will work out procedures to complete all the river links by 2015-16. The Task Force on Interlinking of Rivers claims, "the pre-feasibility studies carried out by NWDA for the various links in the Himalayan Component have taken into consideration of the existing, ongoing and proposed dams on the common river systems in Nepal….for which preliminary studies have been conducted by the respective countries…These studies need to be further detailed, surveyed and investigated in cooperation with Nepal…"

Whatever the claimed status and destiny of the project, what is clear by now is that GOI has absolutely unilaterally visualized a critical role of Nepal's river water as well as territory in the planning of RLP. And going by what the Prime Minister and Water Resources Minister of Nepal categorically told the visiting Water Resources Minister of Bangladesh on 23 January this year in Kathmandu, the Indian government has done so without duly consulting Nepal, and getting its due consent.

At this stage, a historical as well as geo-political sense of water relations between India and Nepal will be relevant. The GOI sources have been advising Nepal to adopt a subordinate role model to develop the water resource, a natural endowment that originates in the High Himalayas and Tibet Autonomous Region. This role model of water resources development means to unquestionably recognize India as the one and the only paramount developer who will participate in the planning, development and management of Nepal's water resources. Given the GOI’s self-assumed paramount geo-political role in South Asia, and the on-going murderous political instability in Nepal, the GOI presumably feels it safe to conclude that His Majesty's Government of Nepal (HMGN) will see the timely trade off between surrendering its water right on all major rivers of Nepal to India and its (HMGN’s) own political survival.

The GOI at the mean time seems tactfully aware of the fact that it needs to create a so-called legal base for effecting a subordinate role model for Nepal. This is perhaps more required because of the opposition in Nepal. Any government in Nepal, coalition or otherwise, has in itself never been a problem on the GOI’s way of making a deal in water resources with Nepal. Rather, the GOI has been facing opposition from those in Nepal who have never been empowered. It is this reason why the general Nepali people, who has never been duly represented in power through an actual majority vote, seriously doubt the GOI’s doing and intention towards the equal sharing and fair development of the country’s water resources. Probably King Birendra, who got assassinated in June 2001, was one major leadership exception. He could sense how the general Nepali people evaluated the impact of India-Nepal water deals. It was he who for the first time stated in public that the general Nepali people felt "cheated" by the GOI in its water deals with Nepal.

To preempt the legitimate doubt of the majority of the Nepali people towards its international water behavior, the GOI has accelerated the process of signing several new understanding and agreements with the HMGN on water projects even during these years of murderous political instability in Nepal. For example, the 1996 Mahakali river treaty, in which the provisions of 1991 Tanakpur barrage agreement were subsequently comprised, was primarily designed to legitimize the GOI’s unilateral construction of the Tanakpur water project by allowing the GOI to build 577 meter-long left afflux bund in the Nepali territory, and perpetuate India's unequal share on the Mahakali river against the diminished life of the Sharda Barrage agreement signed in 1920s. The October, 2001 inception report or guiding document for joint studies on High Dam on Sapta Kosi, where Nepal enjoys unrestricted right to utilize water under 1959 Kosi treaty (amended in 1966), is logically viewed to limit Nepal's water right as India, for its strategic water security objective of RLP, gives the highest priority to hydropower in the project. This conclusion is derived on the basis of the GOI’s protracted negotiation on the "guiding document" on the Sapta Kosi joint study. While other countries are on the hold and not taking measures to undertake even simple development works in Nepal for "lack of security" and "regular" government business, nothing stops the GOI even to raise issues, initiate, and enter new understanding and agreements with His Majesty's Government of Nepal having far reaching impact and grave consequences of the sharing of natural resources on the territorial integrity of the country.

To pursue its dominance systematically, the GOI has always been in the habit of completing the cross-border water infrastructure projects in the river basin without consulting Nepal. On the contrary, it has been happy to take a stand on the basis of the unilateral downstream riparian right to stall water projects, such as Sikta and Babai, in Nepal, and indefinitely delay poor agrarian Nepal’s development efforts.

Indeed, exporting hydropower to India and earning blue revenue has been an ingrained organizational cliché for the conventional public power agents in Nepal as well. This was the cliché that was used to its maximum in the public relation exercise during the forced and hasty ratification of Mahakali river treaty by the Nepali parliament. But those Nepalis with their common sense in place understand well that all that glitters is not gold. Yet, GOI would like to nurture the cliche and sell it to the Nepali psyche that it is only GOI-led hydropower development where all that glitters is gold, so it is necessarily helpful to Nepal. The GOI would like to stress further that Nepal should not ask for any downstream benefit in the form of flood control, environmental conservation, and regulated supply of water for increased water and food security as its unilaterally constructed structures on and around the international border have already claimed prior use right on the water. The conventional public power agents without any critical alternative vision would certainly be obliged to accept what the GOI says. Even so, this informs one about the basic strategic water interest of the GOI in Nepal. And this interest has been to have control over the Nepal’s water resources. In the 20th century, the control was mostly in the form of irrigation projects. In the 21st century, the control attempts will be mostly through hydropower projects.

Given the GOI’s self-centered unilateralism in water resources development, its deep all-round involvement in Nepal’s domestic politics and consequent insecurity emanating from this involvement, it is not easy for the Nepali political leaders, to understand and appreciate the critical relationship that inseparably exists between the country’s territorial integrity, water rights and internal sense of security in the Ganga basin, and assert for the same. One feasible way to balance the extreme unilateralist pressure created through RLP, that ultimately seeks to annex Nepal in the RLP design in the name of optimum water resources development, would be to make concerted diplomatic and political efforts, even though it may take some years, to supply fresh water from Nepal to Bangladesh using pipe technology. Sure, Bangladesh and Nepal cannot go for this without the GOI‘s cooperation. But it will be very difficult to GOI to oppose this proposal as it helps to serve two least developing neighbors, and which also contributes in meeting the humanitarian Millennium Development Goal of Poverty Reduction and safe water supply adopted by the UN in September, 2000.

Another way to balance India’s extreme unilateralism will be the cooperative research arrangement on the impact of climate change on the Himalayan ecology, the mainstay of the major rivers in the region. China has moved forward by regularly providing data on Yarlung Zangbo or Brahmaputra River to downstream India. Chinese researchers have called for regional cooperation in fighting against the potential flooding from rapidly melting glaciers in the Himalayan region. They consider the regional approach will upgrade the monitoring and combat systems of such a transnational issue. Such an approach has also been proposed by researchers from Nepal and the United Nations' Environment Program (UNEP). Experts consider implementing integrated basin management encompassing both the mountains and the lowlands is the key to meeting the above challenges. A major effort must be made to identify win-win solutions for people living in both highland and low areas.

Through projects such as RLP, the GOI is attempting to unilaterally control a fundamental natural resource, which is most essential for the ecology, human beings and the animal kingdom. This also indicates GOI’s hegemonistic understanding about water. Water is not static-it is unitary yet dynamic through out its flow. It is indivisibly linked with two basic elements of the state-the people and the territory. The GOI wants to maintain India’s internal water security in the face of the predicted severe water scarcity through the traditional means of strategic expansion and control. But the use of traditional philosophy of power politics to help address the problem of the 21st century will perhaps not help. Whether the GOI wants to raise the already increased level of conflict, and intensify the covert operations at the same time, the choice is theirs. For Nepal, in the face of GOI’s continued interference there is no choice to make but be a bad neighbor. The RLP in the presently propagated and promoted form does not represent a civilizational foresight. The situation, nevertheless, can definitely take a positive and cooperative turn if the GOI heeds the words of Mahatma.

Before I end, I will like to quote Dr. Henry A. Kissinger. He says, "Unilateralism for its own sake is self-defeating. But so is abstract multilateralism." But Mahatma’s vision of "good neighborhood" provides a real regional base in South Asia that has all the potential for paving the way for inter-regional cooperation as it is taking firm roots in East and South-East Asia. And one cannot agree more with what Dr. Kissinger cited of Immanuel Kant. Two hundred years ago, Kant in his essay entitled "Perpetual Peace" wrote, "the world is destined for the perpetual peace. It will come about either by human foresight or by a series of catastrophes that leave no other choice.

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