Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [57]
CHAPTER 11
India and Pakistan: Glaciers, Rivers, and Unfinished Business
Water Flows or Blood
—Protest sign in Pakistan
PAKISTAN AND INDIA are famously locked in struggle. An important cause of this enmity is each side’s need for water. An important method in the conflict is Pakistan’s use of militant Islamist guerrillas and terrorists as proxies against India. One of this struggle’s crucial battlefields is Afghanistan.
As climate change increases water stress in South and Central Asia, the India-Pakistan conflict, already unfolding on multiple fronts, is further aggravated. The India-Pakistan conflict is not reducible to water; nor is it caused by climate change. However, water and climate are key drivers of the conflict. As climate change brings more extreme weather, monsoon disruptions, flooding, drought, and rapid glacial melting, it plays an ever-greater role in shaping the India-Pakistan conflict.
Water Tower Karakorum
The India-Pakistan conflict pivots on Kashmir, in part because 90 percent of Pakistan’s agricultural irrigation depends on rivers that originate in the region, much of which is occupied by the Indian military.1 The conflict began in 1947 during Partition. Under the British Raj, the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir had a Muslim majority but was ruled by a Hindu maharajah and his court staffed by Hindu outsiders.
The logic of partition was that India’s Muslims and Hindus constituted separate nations. The Muslim League put this forward, and the Indian National Congress reluctantly agreed to the idea of geographic separation along religious lines. That process quickly turned apocalyptic as Hindus and Muslims turned on one another; 1 million people were killed and 15 million displaced. These intercommunal conflicts were religious in name but also involved displaced and distorted class conflicts. As a scholar of that era put it, “Communalism is more than a religious phenomenon. Its social and economic overtones appear when peasants who happen to be Muslims are oppressed by Hindu money-lenders or when Muslim weavers strike against Hindu mill owners.”2
A central element in Partition was the fate of British India’s 560 small, semiautonomous, so-called princely states. All were advised to accede to either Pakistan or India. Since the logic of Partition was that Muslim-majority areas should go to Pakistan, Kashmir seemed to belong there: it was more than 70 percent Muslim, and most of its trade links and communications lines tied it to that region. In one version of the original acronym that became the name Pakistan, the k stood for Kashmir.3 Additionally, and very importantly, “its three mountain-fed rivers, the Indus, the Jhelum (which flows through the famed Vale of Kashmir), and the Chenab, join in a single stream to descend through the Pakistan lowlands and empty into the Arabian Sea at Karachi.”4
Indian leaders, however, saw Kashmir as a resource frontier and geostrategic asset that was too valuable to concede—remember, along with huge glaciers, it had forests, minerals, and borders with Afghanistan, the Soviet Union, and China. As Alice Thorner, a leading historian of India, explained at the time, “Kashmir was conceived as both a gateway to greater Indian influence in Central Asia and a bastion of defense. India alone, it was argued, had the economic strength to develop Kashmir’s so far untapped water-power potential and mineral resources.”5
The Hindu maharajah and his court were reluctant to yield their autonomy to either state, and a three-way stalemate ensued. Then, on October 22, 1947, Pakistan made its move. In the predawn gloom, an armed column of approximately two thousand Pashtun tribesmen—the first generation of Pakistan’s mercenary guerillas, recruited from the northwest borderlands with Afghanistan and led by a major in Pakistan’s army—invaded Kashmir. They drove sixty miles beyond the border before meeting opposition from a small force of Kashmir state troops. The maharajah’s government called for Indian military aid. As Indian troops were dispatched