Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [59]
According to the treaty, Pakistan receives exclusive rights to the waters of the Indus and its main western tributaries, the Jhelum and Chenab. India is allocated the eastern tributaries of Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej.12 India can dam these rivers for power, fish from them, channel them for navigation, and so on, but it must release most of the water to Pakistan. In total, Pakistan should receive 80 percent of the waters that might otherwise reach the Indus. In the 1950s, as the treaty took form, India clearly had the upper hand, but it needed World Bank financing to develop its economy. So, India agreed to terms that favored Pakistan.13
Surprisingly, to date, the treaty has functioned. Why? One academic has argued that India and Pakistan cooperate because doing so is “water rational,” meaning, “cooperation was needed to safe-guard the countries’ long-term access to shared water.”14 But that tautology leaves unanswered the question: Why is conquest not water rational?
The central issue in the treaty is India’s advantage. As the upstream riparian with the superior military, India could take more water. In fact, India could destroy Pakistan by turning the breadbasket of the Punjab into a desert. However, in the late 1950s, when the treaty was being negotiated, both countries needed World Bank financing, and only cooperation over water guaranteed that. Further, though Pakistan was in a weak position, India also faced significant constraints. Pakistan was closely allied to the United States and was part of the US-backed Southeast Asian Treaty Organization. Pakistan was also growing close to China, India’s rival. Two years after the treaty was signed, India and China even fought a brief war for control of other glacial peaks.
Numerous other aspects of the international equation stayed India’s hand. For India to have launched an all-out war for Jammu and Kashmir and then built dams to divert Indus headwaters would have constituted an act of intolerable aggression.
Instead, India holds Muslim-majority Kashmir as occupied territory. An intifada-like popular resistance now grips the province. During the crisis summer of 2010, Indian forces killed a demonstrator or two every few days.15 Indian officials in Kashmir are accused of ignoring “Kashmir’s significant economic troubles, rampant corruption, and rigged elections” and of intervening “in Kashmiri politics in ways that contradicted India’s own constitution.”16
Rigged state-assembly elections in 1987 ignited widespread violent opposition. By 1992, as the jihad in Afghanistan wound down, some mujahideen pivoted from Afghanistan to Kashmir. The struggle for Kashmiri independence began to morph into an “Islamist crusade to bring all of Kashmir under Pakistani control.”17 The NATO occupation of Afghanistan since 2001 has not siphoned off militants from Kashmir but instead reinvigorated the entire Central Asian conflict system. Now the brutal tempo of drought and flooding exacerbates the tensions.
Bellicose Dams
In 2008 India inaugurated the 450-megawatt Baglihar hydroelectric dam on the Chenab and began restricting the flow of water to Pakistan. The Chenab rises in Kashmir and drains into Pakistan. Pakistan tried to stop construction of the Baglihar Dam by appealing to the World Bank in 2005. The project went ahead nonetheless, after India agreed to reduce the dam’s height and promised not to restrict the river’s flow.18
Yet, the Baglihar Dam is only one of several under construction.19 The more paranoid and bellicose Pakistani activists say India has already constructed forty-four dams on “Pakistan’s rivers” and has another fifty-two dams in process.20 India maintains it is merely harnessing the energy of the water or clearing rivers for navigation and is not impounding and diverting more than its share. Pakistan disputes this and points to the decreased flows in its rivers.
In the summer