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Bridge over Himalayan
waters
By Ranjit Devraj
NEW
DELHI - As Indian and Pakistani members of a commission
on the sharing of the Indus waters meet in the Indian
capital this week, it will be with the knowledge that
the outcome of their talks on sharing glacier-fed waters
have a bearing on sub-continental peace.
When
the Permanent Commission on Indus Water met early in
February in Islamabad, it failed to sort out differences
over the design details of a 450-megawatt hydroelectric
dam that India is constructing at Baglihar village on
the Chenab river.
This week's four-day meeting,
which ends on Saturday, is so sensitive for Pakistan
that its Foreign Ministry recently advised the Ministry
of Water and Power not to talk to the media about it.
The Chenab is one of the five tributaries of the
shared Indus river, whose headwaters lie in the disputed
Himalayan territory of Kashmir. Under the 1960 Indus
Waters Treaty, Pakistan is supposed to get exclusive use
of the Chenab.
The February meeting, an
unscheduled one, was called by Pakistan, the lower
riparian state, to express apprehensions that the design
of the Baglihar dam's spillway violated the 1960 Indus
Waters Treaty and would allow India to partially divert
waters of the Chenab.
But on April 8, Indian
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee extended his hand in
peace to Pakistan, offering to settle all issues
outstanding between the quarrelsome neighbors through a
resumption of dialogue.
Since then, the two
countries have moved to build trade ties, restore full
diplomatic relations and resume transport links that
were suspended as a consequence of an armed attack
against the Indian parliament in December 2001, for
which New Delhi blamed Islamabad.
After that,
ensuing tensions between India and Pakistan led to the
nuclear-armed neighbors massing a million troops on
their common border. War was prevented only by intense
international shuttle diplomacy led by US Secretary of
State Colin Powell.
At the height of the
hostilities, Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf
let it be known that his country's "nuclear threshold"
would be crossed if India attempted to block the water
resources the two countries have shared for decades.
Musharraf's fears were not unfounded as there
have been calls in India for abrogating the Indus water
treaty. "The incongruity of unabated terrorist killings
by Pakistani jihadis while the water lifeline flows
uninterrupted to Pakistan from India stares us in the
face," said Jasjit Singh, former director of the
Institute of Defense Studies and Analyses, a think tank.
But there are contrary voices too. Ramaswamy
Iyer, a former top bureaucrat and authority on water
resources, said that asking for abrogation of the treaty
was a bad move since it was "negotiated over several
years and agreed upon by all sides".
However,
both Singh and Iyer say that the treaty should be
renegotiated since the lion's share of the Indus waters
now goes to Pakistan. Under the Indus Waters Treaty,
Pakistan received exclusive use of waters from the Indus
and its westward flowing tributaries, the Jhelum and
Chenab, while the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej rivers were
allocated for India's use.
Negotiated and signed
under World Bank mediation, the treaty was necessitated
by the carving out of Pakistan in 1947 as a homeland for
Muslims on the sub-continent following the
decolonization of British India. The treaty has survived
the severest of diplomatic rows and three conflicts that
have broken out between the two neighbors, a fact held
up by the World Bank as an example of waters being
peacefully shared by countries that are bitter rivals in
other respects.
Still, decades of hostility and
mistrust between the countries have made Pakistan
uncomfortable with its status as the lower riparian
state and with having to live with the idea of its main
water resources flowing through Indian territory.
Following the failure of the February talks on
the Baglihar dam, Pakistan issued notice to India that
it was asking for a neutral expert to resolve the
dispute under the provisions of the Indus Water Treaty.
Islamabad prefers to have a World Bank official as this
mediator, and this promises to be a key issue in this
week's talks.
This is the first time since the
treaty was signed that a dispute looks set to get
referred to a neutral expert. "They have refused our
requests for on-site inspections [of the Baglihar
project], and once when they allowed such inspection,
they [Indians] made it clear that they would not be
incorporating any Pakistani proposals for a change in
design," said a Pakistani official.
Because
efforts to settle the issue bilaterally have not borne
fruit, Islamabad is left with little choice but to seek
outside mediation, he added. This move has not gone down
well with Indian experts. "The demand for international
arbitration will only spoil the mood for peace,
especially at this juncture," Iyer said.
Iyer
said India had refrained from seeking international
arbitration to sort out a year-round navigation project
at Tulbul on the river Jhelum, permissible under the
treaty but held up since 1987 as result of Pakistani
objections.
Pakistan's fears are visible in a
paper published by its Institute of Strategic Studies,
which said the Tulbul navigation project would give
India "a strategic edge during a military confrontation
enabling it to control the mobility and retreat of
Pakistani troops and enhancing the maneuverability of
Indian troops".
Earlier this month, the Prime
Minister of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, Sikandar Hayat
Khan, openly supported the revival of a proposal for the
formal partition of Kashmir between India and Kashmir
along the Chenab river as a practical solution to the
long-standing dispute over the territory.
Khan
was quoted as saying that such a division would result
in the Muslim-majority areas of the territory going to
Pakistan and the Hindu-majority parts going to India,
satisfying the basic principle on which the 1947
partition of British India was carried out.
It
would also result in Pakistan gaining full control over
the Chenab, on which the Baglihar dam is now coming up,
and expanding the territory it holds to cover Srinagar,
the capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir state, which
lies west of the river.
(Inter Press
Service)
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