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India-China relations: A river runs through it

ByNimmi Kurian
Jan 13, 2025 08:15 PM IST

The dam planned by Beijing on Brahmaputra in Tibet could turn out to be a poisoned chalice for South Asia

The new site of geopolitical tensions between India and China could lie at a staggering vertical drop of over 2,000 metres, in the massive gorge in Tibet’s Medog County, where the Yarlung Tsangpo makes a U-turn before flowing into Arunachal Pradesh. It is the sheer velocity of these hurtling waters that China’s proposed $137 billion, 60,000 MW hydropower project with 300 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity potential seeks to capture. In the direct line of its furious descent are the life chances of millions living downstream in India and Bangladesh. As India calls into question Beijing’s ostensibly green project camouflaged in carbon neutrality pledges, will China’s quest for liquid gold prove to be a poisoned chalice for South Asia?

(FILES) Indian army soldiers walk along a road near Zojila mountain pass that connects Srinagar to the union territory of Ladakh, bordering China on February 28, 2021. (Photo by TAUSEEF MUSTAFA / AFP) (AFP) PREMIUM
(FILES) Indian army soldiers walk along a road near Zojila mountain pass that connects Srinagar to the union territory of Ladakh, bordering China on February 28, 2021. (Photo by TAUSEEF MUSTAFA / AFP) (AFP)

The new project taps into old anxieties about China’s resource choices in Tibet, the headwaters of many of Asia’s mighty rivers that flow into the most populous regions of South and Southeast Asia. Tibet’s fragile ecosystem has struggled to cope with the furious pace of economic activity under China’s Western Development Strategy unveiled in 2000. This has brought in its wake assorted problems of deforestation, soil erosion, landslides, floods, acid rain and pollution, especially of water systems. These have, on more than one occasion, spilt over the border and found their way downstream.

The India-China conversation on water has, over the years, merely skimmed the surface, unable, and often unwilling, to wade through to the deeper end. A weak appetite for striking sovereignty bargains, made worse by a history of animosity punctuated by periodic standoffs has contributed to aiming low and hitting lower outcomes for the region. Transnational institution-building in the Himalayan region has always tended to be more symbolic than substantive as can be seen from nascent minilateral efforts such as the Kailash Sacred Landscape Conservation and Development Initiative (India, China and Nepal) as well as the Landscape Initiative for Far Eastern Himalayas (India, China and Myanmar). It is not surprising then that weak institutionalism has produced weaker bargaining outcomes, a bitter lesson India learned at its own cost in 2017 when China refused to share hydrological data with India but went ahead to share the same data on the same river with Bangladesh. Played out against the backdrop of the India-China standoff at Doklam, this exercise in riparian power play was a reminder, if any were needed, of China’s dominant position in the Asian waterscape.

An inordinate fixation with the water-security linkage has also undercut India’s interests in far-reaching ways. A securitised reading has shut out critical dialogue space, imposing minimal demands on China, giving it virtually a free hand to proceed unilaterally without any accountability to lower riparian concerns. For India, it has led to a conscious choice to keep institutional thresholds low, and consequently, expectations lower. An illustrative example of this is a preference for an instrumentalist approach and a transactional bargain with China under which India pays 82 lakh annually to receive hydrological data during the flood season from three stations in Tibet.

One of the gravest consequences of such a unidimensional reading of the Brahmaputra is that it has ended up being a single-issue debate, fixated on fears over water diversion by China. It has, for instance, edged out attention to water quality as a critical issue. The costs of this inaction came to the fore in 2017 when the waters of the Brahmaputra turned black, with water pollution levels reportedly at 1,249 NTU, 250 times more than the safe limit. Of particular concern has been the environmental degradation facing the ‘Three Rivers area’, comprising the Yarlung Tsangpo, Lhasa River, and Nyangchu basins in central Tibet. One of the most intensely exploited areas in this region is the Gyama Valley with large polymetallic deposits of copper, molybdenum, gold, silver, lead, and zinc. Studies by Chinese scientists have pointed to the possibility of a high content of heavy metals in the stream sediments and tailings that could find their way downstream.

These also raise larger questions about the cumulative impact of massive dam-building projects across the entire Himalayan region. In the geo-dynamically active Himalayas, earthquakes are an ever-present danger with a recorded history going back to the 13th century. Studies by Chinese scientists traced the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, which resulted in the loss of 80,000 lives, to the Zipingpu Dam in Sichuan province in western China. The 7.1 magnitude earthquake last week near Shigatse in Tibet is a reminder to China that this will, by no means, be a cost-free, winner-takes-all panacea that it could delude itself into believing. There will be reputational risks, mounting environmental costs, and global and regional sentiment for Beijing to consider.

The history of global transboundary river cooperation offers interesting takeaways for the Brahmaputra riparian countries, be it the 1909 landmark Great Lakes agreement in North America or the International Sava River Basin Commission set up in 2005 for the forecasting of low flows in southeastern Europe. What this rich evidence tells us is that establishing habits of trust and cooperation among riparian actors will have long gestation periods, as borne out by the 2023 Ecuador-Peru agreement to jointly protect the Catamayo-Chira, Zarumilla, Puyango-Tumbes watersheds, which builds on a long history of cooperation dating back to 1971. Similarly, basin-level approaches such as the Mekong River Commission, reinforce the need to shift the needle towards a water-livelihoods linkage, with a focus on mitigating the vulnerabilities of small-scale farmers in the basin countries. Last but not least, these also highlight the capacity of alternative articulations to hold their own alongside the dominant water wars paradigm, as the robust tributary-level cooperative agreements in the Syr Darya basin in Central Asia underline. These hold an interesting lesson or two for the over-securitised Brahmaputra discourse. When all is said and done, one cannot think of a more fitting way for the Indian State to signal that it has the best interests of its border citizens at heart than by giving voice and agency to this missing water agenda.

Nimmi Kurian is professor, Centre for Policy Research.The views expressed are personal

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