Baglihar Dam and our ‘lower riparian alarmism'

[Neo]

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Baglihar Dam and our ‘lower riparian alarmism'

There are lessons to be drawn from the World Bank verdict on the Baglihar Dam dispute between Pakistan and India. The verdict has mostly gone in India’s favour, but it is not surprising that Pakistan has claimed ‘victory’. The federal water and power minister, Liaquat Jatoi, says that the World Bank expert Professor Raymond Lafitte has “determined that the design of Baglihar Dam violates the Indus Waters Treaty and directed India to lower the height of the proposed reservoir on the Chenab in Indian-held Kashmir”. But that is not really true.

Pakistan had raised four objections of which “three have been accepted by the expert”. The expert has asked India to reduce the height of the dam from 144.5 metres to 143 metres (sic!). The expert has also reduced the size of the reservoir from 37.722 million cubic metres (MCM) to 32.56 MCM (sic!). According to the minister, India’s planned spillways for the dam — Pakistan’s major source of objection — were found in conformity with international practices, but India’s design and analysis were found to be incorrect. This is where the obfuscation has clearly crept into the media management.

A glance at what India has said about the World Bank decision seems to point to panic buttons being pressed on the Pakistani side. The Baglihar Dam is essentially on line and the changes recommended by the expert are only minor in nature. New Delhi has announced that once again Pakistan has been proved wrong. The Indian union minister for water resources, Prof Saifuddin Soz, a Kashmiri, said there would be no loss of power generation from the reduction in the dam’s height. He said India had offered to make this change before Pakistan had approached the World Bank. He said Pakistan’s biggest objection, the installation of the sluice spillway gates, had been rejected.

Pakistan went to the World Bank in 2005 objecting to India’s design and height of the dam on the Chenab River awarded to Pakistan under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty (IWT). India was not allowed to use its waters but was permitted to produce electricity from its waters. Pakistan as a lower riparian suspected that the dam had been designed to store more water than was allowed for purposes of electricity generation. Many meetings were held, but Pakistani experts were not able to overcome their suspicion that India was constructing “gate-like structures likely to affect Pakistan’s agriculture by making it lose 8,000 cusecs of water every day”.

So the fact is that Islamabad, no matter how it looks at the World Bank verdict, cannot claim victory, if only because its objection to the spillway gates has been set aside. While there is no harm in claiming victory — which purports to convey to the people of Pakistan that India has been once again defeated — it would be a mistake not to learn all the lessons embedded in the water dispute and its final denouement. While the matter was given in the hands of specialists, no estimate was made of the psychological orientation of the Pakistani bureaucrat going to India and accepting the Baglihar Dam design. In other words, even a Pakistani expert — usually a bureaucrat — is affected by the lower riparian alarmism of the nation.

The Baglihar Dam began to be discussed in 1992 and Pakistan lost no time in invoking the IWT to say that it might not allow it. After that, till 2005, when the two countries went for arbitration, a lot of damage was done to Pak-India relations. The quarrel over the dam unfolded during the worst years of the Kashmir jihad. Both sides deployed enormous amounts of agitprop to smear each other and arouse fear and loathing. In lower riparian Pakistan those in charge of jihad started naming the water issue as one of the reasons behind the covert war. The public mind in Pakistan was poisoned till the elected governments were destabilised finding themselves unable to allay the sense of insecurity of the people.

Pakistan is not unfamiliar with the mind of the lower riparian. One simply has to examine the Sindhi rejection of the Kalabagh Dam to understand its depth and in some ways its helplessness. Pakistan, therefore, must learn to approach the water problems with upper riparian India with a new non-alarmist attitude, so that its specialists and experts don’t feel under pressure to play the role of spoilers rather than fair-minded evaluators.

There are other dams in contention: the Kishenganga hydroelectric project on the Neelum River, which is a tributary to the Jhelum, which belongs to Pakistan. Uri-II on the Jhelum River in Baramulla District, the Pakul Dal and the Burser Dams, both on the Marusundar, a tributary of the Chenab River in Doda district. Unless ‘nuclear powers’ India and Pakistan develop a friendly working relationship, the coming years will bring more tension and conflict, dwarfing the old Kashmir dispute. The World Bank arbitration tells us that Pakistan must become more cautious in its approach while remaining fully vigilant over its rights under the Indus Waters Treaty. *

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007\02\14\story_14-2-2007_pg3_1