Unruly Waters

by Sunil Amrith

  For some, the unity of nature was set against the human divisiveness of Partition. The socialist Rammanohar Lohia wrote of his astonishment that Nehru was willing to divide India’s great river basins out of political expediency.7 Saadat Hasan Manto, the most incisive and enduring chronicler of Partition in fiction, turned to the problem of water in his 1951 short story “Yazid.”8 The story’s opening image is almost shocking: “The riots of 1947 came and went. In much the same way as spells of bad weather come and go every season.” In his first two sentences, Manto evokes the indifference of nature to human suffering; he signals the insignificance of human folly faced with the cycle of the seasons; he also draws the suggestion that Partition’s violence may have been as “natural” as the rains—a message colored with irony, since it runs counter to so much of Manto’s fiction, which depicts Partition as the monumental consequence of petty and all-too-human decisions. The most memorable exchange in the story takes place between the sage village midwife, Bakhto, and Jeena, wife of the protagonist, Karimdad. One day Bakhto arrives with news that “the Indians were going to ‘close’ the river.” Jeena is nonplussed: “What do you mean by closing the river?” When Bakhto replies, plainly, “they will close the river that waters our crops,” Jeena laughs in disbelief: “You talk like a mad woman… who can close a river; it’s a river, not a drain.”9

  PARTITION AFFECTED EVERY PART OF GOVERNMENT, EVERY INSTITUTION. The Indian Meteorological Department, too, was divided in 1947. One of the pressing tasks for the partition of Indian meteorology was the exchange of observational data—all original records relating to the weather of Pakistan, wherever in (undivided) India they were held, were transferred to the new Pakistani meteorological service. Both sides held that climatological data were “records of common interest,” as if to acknowledge that the monsoons respected no human frontiers. They supplied each other with duplicate copies. And then there was the question of the instruments upon which weather science rested. These, too, were divided: the Indian Meteorological Department reported that “out of the stock of instruments and stores held at [headquarters in] Poona and Delhi, stocks between 20 to 25% of each item were to be given to Pakistan.” A simple list conveys a deep rupture:

  As a result of the partition, 2 type A Forecast Centres, 1 type C Forecast Centre, 5 Auxiliary Centres, 8 Aerodrome reporting stations, 3 Radio-sonde stations, 14 Pilot Balloon Observatories, 82 surface observatories, and 1 seismological station were transferred to the Pakistan Meteorological Service.

  Incidentally, the list also conveys how dense the infrastructure of meteorology in British India had become by the end of the war. There is a poignant sense of how hard meteorologists fought to keep doing their work, regardless of the chaos and violence around them. “Interim arrangements were made,” they noted, “for the issue of storm warnings, etc. for certain regions falling in Pakistan.”10

  Like meteorologists, engineers and economists looked at the material knots tying the two new states together and many of them believed that a future of cross-border cooperation was inevitable. Just a year after the event, C. N. Vakil, a professor of economics at Bombay University, wrote a pamphlet on The Economic Consequences of Partition. It was prosaic in the face of colossal upheaval. The facts, he thought, made it “easy to appreciate the need for an agreed economic policy between the two Dominions now and in the future”—that both states formally remained Dominions within the British Empire until 1950 provided a measure of political cover for negotiations to take place. Against “the atmosphere of communal bitterness as well as increasing mistrust,” Vakil believed that “fundamental economic forces in the two Dominions are likely to work in the direction of mutual inter-dependence.” But he acknowledged the real possibility that “political forces” would win out; he saw that India and Pakistan could end up in a state of “economic warfare.” The darker edge to his pamphlet came in his wish to inform “the layman” of the economic “weapons” at India’s disposal if “warfare” it was to be.11

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER PARTITION ENGINEERS ON BOTH SIDES MUDDLED through. In the midst of crisis they kept the water running. In December 1947, the chief engineers of East and West Punjab signed a Standstill Agreement to maintain supplies to the Bari Doab, one of the Indus River canals ruptured by the border: the headworks fell on the Indian side of the border and most of the canal in Pakistan. When Punjab’s Canal Colonies were built they had been conceived as a unitary system, its hydraulic parts each useless in isolation; now the engineers had to improvise. And then the water stopped. On April 1, 1948, the day the makeshift agreement expired, India shut off the water supply to the canal. The fears that Manto depicted in his fiction mirrored historical events—“it’s a river, not a drain.” But the rivers, too, were national now.

  The sudden stoppage raised alarm on the Pakistani side. In the midst of the spring sowing season, the waters to the Upper Bari Doab and Dibalpur canals stopped, disrupting cultivation and threatening the harvest. Residents of Lahore saw the canal that bisected their city empty of water: before their eyes was a visceral sign of Pakistan’s vulnerability. East Punjab’s engineers, on the Indian side, shut off the canal water to Pakistan without the approval of the central government in Delhi; Nehru himself worried that “this act will injure us greatly in the world’s eyes.”12

  The conflict over Indus waters joined the territorial conflict between India and Pakistan over the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, whose Hindu ruler had chosen to join India rather than Pakistan under considerable pressure from the Indian side, and against the wishes of the territory’s predominantly Muslim population. The tussle over Kashmir erupted into military conflict within months of Partition, following the invasion of the territory by Pathan militia from the northwest with covert support from the Pakistani state. Upon Kashmir both India and Pakistan projected their anxious sense of truncation, in the sense that both sides ended up with less territory than they thought they ought to have, as a result of a hasty partition that satisfied nobody. Both sides came to see control over Kashmir as a vindication of their founding ideologies: for India, the extension of a secular and democratic polity; for Pakistan, the achievement of a Muslim homeland in South Asia. The views of Kashmiris, then as now, were ignored. But the Kashmir dispute also had a hydraulic dimension: of the five tributaries of the Indus River, one, the Jhelum, originates in the Kashmir valley; another, the Chenab, flows through Jammu. Gnawing at India and Pakistan, through their inability to find a solution in Kashmir, was a quest to control the state’s water.13

  Pakistan and India each made their case before a global audience. The dispute over the Indus attracted international attention because it seemed like just the sort of water conflict that many others could face as the map of the world was redrawn. Pakistan’s delegation to the United Nations declared in 1950 that “the withholding of water essential to an arid region to the survival of millions of its inhabitants” was “an international wrong and a peculiarly compelling use of force contrary to the obligations of membership in the United Nations.”14 The Indian argument, by contrast, was that India “has the right under the Partition, as also in equity, over the waters of rivers flowing through her territory.” India’s lawyers also advised that the provisions of international law were ill-suited to “the case of two countries, which have come into existence from the partition of a previously existing national unit”—which rested on the idea that British India was a “national unit,” a strange claim for Indian nationalists to make just a year after independence.15

  Both sides used Partition to bolster their arguments. India insisted that Radcliffe’s line had given Punjab’s richest agricultural lands to Pakistan, including the Canal Colonies—lands farmed mostly by Sikh and Hindu cultivators who now found themselves uprooted as refugees in India. Partition had “disrupted [a] unitary system of canal irrigation and therefore the entire economy of the area,” executed with “complete disregard of physical or economic factors.” In this light, the Indians argued, it wa
s their prerogative to make best use of the water resources that remained. India’s advocates portrayed eastern Punjab as the victim of a partition that had been imposed upon it “to satisfy the ideology of Mr. Jinnah and his Muslim League.” With little warning, East Punjab “found itself an economic unit, and a very much underdeveloped area.” Its survival depended on wresting control over “the life-giving waters from the Himalayas” that had, through British canals, “been unfairly diverted to increase the prosperity of distant tracts” that now lay across the border. The Pakistanis retorted that India “wishes to make a desperate attempt to escape the economic consequences of partition”—which Pakistan, as a new state, had no choice but to face. The Pakistani submission to the tribunal of arbitration gave Partition a material as well as an ideological dimension: “Apart from religious and cultural considerations, one of the main objects of partition is to enable the residents of the two Dominions to use and develop their economic resources for their own benefit.” They closed with a goad: “East Punjab should have the courage to face the economic consequences of a political standing by itself.”16

  Each Punjab “found itself an economic unit”—the phrase suggests that this happened as one might “find oneself” in an unfamiliar destination after getting on the wrong train. Divided provinces, like the divided nations of which they were part, had to stand alone where once they were part of a larger whole. The vogue for planning demanded a simplified model of the economy upon which plans could be made. This cemented the vision of an Indian economy set apart from the whole web of connections that tied India to Southeast Asia and beyond.17 Partition stymied many plans: it struck at the mutual dependence of the jute growers of eastern Bengal and the export houses of Calcutta, at the ties between coal producers of eastern India and Pakistan’s factories, at the carefully calibrated use of water by farmers along the length of the canals of Punjab. These new “economic units” unleashed a desperate competition for water: the precondition for every vision of prosperity.

  In both India and Pakistan, Partition generated a sense of loss and a feeling of vulnerability. Following India’s water stoppage, water engineering became an urgent priority in Pakistan. Pakistan’s engineers designed a new canal project known as the BRBD (Bambanwala-Ravi-Bedian-Dibalpur); it would run parallel to the partition border, a “canal designed to sever Pakistan’s [water] supply from India.” A volunteer corps of laborers rallied to the cause of the new canal as an act of national defense—it came to be known as the Martyrs’ Canal.18 For India, the loss of the productive agrarian lands of western Punjab hastened the push to develop its eastern reaches. Plans for a large dam at Bhakra, on the drawing board since the early twentieth century, now became a priority. Old fears of famine had never gone away; they were reactivated by Partition. Eastern Punjab needed new sources of water to keep its most vulnerable districts secure from a failure in the rains.

  The Indian water stoppage lasted a matter of weeks. Negotiations between the two sides resumed at the end of April 1948. In exchange for payment, India agreed to continue supplying canal water to Pakistan for an unspecified period, during which “alternative sources” would be developed. Both sides clashed repeatedly, their claims often directed at international observers. Pakistan proposed international arbitration; India insisted it was a domestic matter. In 1951 the American David Lilienthal—a senior official in the Tennessee Valley Authority, and now a globetrotting development consultant—toured India and Pakistan; he took a particular interest in the Indus water dispute. Lilienthal contrasted “politics and emotion” with “engineering or professional principles.” He described how Partition, driven by emotion and not by reason, “fell like an ax” upon the Indus basin. But, he added, “the river pays no attention to Partition—the Indus, she ‘just keeps running along’ through Kashmir and India and Pakistan.”19 He wrote a long piece for Collier’s magazine warning the American foreign policy establishment that Kashmir was “another Korea in the making.” Lilienthal had proposed that water management be removed from the political realm. He had faith in the shared training and professional camaraderie of India’s and Pakistan’s water engineers; he believed in their ability to work together for a “cooperative,” technical, solution. In Partition’s aftermath, such apolitical solutions were as attractive as they were unrealistic.

  THE PARTITION OF INDIA MARKED THE BEGINNING, NOT THE END, of the division of Asia’s waters. A year after Mao Zedong’s army overpowered Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War, inaugurating the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, Chinese forces invaded Tibet. The annexation of Tibet was a thorn in India’s relations with China. Many Indian politicians, including members of Nehru’s cabinet, urged him to take a hard line, but Nehru opted for a path of conciliation, recognizing that India was not in a position to take any action. What went almost unremarked at the time was that the annexation of Tibet in 1950 also gave China control over much of Asia’s freshwater. The Indus was divided between India and Pakistan—but its source is on the Tibetan Plateau, which was now ruled as part of China. From the Tibetan Plateau flow the Brahmaputra (known in Tibet as the Yarlung Tsangpo), the Salween, the Mekong, and also the Yangzi. The source of the great rivers still seemed, in 1950, remote, wild, untouched by the modern world. It is no surprise that water was mostly invisible through the process of dividing Asia into modern nation-states. In the second half of the twentieth century, water resources would become increasingly important to the process of marking and laying claim to the earth, increasingly pivotal to conflicts between Asian states. In 1950 water was not, or not yet, a cause of conflict except between India and Pakistan. But their effects on shared water resources would be among the most far-reaching consequences of Asia’s midcentury territorial disputes.

  Still, the power of nature, paying no heed to new borders, was on full display in August 1950, when—on Indian Independence Day, the fifteenth—a powerful earthquake tore through the borderlands straddling India, East Pakistan, Tibet, and Burma. The earthquake was one of the ten most powerful ever recorded, caused by the collision of two continental plates. Its epicenter was in Rima, Tibet—and came just three months before the Chinese invasion—but the bulk of the damage fell on the northeastern Indian state of Assam. Even as politicians were busy redrawing the map of Asia, the earthquake altered the landscape and devastated human lives. As if to underscore the remoteness of the earthquake’s epicenter from centers of political power, relief was slow to arrive. The earthquake blocked the course of many tributaries of the Brahmaputra, changing the river’s course. The British botanist and explorer Francis Kingdon Ward was traveling in Tibet at the time, and penned one of the few eyewitness accounts from the earthquake’s epicenter. He wrote that “the immediate result of the earthquake was to pour millions of tons of rock and sand into all the main rivers… displacing millions of cubic feet of water.”

  Every scheme to engineer water had to contend with the instability of Asia’s mountain rivers; with the growing confidence of postcolonial engineers, caution began to be set aside.20

  II

  In 1951, India carried out its first census after independence. It was at that time the largest census ever undertaken in the world. The average life expectancy in India stood at just 31.6 years for men, and 30.25 years for women.21 In the United States at the same time, that figure was 65.6 years for men, and 71.4 for women. For every 1,000 live births in India at the time, more than 140 infants died. This was an indictment of two centuries of British rule, since the “abstract number which is the average human life span,” as philosopher Georges Canguilhem noted, revealed much about “the value attached to life in a given society.”22 In China, after more than a decade of war, life expectancy was no higher. Nothing illustrates so plainly the magnitude of the challenge before the governments of Asia’s new states. For India and China, as for Pakistan and Burma and countries all along the great crescent, harnessing water was a priority in their quest to transform the conditions and ex
pectations of life.

  In his introduction to the census, commissioner R. A. Gopalaswami pinpointed what he saw as a turning point in India’s population history, around 1921. Until then India’s population had grown slowly. The terrible famines of the late nineteenth century, the prevalence of infectious diseases like plague and malaria, the devastating and rapid toll of the influenza epidemic of 1918, which killed between 12 and 13 million people in India—taken together, they produced a grim toll of premature death and debilitating illness. After his account of the influenza, Gopalaswami’s narrative reaches its pivot: “We now reach the turning point,” he wrote, where after 1921, “we hear no longer about abnormal deaths.” From that point on, he argued, famine and mass epidemics ceased to be the killers that they were in India. Some of the credit he gave to the mobilizing power of Indian nationalism, some to administrative improvements that came from lessons the British had learned from earlier disasters. Gopalaswami presented a picture of India’s climate that was no longer the threat that it was: “Though the usual cycles of vicissitudes of the seasons continued and the brown and yellow belts of the country continued to suffer from droughts… there was no extraordinary calamity” in the years between the wars. Good policy was matched with good fortune, since “nature also seems to have been kindlier” in the two decades after 1921, with fewer major droughts. The Bengal famine of 1943 was a devastating reminder that famine could return to India. But it did not invalidate the longer-term pattern, and prevailing wartime conditions made it exceptional; rather, Bengal “gave a sharp jolt” to India’s leaders, and reminded them of the need for vigilance.23