Unruly Waters

by Sunil Amrith

  Displacement never went unchallenged. In December 1950, ten thousand villagers from an area soon to be submerged by the Tungabhadra Dam came together in a public meeting. They issued a list of demands, topped by their demand for adequate compensation for their loss of land and income. Among those who needed to be resettled were not only registered landowners, but also “houseless coolies, weavers, and ryots [cultivators]” who faced the “difficult present circumstances.” Two years later, the government offered them a better deal: 30 percent over and above the amounts awarded by the Land Acquisition officers, but only to those “who withdraw their cases from the civil courts.” In this rare willingness to compromise lies a clue to just how many people fought their dispossession in the courts of independent India. A few months after the meeting of Tungabhadra villagers, a touring official wrote to Hyderabad’s minister of revenue: “I told the people gathered in a pretty large number at Manur that they should not stand in the way of the construction of the project but should consider it a great sacrifice on their part, since by the sufferings, if at all, of a small number the country is going to prosper.”57

  This was the crux of the utilitarian argument—the greatest good for the greatest number—that authorized India’s great water projects at any cost: in families displaced, in villages drowned and futures ruined. Through most of the 1950s, India’s courts agreed. When the Maharaja of Darbhanga, Kameshwar Singh, tried to resist the acquisition of part of his Bihar estate, the High Court ruled that “the Legislature is the best judge of what is good for the community… and it is not possible for this Court to say that there was no public purpose behind the acquisition contemplated by the impugned state.”58 Convinced of its mission, the Indian state felt little need even to document the displaced.

  The true scale of displacement would only become clear later on. Through the painstaking work of activists like Walter Fernandes and scholars like Sanjoy Chakravorty, working through fragmentary archives and court cases, we now have a sense of the numbers of people that India’s dams chased from their homes. From independence to the present day, that number is likely to exceed 40 million. It bears repeating: 40 million people in India have been displaced by dams alone. More than 50 million people have been displaced by the state’s development projects writ large. India’s adivasis have borne the brunt of this displacement, and they are also least likely to have received any form of compensation. One reason that almost every official figure vastly underestimates the numbers displaced is that they count only those who own land that has been acquired by the state through compulsory purchase. They do not include the large number of landless people in India who “depend on the acquired land for income”—tenants, wage laborers, service providers. The latter group have seldom if ever received compensation. The other way in which the true losses sustained by displaced communities exceed official calculations is that dams often submerged common property—forests, grazing grounds, and other grounds considered “wasteland” by the state. The commons were already under strain by the end of the nineteenth century, more likely than ever to be enclosed and possessed as private property—but the poorest groups in society, adivasis above all, still depended on them in the 1950s. Through a painstaking assembly of data, Chakravorty has estimated that water projects are by far the greatest cause of population displacement in independent India. The “core problem,” he writes, is that “the population that benefitted from the development projects is fundamentally different from the population that was displaced or disrupted.” The benefits of large dams have gone downstream; power from hydroelectric plants has gone to cities and factories and to farmers who “still have land [on which] to run their pumps.”59

  The environmental consequences of large dams have been considerable: forests have been drowned, soils salinated, rivers blocked in midflow, deltas starved of silt, natural drainage hindered—leading, ironically, to more severe flooding. But the sheer scale of the impact of large dams on Asia’s ecology of water would only become clear toward the end of the twentieth century.60

  Nehru himself began to have a change of heart at the end of the 1950s. “For some time past,” he said, speaking about India’s dam fever, “I have been beginning to think that we are suffering from what we may call ‘disease of gigantism.’” He proceeded to tell his audience of engineers that “the small irrigation projects, the small industries and the small plants for electric power will change the face of the country, far more than a dozen big projects in half a dozen places.”61 But a massive failure in the monsoons precipitated a shift in political priorities.

  VI

  The United Nations’ Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE) started life in Shanghai in 1947. The commission set about collecting information on economic conditions across Asia. Its first survey came out in 1948—an “incomparably more thorough and informative account of the economic life of the region” than any ever attempted—and painted a picture of a continent in ruins after the war.62 ECAFE’s original regional members were Pakistan, India, Burma, Thailand, the Philippines, and China. At a time when much of Asia remained under imperial control, “nonregional” members—the imperial powers and the Soviet Union—had a major presence, as did “associate,” nonvoting, members that were still under colonial rule or postwar occupation—Ceylon Malaya, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, and Japan. The intersection of Asia’s postwar revolutions with the early Cold War created immediate political tensions. After the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949, ECAFE decamped from Shanghai to Bangkok; like the rest of the UN system, it recognized the Republican government in Taiwan as the rightful representative of China.

  Asia in the 1940s was torn three ways: between colonial powers still clinging to power, newly independent states hungry for the technology and financing that would allow them to realize their grand plans, and the new superpowers in competition for their allegiance. ECAFE’s deputy director, the American C. Hart Schaaf, made the bold claim that, amid these tensions, ECAFE was primarily the creature of new Asian states. He insisted that “in the most extensive and populous region on earth,” the “most conspicuous political fact” was “a new dynamic nationalism”; he suggested that ECAFE had not only “witnessed” but also “facilitated” this movement. One indication of this stance was ECAFE’s appointment of an Indian director, P. Lokanathan, a Madras University economist who had been editor of the influential periodical Eastern Economist. Invoking the judgment of an imagined “future historian of ECAFE,” Hart Schaaf argued that ECAFE’s role in the region would in time be seen as vital.63

  Asia faced a “revolution of rising expectations” that cut across revolutionary and nonrevolutionary, capitalist and Communist states. ECAFE embraced water as a major regional priority, and one that could bring people together: it was an area where tangible results could be achieved. In 1950 the organization convened a meeting in Bangkok on flood control in Asia. Hydraulic engineers, city planners, and hydrologists from across the region came together to compare notes; through the mediation of international agencies, “often… a particular national project becomes regional.” In his search for a metaphor that would explain the benefits of regional cooperation, Hart Schaaf turned to “the concept of an act or event which sets in motion a cumulative process of great momentum,” adding that it was “around [this idea] that Lord Keynes and others have constructed their thinking about the ‘multiplier.’”64 ECAFE’s achievements were piecemeal, perhaps relatively small, but they were not insignificant. The agency epitomized the ideal known as “functionalism,” which Lilienthal had put forth in response to the Indus dispute: that technical matters, from public health to water management, could be removed from the political arena and solved cooperatively by experts whose professional camaraderie transcended geopolitical fault lines. But the politics of national sovereignty, like the geopolitics of superpower rivalry, could not be avoided. The very absence of the People’s Republic of China from the ECAFE table mad
e the organization’s claims to a comprehensive regional perspective ring hollow. In 1954, for the first time, ECAFE’s Economic Survey included “Mainland China,” compiling statistics from official sources in the PRC: it was among ECAFE’s most keenly read publications, as Asian planners, economists, and statesmen had the occasion to compare their countries’ rates of “progress” with that of the revolutionary behemoth.65

  The curiosity of Asia’s leaders and engineers about China—fascination combined with suspicion—went beyond the capacity of an ECAFE report to satisfy. Nowhere more so than in China’s largest neighbor, India. The government of India had been among the first to recognize the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Nehru’s first ambassador to China, the historian K. M. Panikkar, was keenly impressed by China’s revolution, and by Mao. The Chinese government’s invasion and annexation of Tibet in October 1950 alarmed and surprised India, which regarded a semi-independent and friendly Tibet as a buffer along its border with China. Nehru came under pressure from others within the Congress to take a harder line; but a realistic sense of India’s inability to intervene prevailed. Relations between the two countries warmed in the 1950s in line with Nehru’s foreign policy of nonalignment with either bloc in the Cold War. Among the Indians most keen to learn about developments in China were the country’s leading hydraulic engineers. In May 1954, Kanwar Sain, chairman of India’s Central Water Commission, and K. L. Rao embarked on an official mission to China to inspect and to report back on China’s water projects—flood control in particular. Sain and Rao were among the first outsiders to see, firsthand, China’s hydrological experiment; and because they were favorably disposed toward the Chinese government, they had extensive access to information.

  Sain and Rao arrived in China on May 4, 1954, and stayed two months. They spent much of their time on the water, making many parts of their journey along the Yangzi by boat. Sain and Rao were chief protagonists of India’s own colossal efforts to control water; the scale of work in China dazzled them. They undertook their tour of China half a century after the Indian Irrigation Commission had traveled through India in search of water. Theirs was part of the same quest: the famines of the late nineteenth century had unleashed in India a desperate and continuing search for sources of water to mitigate dependence on the monsoon. Sain and Rao were trained in the colonial tradition of Indian water engineering. But now they represented an independent nation, and for inspiration they looked not to Europe but to revolutionary China. Consider the contrast between the two tours: where the irrigation commission traveled with a retinue of servants in a specially chartered train, Sain and Rao were given strictly limited foreign exchange. They were accompanied by just two interpreters and two officials. They were impressed by the modesty, the lack of ostentation they saw—and by the absence of the tight social hierarchies of India, to say nothing of caste. Another thing puzzled Sain and Rao. For generations, Indian intellectuals had believed that the most fundamental bond between India and China was Buddhism. But “to our repeated questions about the Buddha” came a standard response: “Chairman Mao is our Buddha.” In a new era, India and China needed a new language, a new basis for their interaction—it came naturally to two hydraulic engineers to see that basis in the shared problem of water.66

  Distinguishing his perspective from the negativity about China that he had imbibed reading the accounts of “foreign diplomats,” Sain commented on the high standards of sanitation he saw everywhere. An austere Indian engineer in the tradition of Visvesvaraya, Sain noted with satisfaction “an absence of headlines in the newspapers highlighting murder, scandals, or disgraceful lives.” Most of all, he was impressed by the “clear-cut vision” state officials had of a “new China of their dreams,” which in turn instilled in the people “unbound faith and confidence in the wisdom, goodness, and creative policy of the government.” Sain contrasted the Shanghai he had seen in 1939, on his way home from the United States—a cosmopolitan and decadent city, in his mind—with the city he saw in 1954. “The bright lights had gone out,” he wrote, but he meant this as a compliment. Shanghai now looked “more typically Chinese,” shorn of Western concessions and colonial settlements. Like so many other port cities along the littorals of the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, it was now “integrated [more] closely with the economy of the interior rather than dependent on foreign luxury trade.”67

  Sain’s and Rao’s report contains an extended list of every Chinese official they met, from ministers to field engineers to water scientists at the College of Hydraulic Engineering for Eastern China, in Nanjing. They were struck by the quality of China’s hydraulic engineers. They delighted in the firm emphasis given to technical education in China. They praised the Chinese capacity for improvisation, building huge dams from local materials when imports were in short supply. Traveling through China, Sain’s and Rao’s thoughts turned naturally to comparisons with India. There were clear differences in the challenges each country faced. One sharp contrast between India and China was climatic—once again, what made India distinctive was the monsoon. “Unlike India, hemmed in by the Himalayas,” they wrote, “China is open to Central Asia”; this meant that, in the summer, “China unlike India is not the single objective of the air circulation of a whole ocean.” China received “less heavy and less concentrated rainfall” than India, and its rain was “much more equally spread across the interior.” By contrast, China’s rivers were more menacing than India’s, more prone to burst their banks. India’s great need was irrigation; China’s was flood control. Both countries eyed an industrial future, and the promise of hydroelectric power attracted them both.68

  India and China shared a sense of urgency. They shared a conviction that water held the key to security and prosperity—these translated into an addiction to mammoth projects. In both countries, bigger was better. Just as the pamphlets of India’s Central Water Commission and the documentaries of its Films Division extolled the pace and the scale of dam building in India, so too did the Chinese state and its engineers take pride in their compression of time. In the five years since the liberation, they boasted, “250 major and thousands of minor irrigation projects” had begun in China, adding 9.2 million acres of irrigated land. Most striking to the Indian visitors were the “remarkable speeds of construction” China had achieved through the mobilization of labor on a scale “unknown in recent times.”69

  Soon after the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, Mao’s government made the Yellow River a priority. Known for centuries as “China’s sorrow,” the Yellow River was notoriously prone to flooding. Within a year after the liberation, both the Huai and Yellow rivers experienced catastrophic floods. In the interests of national reconstruction, they had to be tamed and conquered. Where India drew expertise and aid from both the Americans and the Soviets, and where Nationalist water engineers in China in the 1920s and 1930s had maintained close links with the United States and Germany, after 1949 Chinese hydraulic engineers combined Russian technical assistance with local ingenuity. In parallel with India’s race to build Bhakra Nangal, the most ambitious Chinese dam was the Sanmenxia on the Yellow River.

  Like Bhakra, the Sanmenxia had its origins in the 1930s; like Bhakra, a sense of urgency that followed the revolutionary upheaval of the 1940s brought it to the top of the agenda. The dam was located near the border between Shanxi and Henan, designed by Soviet engineers. The Soviets proposed a concrete gravity dam across the Yellow River, with a reservoir 360 meters above sea level. The initial plan would have displaced more than 800,000 people from their homes, and flooded 3,500 square kilometers of land. As plans for the dam went into circulation, between 1955 and 1957, Chinese experts debated it at length. During a fleeting moment of political openness under Mao’s “Hundred Flowers” campaign, hydraulic engineer Huang Wanli—trained as a meteorologist at Cornell and Iowa in the 1930s, and then an aide at the Tennessee Valley Authority—raised the alarm. He argued in favor of a lower dam, with a smaller reservoir. He hinte
d that the Soviet plans had not undertaken a detailed analysis of costs and benefits. He felt that a smaller scheme, which displaced fewer people, would be less risky. He feared that the dam’s design was no match for the heavy loads of silt that the Yellow River carried: the danger, as he saw it, was that the dam’s reservoir would silt up, making the dam useless—or, worse, dangerous.

  The Hundred Flowers campaign was short-lived; as people spoke more freely, Mao disliked what they said. His retribution was swift. Huang was condemned and humiliated. He was deemed a “rightist” and sent for “re-education.”70 His predictions proved uncomfortably accurate. Within a few years of the Sanmenxia Dam’s completion in 1960, it was clear that its reservoir was clogged with sediment. As Sino-Soviet relations soured after 1960, it became easier to blame a faulty Soviet design for the dam’s problems. Acknowledging the scale of the problem, Zhou Enlai ordered a reconstruction and renovation of the scheme, at huge cost. At the same time, the human cost of the dam was immense. Just as Bhakra and Hirakud began the decades-long displacement of Indians by large dams, Sanmenxia led to the forcible relocation of an estimated 280,000 people.

  Other aspects of China’s experience had no parallel in India, as Sain and Rao were quick to notice. The mobilization of labor in China was on a scale unknown in India, and this also set China on a path to water engineering quite different from the one established by their Soviet allies. Mao had prevailed in the Chinese civil war because of his stunning success in mobilizing popular support and enthusiasm—first in the vanguard of the anti-Japanese resistance, and then deployed against Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army. This commitment to mass action never left Mao. It shaped deeply his government’s approach to water management. The first achievement of the people’s energies, mobilized at the county level, village by village, was the two-hundred-kilometer People’s Victory Canal, linking the Yellow River and the Wei. The People’s Daily ran features on the exertions of model workers who had broken records and distinguished themselves in devotion to the cause. By the mid-1950s, as China’s collectivization drive gathered pace, Mao’s government laid ever-greater emphasis on irrigation from the ground up. This fervor reached a peak during the Great Leap Forward, when every county was set to work building its own dams and irrigation ditches. Zhou Enlai made a rare official acknowledgment of the disastrous consequences of this approach in 1966, when he said, “I fear that we have made a mistake in harnessing and accumulating water and cutting down so much forest cover… Some mistakes can be remedied in a day or a year, but mistakes in the field of water conservancy and forestry cannot be reversed for years.”71