Unruly Waters

by Sunil Amrith

  Of course, much of this took place after Sain’s and Rao’s visit. They saw no signs of danger in China’s quest for water. In table after table they compared China with India—how much concrete their dams consumed, how much water their reservoirs could hold. The speed of canal excavation was where China’s achievements were most dramatic in comparison with India’s. The Indian engineers’ conclusion was wistful: “In India, where similar human force is available, it should be possible to attain similar speeds… by proper organization and creation of enthusiasm among the people”; they chose not to mention that “proper organization” would have demanded a level of coercion that the Indian government was unwilling (or unable) to muster.72

  The most revealing part of Sain’s and Rao’s report is a verbatim record of a speech by China’s director of water conservancy, given at the end of their stay, in which he sought to address the questions that had arisen during their visit. Director Hao positioned the People’s Republic firmly within an ancient tradition of water management in China. “The record of exploitation of water by the Chinese people,” he wrote, “dates back to ancient times.” But under the “corrupt” and “feudalistic” rule of a decaying empire, compounded by the failures of the Nationalist government, “the hydraulic constructions [of China] were seriously ruined owing to long years of negligence.” The Communist state claimed the mantle of imperial power over water—it was a revival as well as a revolution.73 China’s archives of water control were on display everywhere the visitors went: at Tsinghua University, they were shown an eight-hundred-year-old text “containing excellent plans” of the Yellow River. Hao spent as much time telling his Indian visitors about small projects as he did extolling the gargantuan ones. His was a story of repair and renovation as much as creation. He spoke of the myriad ponds and dikes that conveyed water to the fields of southern China. He spoke of the spread of simple technology—a “Liberation-type waterwheel” that outdid the age-old technologies still in use.74

  Sain and Rao returned to India filled with enthusiasm. For all that they grasped the complexity of China’s approach to water, their message back home was a simple one: it was a message of scale, speed, and control. Their main “lesson” from the Yellow River for the management of the notoriously flood-prone Kosi River of Bihar was the lesson of centralized command; China’s intensive emphasis on small projects fell by the wayside in their accounts. Soon after his return Sain was summoned by Nehru, and “closeted with him for about an hour.” Nehru, soon to depart for China himself, asked for Sain’s impressions. Listening closely, he pressed harder: how would Sain describe China in one sentence? Sain recalls that he gave Nehru an unscripted answer: “At present China is behind India in every field, but I feel that at the rate they are progressing, China may be ahead of India in 10-15 years.” Nehru “made no comment,” Sain remembered, “but I could see from his face that he did not relish this reply.”75

  India’s most eminent water engineers returned from China with a sense that the two countries shared fundamental problems, and that there were lessons they could learn from China. But there were ominous portents, too. In his speech, Director Hao had described how China’s water projects had been “extended to the border regions of our fraternal minorities and helped to promote national unity.” There was never an attempt on the Chinese side to disguise the fact that water was intrinsic to political power. The conquest of water meant the conquest of space. With the control over water came the projection of state power over peoples with a different vision of water’s uses: the people of Xinjiang, the people of Tibet. Unspoken was the thought that some day the “border regions” in question may include China’s borders with India.

  Sain and Rao faced a problem when they returned with the first-ever maps of China’s water projects to be seen outside China. The Indian Ministry of External Affairs was rankled by what Sain and Rao had missed: the maps they had been given by Chinese officials claimed as Chinese territory a large swath of the borderland that the Indian state saw as integral to India. The maps were destroyed, redrawn to accord with India’s understanding of its territorial boundaries. Sain later wrote in his memoirs that he was grateful this had been caught before the volume was published—if it had not, it would have been a source of “great embarrassment” a few years later, when India and China went to war over just those borders.

  One of Sain’s enduring impressions of his trip had been “how the Chinese people loved and admired the Russians.” “The bookstalls are generally full of Russian books and journals,” he wrote; Russian expertise was offered without condescension and without strings—or so it seemed. He had the opportunity to see for himself a year later, when he led an Indian delegation to the Soviet Union, sponsored by the United Nations’ Technical Assistance Administration. Again, the visit of Indian technical experts was followed by an official visit by Nehru. Sain wrote a sweeping account of just how rapid the Soviet Union’s economic progress had been since the revolution. Inspecting its hydraulic projects, he concluded that “the interests of the power engineers have been accorded pride of place,” a dominance he traced back to Lenin’s emphasis on electrification as the key to socialism—flood control and irrigation, India’s and China’s other great needs, were less valued. But Sain’s conclusion was clear: China had much more directly to teach India than the Soviets.

  AS CHINA’S EXPERIENCES INSPIRED INDIA’S ENGINEERS, SO INDIA’S experiences became a model for the rest of Asia. A year after his visit to the Soviet Union, ECAFE’s director, Lokanathan, commissioned Sain to join a UN mission to survey the Mekong. Like the Brahmaputra, the Salween, and the Yangzi, the Mekong originates on the Tibetan Plateau. In the twentieth century, it has been Asia’s quintessential “transboundary river,” running through China, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam before spilling into the South China Sea. The Mekong, the ECAFE commission noted with understatement, was “a perennial river of great importance.” That importance was clear to the US government, which maintained an escalating financial and military presence in South Vietnam after the end of the French-Vietnamese war in 1954, which had resulted in the division of the country. The US Bureau of Reclamation, the domestic agency responsible for hydraulic engineering, had a global presence by the 1950s. Its engineers surveyed Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia, looking for hydroelectric potential. They had surveyed the Mekong, too, but their initial verdict was lukewarm.76

  Convinced that a substantively international effort was needed, the UN went back. Sain was joined on the commission by Y. Kubota, the president of Japan’s Nippon Koei corporation; G. Duval, a former colonial official; M. Sakaita, an engineering geologist from Japan; and the Dutchman W. J. van der Oord, a navigation specialist. They toured the Mekong in April and May 1956. The commission placed its faith in two large hydroelectric projects, one on the Tonle Sap in Cambodia, the other at Nam Lik in Laos. “The prick has gone too deep to be halted”—this is how Sain described his sense that large-scale hydraulic engineering was inevitable, now, in the Mekong as elsewhere in Asia, given the bold claims that had been made on behalf of big dams, and given the hunger for progress and development that he saw wherever he traveled. The following year, Sain joined another commission coordinated by ECAFE and led by Raymond Wheeler, former chief engineer of the US Army Corps of Engineers. Wheeler’s account of the mission harked back to the language of colonial exploration. “There were no maps of the country,” he wrote, “we had to make them… Nobody had any data on river flow, or even any idea how to keep data.” Wheeler described the Mekong as “truly a virgin river.” Historian David Biggs notes that the commission proposed “a cascade of hydroelectric dams and irrigation schemes in the valley from the Chinese border southward to the Mekong Delta.” The Mekong commission signified an opening for private interests who stood to profit from the dam-building rush; Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese companies, in particular, stepped in with materials and personnel.77

  The Mekong commission was quickly overshadow
ed by the escalation of American involvement in Indochina. The US Bureau of Reclamation placed its faith in what it called “impact type projects,” the grandest of them being the Pa Mong Dam, upstream of the Laotian capital, Vientiane. Vast, ambitious, planned to the last detail—the dam never materialized, as the United States became mired in military conflict in Vietnam that engulfed Vietnam’s neighbors as well.78 There was a close bond between American support for dam building in Asia and American strategic imperatives in the Cold War. But Kanwar Sain—a patriotic Indian engineer at the pinnacle of his profession, enamored of China but with close personal and professional links to the US Bureau of Reclamation—chose to spend a decade of his career with the Mekong commission, trying to coordinate the development of Asia’s most international river. In his memoirs, he hints that the material reward of working for the United Nations was one clear incentive. But his motivations went deeper than the money. Sain believed, like so many of his generation, that taming the waters was a goal beyond national sovereignty—and beyond ideology. Working for ECAFE alongside many former colonial civil servants and engineers now turned development consultants, Sain held to a vision of Asian nations working together to claim their rightful place in the community of nations. In a memoir that is detached, even clinical, in tone, a rare moment of emotion comes when Sain describes his “pilgrimage” to the site of Angkor Wat, in Siem Reap, Cambodia, while on his first Mekong mission: “I was very much moved by the ancient glory and culture of India reflected in Angkor Wat,” he wrote.79 Just as many of India’s water engineers presented their “new temples” as standing within an ancient historical tradition of water engineering, so Sain appealed to a deep history of cultural exchange across borders to provide ballast for his vision of an Asia united by water—or by water engineers.

  In a sense, Sain’s faith was eventually vindicated. The Mekong commission outlasted the American war. It received a new lease of life in the 1990s and now stands as one of the most important, if not always the most effective, river-regulating bodies in the world.

  VII

  The “multiplier” that ECAFE invoked to justify its work on cross-border river valley development could have the opposite effect: as projects and ambitions escalated, so did the potential for conflict. After a high point of warmth in their relationship in the mid-1950s—the era of “Hindi-Chini bhai bhai” (India and China are brothers)—the territorial conflict between India and China intensified. The unmarked and mountainous frontier between India and China became contentious as both states intensified their presence in the borderlands. New infrastructure brought border regions within easier reach of Beijing and Delhi; military forces were stationed there; migration from the plains brought new settlers, often ethnically distinct from the people who inhabited the uplands. The spark for conflict was the construction of a Chinese road linking Xinjiang and Tibet—a road that passed within what India considered to be its territory. Indian intelligence did not find out about the road until 1957, by which time its construction was well advanced. India insisted on the sanctity of agreements made under the British; the Chinese charged that India now stood as the beneficiary of British imperial aggression. In a pained and lengthy letter to Zhou Enlai, which was later published by the Indian government, Nehru countered that “the boundaries of India were… settled for centuries by history, geography, custom and tradition.” He turned, then, to water: “The water-parting formed by the crest of the Himalayas is the natural frontier” between India and China, “accepted for centuries as the boundary.”80

  Water was not, by 1960, perceived as a source of conflict, but recently declassified Indian sources show that there were fears about the future. Rumors were rife. In exile in India after the failed Tibetan uprising of 1959, the Dalai Lama raised the alarm in a public meeting. He charged that the Chinese state was “planning to build high dams across the Brahmaputra and Indus group of rivers in the Tibet region,” and that the Chinese “had these schemes in view ever since they came to Tibet.” He asked, pointedly, “how far such projects undertaken unilaterally would be in the interests of India.” The Indian foreign ministry responded cautiously to a report on the Dalai Lama’s speech. “We have… no information so far about any proposal of the Chinese government to construct dams across the Indus or Brahmaputra before the rivers leave Tibet,” one official wrote, but he saw the “necessity of being alert in this manner.” Indian officials were well aware that “there is a great fall in the Brahmaputra just before it enters India” with “potential for power and irrigation.” But they were reassured by the thought that it would take “huge resources to make anything of it”; any plans the Chinese had “will certainly take a long time.”81 The Indian trade mission in Gyantse, Tibet—which clearly doubled as a source of intelligence—concurred. They reported to Apa Pant, the chief political officer in the Indian protectorate of Sikkim, that “construction of dams and reservoirs on the river is likely to involve huge resources including manpower, which the Chinese authorities will be able to utilize only after they have brought in large numbers of Chinese for settlement.”82

  The Indian Ministry of External Affairs was concerned enough to involve colleagues in the irrigation department. In a letter marked “top secret,” K. K. Framji, chief engineer of India’s irrigation department, reassured the foreign ministry that “substantial or imminent diversions by China for irrigation purposes in the Tibet region do not appear to be practicable.” The construction of storage dams for power generation might even benefit India as they “would be helpful in mitigating floods in Assam or East Pakistan.” But he then raised a darker prospect: “If the Chinese hydro-electric schemes are so projected as to divert substantial quantities of Brahmaputra flows away from the present course into adjoining valleys,” this would be “a significant loss of valuable water resources to India, and even more so, to Pakistan.” He concluded on a hopeful note: “No doubt we will be given timely information regarding any observed or reported activities towards any such diversion.”83

  Events soon overtook these concerns about the future of water. In 1959, India infuriated the Chinese government by granting asylum to the Dalai Lama; from that point, tensions on the border between India and China ran high. Both sides built up their military forces along the border; India pursued a “Forward Policy,” stationing troops north of the McMahon line, the 1914 frontier that had marked the boundary between Tibet and British India. Taking the Indians by surprise, Chinese military forces launched attacks on both the eastern and western flanks of the border region on October 20, 1962. As the world was transfixed by the Cuban missile crisis, Indian and Chinese forces fought in the high Himalayas. But it was no contest: the Indian military was no match for Chinese forces, who won decisive victories. A month after the offensive, the Chinese declared a unilateral cease-fire and withdrew their forces to the “line of actual control”—or the de facto border.

  The war with China marked a humiliating defeat for India. The Indian army was ill-equipped, ill-prepared; China’s invasion seemed to mock the effort Nehru had put into fostering good relations between the two countries. Nehru’s political legitimacy at home was battered. With hindsight, 1962 appears as the beginning of the end of the Nehru era in Indian politics. In the opening pages of his first novel, Such a Long Journey, set in Bombay of the 1960s and 1970s, Rohinton Mistry evokes a widespread sense that “the war with China froze Jawaharlal Nehru’s heart, then broke it. He never recovered from what he perceived to be Chou En-lai’s betrayal.”84 Nehru’s frank, even desperate, plea for American military assistance in the war dented his commitment to nonalignment in the Cold War. India’s defeat on the international stage coincided with a rising chorus of criticism at home, raising questions about the economic and political strategy Nehru had pursued in the fifteen years since independence. Was there a better way?

  JAWAHARLAL NEHRU DIED IN 1964. HIS WILL AND TESTAMENT EXPLAINED why he wanted his ashes to be scattered in the Ganges upon his death. “I have been attached to the Ga
nga and the Jumna rivers in Allahabad ever since my childhood,” he wrote, “and, as I have grown older, this attachment has also grown.” The Ganges, he wrote, “is the river of India, beloved of her people”: bearer of “her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats.” Evoking the identity of the river with the very geography of India, Nehru wrote that each glimpse of the Ganges “reminds me of the snow-covered peaks and the deep valleys of the Himalayas, which I have loved so much, and of the rich and vast plains below, where my life and work have been cast.” Nehru was adamant that “my desire to have a handful of my ashes thrown into the Ganga at Allahabad has no religious significance.” Water still had imaginative power to evoke the sacred, to shape nations’ perceptions of their limits. The Ganges remained the essence of India, the Himalayas India’s natural boundary, even in an age when India’s “new temples” were large dams.