Tropic of Chaos

by Christian Parenti

  Rigged state-assembly elections in 1987 ignited widespread violent opposition. By 1992, as the jihad in Afghanistan wound down, some mujahideen pivoted from Afghanistan to Kashmir. The struggle for Kashmiri independence began to morph into an “Islamist crusade to bring all of Kashmir under Pakistani control.”17 The NATO occupation of Afghanistan since 2001 has not siphoned off militants from Kashmir but instead reinvigorated the entire Central Asian conflict system. Now the brutal tempo of drought and flooding exacerbates the tensions.

  Bellicose Dams

  In 2008 India inaugurated the 450-megawatt Baglihar hydroelectric dam on the Chenab and began restricting the flow of water to Pakistan. The Chenab rises in Kashmir and drains into Pakistan. Pakistan tried to stop construction of the Baglihar Dam by appealing to the World Bank in 2005. The project went ahead nonetheless, after India agreed to reduce the dam’s height and promised not to restrict the river’s flow.18

  Yet, the Baglihar Dam is only one of several under construction.19 The more paranoid and bellicose Pakistani activists say India has already constructed forty-four dams on “Pakistan’s rivers” and has another fifty-two dams in process.20 India maintains it is merely harnessing the energy of the water or clearing rivers for navigation and is not impounding and diverting more than its share. Pakistan disputes this and points to the decreased flows in its rivers.

  In the summer of 2008, farmers along the Chenab reported lower levels of both the river and groundwater.21 Under the Indus Water Treaty of 1960, Pakistan is to receive fifty-five thousand cusecs of water. (A cusec is a volumetric unit for measuring the flow of liquids, equal to one cubic foot per second.) In recent years, Pakistan has protested that India is cutting the water flow to a mere thirteen thousand cusecs during the winter and a maximum of twenty-nine thousand cusecs during summer. This damages both agriculture and electrical power generation, which in turn harms industry and manufacturing.22

  To make matters worse, Pakistan reports declining rainfall and dangerous over-exploitation of groundwater. Water tables in Islamabad and Rawalpindi decreased between 1 and 2 meters per year, between 1982 and 2000. In Quetta, the parched capital of Balochistan, the water table is falling by 3.5 meters annually.23 According to Pakistan’s Water and Power Development Authority, the last 50 years have seen annual per capita water availability drop by almost 80 percent, from 5,600 to 1,038 cubic meters. By 2025 that figure is expected to fall to only 809 cubic meters per person, per year.24

  Now, the India-Pakistan tensions—born in part of a water dispute and exacerbated by climate change—are being displaced onto, and played out as, religious war. The Muslim fanatics of Pakistan talk of water, god, and violence all in the same breath.

  In 2010 the religious militant Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, head of the Jamaat-ut-Dawa (JuD) and founder of the outlawed Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist group linked to Pakistan’s military, accused India of “water terrorism” because it was building tunnels and dams on key Indus tributaries. India claims this does not impact water levels. But water volumes are decreasing, and Pakistani farmers have marched, warning, “ Water Flows or Blood.”25

  Now militants of the JuD are building a water movement. A meeting they called in May 2010 was attended by representatives of most major political parties, including the Pakistan People’s Party, Jamaat-e-Islami, and cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan’s Tehrik-e-Insaaf. At the meeting the JuD demanded the government stop India from building dams in Kashmir or give the “Kashmiri mujahideen” a “free hand” to address the problem.26 “We have two options, either to accept India’s water terrorism or wage a war against it,” said senior JuD leader Hafiz Khalid Waleed. A leader of another party stoked anti-Semitism by claiming, “Israeli engineers are overseeing the building of dams blocking Pakistan’s share of waters.”27

  Strategic Displacement

  The climate-exacerbated water tensions between these two nuclear-armed states also get displaced onto, and play out as, religious and ethnic war in Afghanistan. For Afghans, the enmity between their state and Pakistan is rooted in Afghanistan’s loss of territory to British India in 1893, when the Durand Line, now the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, was forced upon Afghanistan’s “Iron Emir” Abdul Racman Kahn. In that bargain, Afghanistan lost a large amount of its Pashtun territory. Among Afghans that wound still festers. For Pakistan the issue is India.

  India has courted Afghanistan with more than $1.3 billion in reconstruction aid since 2001. Its political influence expands via intelligence assets, a large diplomatic footprint, new hospitals, hydroelectric projects, and road building—lots of roads, some of them suspiciously close to the Pakistani border.

  Pakistan wants India’s ally, Afghanistan, to remain weak. So, as it has in Kashmir, it supports radical groups like the Taliban. Since the mid-1970s, Pakistan has been destabilizing its western neighbor. Even now Pakistani intelligence has links to elements of the Quetta Shura Taliban, the Haqqani network, and Hezb-i-Islami.

  Ahmed Rashid details how this support continued late into the Afghanistan war in his excellent Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. He writes, “The Pakistani army believed that Karzai’s interim government was profoundly anti-Pakistani. . . . To maintain its influence among the Taliban and Afghan Pashtuns, the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] developed a two-track policy of protecting the Taliban while handing over al Qaeda Arabs and other non-Afghans to the United States.” The United States remained suspicious, and so the Pakistani intelligence created “a new clandestine organization that would operate outside the military intelligence structures, in the civilian sphere. Former ISI trainers of the Taliban, retired Pashtun officers from the Army and especially the Frontier Corps, were rehired on contract. They set up offices in private houses in Peshawar, Quetta, and other cities, and maintained no links with the local ISI station chief or the Army. Most of these agents held down regular jobs working undercover as coordinators for Afghan refugees, bureaucrats, researchers at universities, teachers at colleges, and even aid workers. Others set up NGOs ostensibly to work with Afghan refugees.”28

  In 2007 it was discovered that much of the $5 billion the United States had spent bolstering the Pakistani military’s effort to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban had been stolen or diverted to build up the military’s posture vis-à-vis India. Meanwhile, elements of the Pakistani security forces continued working with the Taliban.

  When I interviewed Taliban fighters in Zabul Province, Afghanistan, in 2006, they described themselves as based in, and supported by, Pakistan.29 “Pakistan stands with us,” said one Talib. “And on that side of the border we have our offices. Pakistan is supporting us; they supply us. Our leaders are there collecting help. The people on this side of the border also support us.” A few days later I reached Taliban spokesman Dr. Mohammed Hanif (later captured), who also confirmed Pakistani support.30

  In June 2010, the ISI-Taliban link received further confirmation when the London School of Economics’ Development Studies Institute issued a scathingly detailed report documenting how the Pakistani spy agency controls the Taliban as best it can—and not always with Afghan enthusiasm or even consent. Written by Matt Waldman of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, the report described an ISI-Taliban relationship as going “far beyond contact and coexistence.” It outlines how the ISI exerts control, deals with opposition from more-independent Taliban commanders, and has provided transportation, intelligence, munitions, fire support, and so on.31

  Why does Pakistan do this?

  Here is how US Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair explained it in February 2010: “Militant groups are an important part of [Pakistan’s] strategic arsenal to counter India’s military and economic advantages.” 32 Pakistan’s proxies strike directly at Indian assets in Kashmir, India, and Afghanistan. Taliban terrorists have killed Indian engineers, police trainers, and diplomats working in Afghanistan. In July 2008, Taliban co
mmandos with alleged links to the Pakistani ISI bombed the Indian embassy in Kabul, killing 41 and wounding or maiming 130 others. In October 2008, another suicide car bomb hit the Indian embassy, killing 17 Afghans who were waiting in line for visas. In the autumn of 2009, men with links to Lashkar-e-Taiba attacked two Kabul guesthouses full of personnel from the Indian army’s medical and educational corps.33

  Triage

  Pakistan security forces will not end their support for the religious radicals who make war on India and Afghanistan. There will be no rollback of Taliban-style fundamentalism and no end to the struggle over Kashmir unless Pakistan’s security vis-à-vis India is guaranteed. That security, increasingly, pivots on the issue of water, and the 1960 Indus Water Treaty is now fraying badly.

  CHAPTER 12

  India’s Drought Rebels

  The man who has gotten everything he wants is all in favor of peace and order.

  —JAWAHARLAL NEHRU

  BARREN FORESTS COVER the hills of northern Andhra Pradesh on the edge of India’s Deccan Plateau. It is February, summertime for this region, and the deciduous trees have dropped their leaves in the dry heat. The landscape is peculiar: flat-topped hills with steep ridges run in long lines often marked by horizontal cliffs. Between these lie broad valley plains, containing occasional piles of volcanic rubble.1

  Life for the farmers here is difficult. “There is declining rain, and this affects yields, and the prices are still low,” says Linga Reddy Sama, a cotton farmer in the village of Jaamni, a few kilometers from the Sathnala Reservoir not far from the border of Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra states. Most of the people in this area are Adivasi, or “tribal people,” the Gonds of the Adilabad District. Others are Hindu migrants who came down from the state of Maharashtra.

  On that day in 2009, when I sat in the shade of a roughhewn wood arbor with a group of farmers, none of them had yet heard of greenhouse gases or anthropogenic climate change. However, they all thought the weather was changing. They said that in the last ten to fifteen years, regular drought and strangely timed rains had become very common. Many of them speculated that deforestation was the culprit.

  “This generation has done something wrong to affect the rains like this,” said a farmer named Mohan Rao. “ When I was a child, the forests came right up to here. You couldn’t see those hills; all of this was covered in trees. We used to have two rainy seasons. In June we planted irrespective of rain; we planted between the fifteenth and twenty-eighth, and by September we harvested.” He said typically the summer rains fall for three or four months and are then followed by lighter, shorter rains in the late autumn.

  That pattern is common across South India. The summer monsoon blows in off the Indian Ocean, usually making landfall in southern India about June 1. These mighty rains arrive because the rising summertime temperature of the Indian landmass sucks moist air in off the ocean. The moisture rises, cools, and falls as rain. The monsoon is split into two branches by India’s coastal mountain ranges, the Ghats, and most of the rain falls on western coastal India, leaving much of the central region quite dry. The monsoons travel north until September; then, as the sun begins moving south, the weather system begins its retreat back in that direction, creating the winter monsoon. The summer monsoons account for fourfifths of India’s total rainfall; the lighter, retreating or northwest monsoons deliver the rest. But things are less stable than in the past. The farmers say recent years have seen only light winter rains. That makes it impossible to plant a second cotton crop.

  To make matters worse, this area has been in the grip of a nasty little guerrilla war. India, the world’s largest democracy, is also home to one of the world’s oldest guerrilla movements—a Maoist insurgency known as the Naxalites. The Maoist ’s war began in 1967 in West Bengal. Their parties have fragmented and reunited as the war has ebbed and flowed.2 Today, this low-intensity conflict runs the length of eastern India and has a variety of geographically specific causes. In Bihar and Chattisgarh, the heart of the violence, large-scale mining on tribal lands is the immediate cause of troubles. But elsewhere, we find the catastrophic convergence.

  If one compares maps of precipitation with those of violence, a disturbing pattern emerges: where drought advances, so do Maoists. This geography runs down the Eastern Ghats, from Bihar and West Bengal, through Orissa and Chattisgarh, into Andhra Pradesh and even further south and west.This “Red Corridor” is also the drought corridor. Drought produces a chain reaction of debt, land loss, hunger, suicide, banditry, and Maoism.

  Why this neat correlation? The link is not “natural” but rather historically produced. In the years of the Naxal rise in Andhra Pradesh, drought was also intense: 1984–1985, 1986–1987, 1997–1998, 1999–2000, and 2002–2003 were all drought years.3

  As India’s weather patterns have grown more disjointed, so too have its economic policies shifted rightward to effectively abandon the peasant farming class and create greater inequality. If the catastrophic convergence in East Africa pivoted primarily upon Cold War militarism, then in India the story foregrounds economic neoliberalism. The Maoist fire burns not only due to drought but also because of free-market government policy. The rest of this chapter traces the connections between climate, economic history, and political violence in Andhra Pradesh.

  Deep Roots of Rebellion

  The language of the guerrillas permeates political discourse among the Gonds of Telangana, as the northern part of Andhra Pradesh is known. Repression makes the farmers reticent, but any discussion of the weather and economy soon yields hints of Naxalite ideology.

  “Jal, jungle, zameen,” said one of the farmers in Jamni village. It means “water, forest, land” and has been a rallying cry for the social organizations of the local Gonds. It is also a Naxalite battle cry, a defense of the commons against all who would encroach. But the concept goes back further, to a tribal rebellion against the nizam, the old Muslim ruler of Telangana. During the 1940s, tribals, led by Komaram Bheem, and communists rebelled against their feudal overlords. During the British Raj, Telangana remained nominally free as one of the semiautonomous princely states.

  Atop the old order sat the nizam, the Muslim head of state ruling from the city of Hyderabad. From the seventeenth century until 1948, a succession of nizams ruled, but always in league with a class of Hindi landlords, the dora. Together, the nizam and dora, the landed aristocracy, extracted heavy agricultural rents from the rural population but invested little in infrastructure. By the early twentieth century, the British had insinuated themselves into the nizam’s court and controlled its finances and external relations. Nonetheless, the nizam still did well. In fact, the last nizam, Osman Ali Khan Bahadur, who ruled from 1911 to 1948, was for a time the wealthiest man in the world and even made the cover of Time in 1937.4 But in 1948, with the cataclysm of Partition as backdrop, the arrogant noble overplayed his hand when he dallied during accession negotiations with India.

  As with Kashmir, newly independent India saw it as entirely unfeasible to accept a somewhat hostile Muslim-ruled state wedged into its southeast. On September 13, 1948, negotiations ended when Jawaharlal Nehru decided unilaterally and by force that Telangana would join India. The massive Indian army rolled in and crushed the nizam’s palace guard, plus a supporting cast of Muslim irregulars called Razakars. This four-day “war” was called Operation Polo in a mocking reference to the nizam’s many well-appointed playing fields. Thus, the Hyderabad state was annexed to the Republic of India.

  For Telangana farmers, however, the fundamentals did not change. The region remained isolated and economically stagnant, and its peasants continued to live in a matrix of risk, caught between the vicissitudes of markets, state policies, and weather. The last of these factors, weather, tends to matter most in the arid and semiarid regions that cover 60 percent of India.5

  The various Naxalite factions trace their origins to the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and an obscure 1967 massacre in the eponymous West Bengal village of Naxalb
ari, in the famous tea-growing subdivision of Darjeeling.6 In 1969, the Naxalites congealed into a political party called the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), but the party was outlawed. That forced the Naxals to hide in remote backwaters where they tended to fragment into factions, without centralized leadership.7 From the beginning, Naxals were found in West Bengal, Bihar, and Andhra Pradesh.8

  Naxalism Now

  Over the course of the conversation with struggling farmers in Jaamni, it finally comes out that this village has had Naxalite-connected mass-based organizations. Through these movements, the villagers have repeatedly protested, staging darna, or traffic stops, to demand government investment in their water systems. Collectively, they want borehole wells and lift irrigation to bring water from the Sathnala Reservoir. Individually, many of them just want to leave for Hyderabad and its promise of work on constructions sites or to go north to Maharashtra, where they can work as agricultural laborers on large farms.

  The Naxalite war is a strange affair that mixes open political advocacy by students and urban intellectuals with nonviolent direct action by peasant organizations (such as road blockades), and the terrorist methods of the guerrilla cadre (such as assassinations and mining of roads). The Naxals hardly seem capable of taking state power, but neither did their fight wind down with the end of the Cold War. In recent years the state has pushed back with a classic, increasingly violent counterinsurgency, hunting down and killing both insurgents and their civilian supporters. The war is creating centrifugal forms of violence that leave the social fabric weakened and infected with corruption, crime, and pathology.