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KAUTILYA
Forty
And Going Strong
India
and Pakistan fight when they should be marking a historic anniversary
By
Jairam Ramesh
How
ironical that just as the petulant India-Pakistan war of words at the
United Nations completes its course, the 40th anniversary of the Indus
Waters Treaty falls on September 19. Alas, this occasion will pass unsung.
The treaty
took eight long years to negotiate. It was finally signed in Karachi in
1960 between Ayub Khan and Jawaharlal Nehru. Broadly, it gave the western
rivers-Indus, Jhelum and Chenab-to Pakistan and the eastern rivers - Ravi,
Beas and Sutlej-to India. The definitive account of how this treaty came
into being is contained in N.D. Gulhati's The Indus Waters Treaty (1973)
and in Edward Mason and Robert Asher's The World Bank Since Bretton Woods
(1973).
 Partition
immediately spawned the Indus dispute. Pakistan's fear was that since
all its rivers originated in India, it would be held to ransom. An initial
agreement, bilaterally negotiated, had been reached on May 4, 1948. But
soon a stalemate ensued with Pakistan claiming that it had been forced
to sign under duress and that India was interfering with water supplies
to its canals.
In February
1951, David Lillienthal, a former chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority
(TVA) and of the US Atomic Energy Commission visited the subcontinent
to study how the Indus waters problem could be resolved. Nehru and Lillienthal
were great admirers of each other. The TVA was the model for one of Nehru's
"temples of modern India", namely the Damodar Valley Corporation
(DVC) launched in May 1948. While in New York in October 1949, Nehru had
met with Lillienthal who had emerged as an ardent champion of democratic
India then seen to be in fierce competition with communist China and in
danger of losing.
Lillienthal
wrote a highly influential article entitled "Another Korea in the
Making" in the journal Colliers in August 1951. He drew attention
to the potentially explosive Indus dispute and called for American and
World Bank involvement to arrive at a solution. For good measure he added
that "unless a better answer on water is forthcoming, even if the
Kashmir plebiscite could be held, peace would not come".
To cut a
long story short, Lillienthal's enormous clout led the World Bank to take
a hands-on role as a mediator with full US backing. However, his idea
of a TVA-like Indus Engineering Corporation to be operated by India and
Pakistan together to develop the Indus system in an integrated fashion
was rejected as being impractical. The bank's president Eugene Black tenaciously
pursued an alternative agreement. His day-to-day team included a British
civil servant, Sir William Iliff, and a US army engineer, Lt-General Raymond
Wheeler. This team doggedly kept the negotiations going, mostly in Washington
DC, providing technical inputs and dangling the promise of project aid.
What is more, even as the treaty was being pursued, annual agreements
kept getting signed. This helped to maintain a fragile peace and kept
the talks on course.
Indus
Treaty Part II: The treaty was drafted primarily by Iliff but the
key insight was Wheeler's who looked at the map in 1952 and came up with
the simple solution of partition that formed the basis of the final agreement.
That the arbitration clause has never been invoked is a testimony to the
treaty's durability. For four decades, the Indus Commission has continued
meeting each year unmindful of wars and other conflicts.
Pakistan
has gained immensely by the Tarbela dam on the Indus and the Mangla dam
on the Jhelum, by numerous barrages and link canals, by remodelling of
pre-Partition river works and by substantial hydroelectric capacity. In
India, the Bhakra Nangal project that made the Green Revolution possible
was facilitated. The Rajasthan Canal, that has transformed a desert even
though it has not yet been fully completed, came into being. But we have
not made full use of the treaty. Projects like the Thein Dam on the Ravi
await completion. Only about 60 per cent of the permissible limit has
been brought under irrigation from the Indus, Chenab and Jhelum. Just
about 15 per cent of the 8,825 MW of hydro-electric power potential on
these three rivers has been harnessed. Optimal utilisation of the Ravi
river and effective drainage in the command areas of Bhakra-Pong and the
Rajasthan Canal, will require cooperation with Pakistan.
The treaty
has served the subcontinent very well although it could be argued that
it was excessively Punjab-centric and did not provide adequately for Kashmir.
That both countries face serious challenges of salinity and water logging
in the Indus basin has less to do with the treaty itself and more an outcome
of how agriculture and water resources have been managed. An Indus Treaty-II
focused on these ecological concerns and founded on Lillienthal's vision
of joint action would be a natural sequel.
(The author is with the Congress party. These are his
personal views.)
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