How dams climb mountains: China and India’s state-making hydropower contest in the Eastern-Himalaya watershed
Abstract
The dam rush in the upper-Brahmaputra River basin and local, minority resistance to it are the result of complex geopolitical and parochial causes. India and China’s competing claims for sovereignty over the watershed depend upon British and Qing Dynasty imperial precedents respectively. And the two nation-states have extended and enhanced their predecessors’ claims on the area by continuing to erase local sovereignty, enclose the commons, and extract natural resources on a large scale. Historically, the upper basin’s terrain forestalled the thorough integration of this region into both nation-states, but recent technological and economic advances have enabled the two states and their agents to dramatically transformed these landscapes. Many of their projects have perpetuated the interventionist hydrological regimes that India and China also inherited from their imperial forebears. Nevertheless, as with their definition of their borders, neither state has highlighted this historical contingency. Instead, both governments have consistently presented their hydropower projects as shining examples of necessary and benevolent development. Their economy-focused, monolithic development paradigms have, not coincidently, also enabled the systemic side-lining of non-majority cultures, religions and histories. The combination of this cultural exclusion and the nation-states’ late integration of this peripheral region has laid the ground for conflict with local groups over the dam rush. Local identities and experiences have evolved around complex religious, cultural and trade networks, many of which were heavily influenced by the now-defunct Tibetan polity, rather than via modern Chinese and Indian nationalist discourses of development. The dam clashes highlight both the basin’s complex cultural matrixes and the ambiguous relationship Asia’s two most populous nation-states have with their respective imperial pasts. And as the situation remains unresolved, the watershed is an ecological catastrophe in waiting.
Across the developed world and in large swathes of the developing world, large dams (those over 15 meters high) became controversial during the 1980s and 1990s. They were widely criticised for their environmental impacts and population displacement. At the end of these two decades, in November 2000, the influential World Commission on Dams released a report arguing that large dams had produced as many problems as they had solved, and the problems they created had been disproportionately allocated to the globe’s most vulnerable people and ecologies (2000: xxiii). In the lead-up to the report’s release, the World Bank stopped funding large dams, and many commentators relegated them to history (McCully, 2001; Nüsser, 2014: 8).
These were the same decades, however, during which the first large dams were proposed for the upper Brahmaputra River in the Eastern Himalaya.1 The Brahmaputra flows eastward across most of the Tibetan plateau in China, where it is known as the Yarlung Tsangpo, then makes a U-turn in the Himalaya, creating the world’s deepest non-oceanic gorge, before flowing westward across Assam in India. The upper-Brahmaputra basin refers to the region north of the westward flowing stretches of the river. During the 1990s, the hydropower potential of this vertiginous zone proved irresistible to the newly liberalising and energy-hungry nation-states that controlled it: China, India, and India’s ally, the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. The trend continued during the 2000s and 2010s, as the threat of climate change re-invigorated the hydro-electrical business model, and China and India’s emerging status enabled them to accelerate development projects. The region’s first large hydro-electrical projects came online in the early 2000s. Since then, 18 large dams have been built on the upper Brahmaputra and its tributaries, 11 are under construction, and at least another 74 projects2 have been approved by the region’s provincial and national governments.
It is hard to imagine a region less suited to a dam rush than the upper Brahmaputra basin (see Figure 1). Its rivers pass through four countries, each with competing claims on and needs of their waters. In the basin’s lower stretches in northeast India and Bangladesh, over 200 million people depend directly on the river system (Samaranayake et al., 2016: 73). The same tectonic forces that made the upper sections of the basin one of the world’s steepest watersheds destabilise it and large earthquakes strike the region with alarming regularity. Earthquakes and high-intensity rainstorms, which are becoming more frequent because of climate change, alter the flow of rivers, cause major landslides and outburst floods. High varieties in seasonal flow and freezing winters destabilise power supplies and damage hydro-electrical turbines (Yong, 2014).
The region’s verticality has, furthermore, encouraged one of the greatest concentrations of environmental and cultural diversity on the planet. The highest peak in the watershed is Mt Kangchenjunga, the world’s third highest mountain, which rises to an altitude of 8586 meters. Within 115 kilometres of this peak are river plains that are only 100 meters above sea level. Between these two points are the intersection of three internationally recognised biodiversity hotspots (Myers et al., 2000) and a range of biomes, including fragile alpine steppes, pine forests, and jungled ravines. The mountainous terrain has encouraged human diversity too; the region is home to an array of ethnic groups whose communities speak over 50 languages, and practise a mixture of Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and animist traditions.
The basin’s dams have already had a profound effect on this diversity. Environmentally, they have polluted waterways, caused erosion and landslides, and endangered endemic flora and fauna species (Biggs, 2018). Socially, they have displaced local communities, led to language loss and upheaval, and destroyed sacred sites. Despite all this, they have not yet produced the hydro-electric dividend they promised. Their construction has required state investment, and the available information about their contribution to national energy grids is scant (Banarjee, 2014: 39). Even if the hydro-electric power stations fulfil their electrical generative potential in the medium term, the region’s seismic, biological and political restiveness makes them a risky long-term investment.
Despite all this, the Brahmaputra basin dams have continued to ‘climb mountains’. The persistence with which stakeholders have pursued their construction suggests a more complex imperative than mere financial gain or a calculated response to China and India’s multiplying energy needs. This article’s analysis of the region’s complicated intersection of geopolitical and local histories indicates not only the multifaceted reasons for the rush but also the reasons for local resistance to it. This history includes the drama of the ongoing, 80-year-old border dispute between the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China. The disputed border dissects the region and is often used to define it. But from the locals’ perspective, the border is neither a historical anomaly nor an indisputable geopolitical fact. It is, instead, the latest and most virulent manifestation of an encroachment process that was begun before either China or India.
The Tibetans had occupied the basin’s high-altitude valleys for millennia. During the 16th century, they moved downstream, took control of valleys on the southern side of the Himalayan ranges, created the kingdoms of Sikkim, Bhutan and enclaves further east, and enforced taxes and trade treaties on the upper basin’s other ethnic groups. During the 19th century, the Qing and British Empires began exercising imperial influence in the region through cartography, expeditions and uneven treaties.
China and India inherited these two empires’ incompatible borders and, after submitting them to a strange nationalist alchemy, re-presented them as the incontrovertible borders of two post-colonial nation-states. Since this conceptual transformation, both nations have vied for control and influence in the Eastern Himalaya, and their competitive state-making has adopted many of the colonial forms of their predecessors. It has also had increasingly profound social and environmental effects. Their transformation of the region began with its militarisation in the lead-up to the short 1962 Sino-Indian War. After the war, the two armies established a ‘Line of Actual Control’ (LAC) that they have maintained ever since.
As they have consolidated state control in the region, they have drawn on another common legacy from their respective imperial forebears: long traditions of hydraulic manipulation. These traditions had brought both states into ‘hydraulic modes of consumption’ (L Zhang, 2016: 141–87), in which they invested disproportionate resources into river taming technologies that, once constructed, were physically difficult to maintain and, given the way they had transformed livelihoods to create flood-prone, irrigation-dependent communities, were even more difficult to dismantle (D’Souza, 2006: 1–20). The empires left the new republics with infrastructure, knowledge and bureaucratic regimes that were all dedicated to the transformation of watersheds. The new nation-states perpetuated these institutional and physical structures. They began by repairing and extending imperial-era infrastructure, and then, with the help of the world’s two new super-powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, who trained engineers and gave them technology, they went on to build more and larger dams during the 1960s and 1970s. The Chinese and Indian commitment to dam-building survived catastrophic dam failures in the 1970s and the change in international sentiment towards large dams of the 1980s and 1990s. As technology improved, they built dams at higher altitudes on the eastern (Chinese) and southern (Indian) slopes of the Tibetan plateau, eventually reaching the relatively inaccessible upper Brahmaputra basin.
Development, and the close rhetorical relationship between development and dams, underpinned their commitment to dam-building. Despite differences in their political systems, both states cultivated monolithic development paradigms that envisioned the future in numeric, economy-centred imaginaries that naturalised modernist and nationalist norms (McMichael, 2008). This form of development favoured large projects that were visible, well-known and brandable over smaller, community-based projects that would have been less disruptive to local ethnic populations. It also enabled both states, as this analysis will show, to pursue centralised, nationalist state-making that side-lined local histories, identities, languages, and religions.
The disruptive potential of this form of monolithic development has brought mixed blessings to the minoritised peoples living on both sides of the LAC. These communities have found themselves faced with a state-made choice between a multi-cultural, traditional lifestyle or totalising development programs that – while focused primarily on positive outcomes for lowland population centres – still deliver much-needed energy, transport, educational and health outcomes to locals.
In China, an already existent system of political repression, censorship, surveillance, and militarisation has muted local protests against the dams. But the fact that the dams have been added to the long list of banned topics suggests that they are an object of local concern. In India, some local people have benefited from and advocated for the dams, but many others have opposed them. Much of their resistance has been framed as a struggle to protect local cultures, languages and religions against development. As such, it draws on the pre-national identities and networks that developed before the two nation-states controlled the area, foregrounding alternate narratives and cultures relegated by development. These responses to the dam rush throw the ambiguities of China’s and India’s nationalist narratives into sharp relief, and this begs a more thorough investigation into its causes and processes.
Before the border
Before it became one of the world’s most complicated geopolitical arenas, the upper Brahmaputra basin was already geographically and culturally intricate. The main channel’s journey from southwestern Tibet to northeast India is 2628 kilometres long. On the low-precipitation, alpine-steppe to the north of the Himalaya watershed, Tibetans have traditionally practised three forms of livelihood: small-scale farming, nomadic pastoralism, and long-distance trading (see Figure 2). To the watershed’s south are high-precipitation, densely-forested, biodiverse valleys, through which the Brahmaputra and its major tributaries, the Lohit, Dibang, Subansiri, Kameng, Manas, Wang and Teesta, descend (see Figure 3). This region is home to diverse ethnic groups, including the Mishmi, Adi, Apa Tani, Sherdukpen, Monpa, Bhutanese, Lepcha and Bhutia, who have traditionally practised a combination of settled and swidden agriculture.
Before the region’s recent transformation, religion, trade and histories of conflict determined the relationships between its ethnic groups. There were close links between co-religionists, particularly Buddhists, and sometimes trade and military allegiances between different religious groups. There were also tensions between Buddhists and non-Buddhists and between the various lineages of Tibetan Buddhism. Many of these positive and negative relationships were formulated during the Tibetan-speaking groups’ gradual migration down from the upper basin that began in the 16th century and, despite the militarised border, continues today. These migrants came as nomads, traders, pilgrims, immigrants and armies in a process Toni Huber has called ‘micro-migrations’ (2007: 83–106). Rather than migrating permanently at one time, they moved up and down the valleys in response to climate, environment, politics and trade, and only incrementally established social and political dominance across the region.
The southwardly mobile Tibetans were most influential in the basin’s west, where they established two major enduring polities. The furthest west of these is Sikkim, whose western border aligns with the basin’s western boundary. The Kingdom of Sikkim was founded in the 17th century, and it became an Indian state in 1975. To Sikkim’s west is the Kingdom of Bhutan, which established itself as a non-Tibetan political entity in the 17th century too. Unlike Sikkim, Bhutan has nominally retained its independence, but it takes direction on foreign and hydropower policy from India. Tibetans also migrated into the southern face’s eastern half, establishing enclaves in Tawang on the Nyamjangchu River (Manas River tributary), Mechuka on the Siyom River and Pemakö, which hugs the banks of the upper Brahmaputra River (also known as the Yarchab Tsangpo and Siang in this section).
Like many of the governments that would follow them, the Tibetans concentrated their control on the extraction of goods and services from the south side of the upper basin. Their primary extractive tool was a multi-directional and multi-layered system of tax regimes and trade tariffs. The Tibetan-speaking rulers of Bhutan and Sikkim extracted taxes from local indigenous groups and traders within their zones of influence; they also paid tribute to the Dalai Lama as their religious hierarch (Mathou, 2004: 391). The peoples of Tawang and Mechuka were firmly embedded in Tibetan Buddhist networks, and paid taxes and tribute to central Tibetan institutions (Grothman, 2012a, 2012b). The one standout in this regard was the independent kingdom of Pöyül in the basin’s far east, within which lay the Pemakö sacred site. The Dalai Lama’s Ganden Podrang government dispatched troops to Pöyül in 1834 after its ruler refused to pay taxes. Later, it became a site of Chinese-British conflict and was only finally brought under Lhasa’s control in 1926 (Lazcano, 2005).
The residents gave taxes and tributes in exchange for various forms of protection. These protections included access to Tibet’s legal system of petitions and mediations. Legal records for the region now called Tawang (then called Mönyül) suggest that most conflicts between members of a community were about overgrazing, farming and water rights, and that they were settled at a local level. If these issues could not be resolved, a magistrate or monk would be asked to mediate (Ye shes ’phrin las, 2009). The region’s legal documents also suggest a more flexible relationship with borders than those enforced now. Pastoralism and swidden agriculture required flexible boundaries, and the limits of taxation estates, regions and ethnic groups remained negotiated and flexible (Cederlöf, 2014: 49; McGranahan, 2003). Political boundaries were established not by lines on a map but rather by controlling the movement of people and goods through narrow valleys that could be easily monitored and defended (Gamble and Yangmotso, 2015).
The region’s 17th- to 20th-century inter-ethnic relationships did, however, presage later developments in another regard: they maintained ethnic hierarchies. They privileged, in order, the central Tibetans, the Sikkimese (Bhutia) and Bhutanese, other non-Tibetan speaking Buddhists, and then non-Buddhists. Françoise Pommaret has described this attitude as comparable ‘in modern terms…with a “colonialist” attitude’ (1999: 53). This colonialist attitude even foreshadowed the mix of danger and exoticism that the British and Chinese would employ to describe the region. Tibetan writing from this period presents the region southeast of the river as a peculiar mix of dangerous borderlands inhabited by savages, poisoners and exiled murderers, and sacred, paradisiacal ‘hidden lands’ (sbas yul) that brave pilgrims were encouraged to visit. These hidden lands were all based around river valleys, and the rivers themselves were often understood to hold unique properties for healing and blessing (Childs, 1999; McDougal, 2016).
A sacred relationship with the land was also an essential part of the region’s non-Buddhist societies and cultures, including the Mishmi, Adi, and Apa Tani. Many of these communities and cultures (and the languages they speak) survive today, despite centuries of exploitation and oppression by various colonisers and imperial states; first their neighbouring Tibetans colonised the region’s upper valleys and intimdated the rest, next the British and Chinese sent in imperial expeditions to establish their authority in the region, then the Indian and Chinese nation-states sent in armies, administrators and migrants to establish their competing claims on these groups’ lands.
All three aggressors have treated these local groups with contempt. Tibetans called these groups klo pa, or kla klo, meaning ‘uncivilised people’ or ‘savages’. Unless they converted to Buddhism, the Tibetans did not engage with them socially and in their literature affiliated them with snake spirits, damp, and danger (Huber, 2008: 260). Most interactions between the region’s Buddhist and non-Buddhist groups involved trade. The region’s mid-altitude groups often acted as the middle-men between the Tibetans and the river-plain Assamese. Buddhists rarely ventured into non-Buddhist territories, and non-Buddhist traders were only allowed to enter Tibetan-held territory for a day’s march. The exception to this rule was the multi-directional slave trade. This multi-ethnic trade proved remarkably persistent and continued into the 1960s (Huber, 2007: 94), well over a decade after the Republic of India (1947) and the People’s Republic of China (1949) were founded.
The inability of later governments to stamp out the region’s slave trade was indicative of the difficulties all large historical polities had in controlling this area. The Tibetans‘ cultural and social embeddedness gave them an advantage over external rulers in this regard, but even they only controlled a series of trade corridors – particularly Tawang and the Chumbi Valley that leads from Lhasa to Sikkim – rather than the whole area. Those groups who wished to live away from these corridors could do so with little interference from either the Tibetans or local governments.
Drawing a line in the snow
The British and Manchu Empires began their – almost entirely abstract – take-over of the upper basin in the 19th century. The Ganden Podrang became a vassal of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) in 1720, and during the first century of this relationship called on its emperors to protect them from first Mongol and then Gurkha armies. Despite their official relationship, during the next two centuries, Qing influence on the plateau was minimal. The Tibetans ruled themselves, while using their officially subordinate relationship with the Qing to facilitate a lucrative horse-tea trade with China. What is more, their official relationship with China gave them a reason not to engage with the British (Sperling, 2008).
As the British moved into Assam and the Qing increased their influence in Sichuan and Yunnan, however, they both began to project their influence across the Tibetan plateau, and into the upper Brahmaputra basin. This projection came not through army occupation or colonisation, but by other imperial practices such as exploring, mapping, naming, and short-term military expeditions. As Carole McGranahan explained, Tibet was an ‘imperial but not colonial’ space (McGranahan, 2017).
In the 19th century, the British were world leaders at most forms of imperialism and repeated in the upper Brahmaputra many of the patterns they had established elsewhere. Their annexation of the southern half of the upper basin began with exploration. Colonial administrators in Assam focused their efforts on tracking the course of the Yarlung Tsangpo River after it entered the deep Tsangpo Gorge. A large tributary of the Brahmaputra, the Siang, descended from the lower side of the gorge, and they were determined to find a connection between the two rivers. As they were not allowed to travel into Tibet, they trained spies from Himalayan countries who could travel disguised as pilgrims and traders to survey the region. The most famous of these spies, the Sikkimese explorer Kinthup, almost solved ‘the riddle of the Tsangpo Gorge’ in 1880, but was sold into slavery in Pöyül (Bailey, 1914: 561–82).
As well as exploration, they enforced unfair treaties on Himalayan polities. They forced Sikkim to sign a treaty in 1835 that ceded Darjeeling to the British in return for protection from Nepal. Thirty years later, they turned Sikkim into a British protectorate. In 1841, they pried Bhutan’s low-altitude trading posts from them after a short war and encouraged Tawang to cede its trading posts three years later. From this point up to 1959, the Bhutanese, Sikkimese and Tawang authorities paid tribute to both the British and the Dalai Lama.
The Dalai Lama’s Ganden Podrang government proved more recalcitrant than the region’s smaller kingdoms. It refused to sign a trade treaty with the British until 1904, when they sent the euphemistically titled ‘Younghusband Expedition’ – named for its leader Francis Younghusband (1863–1942) – to invade Tibet. The Younghusband Expedition killed between 2000 and 3000 Tibetans and forced protectorate status on the government (Carrington, 2003). The expedition encouraged the Qing Dynasty to take drastic measures to re-establish control in Tibet. They sent Zhao Erfang (1845–1911) – a warlord with the moniker ‘butcher Zhao’, who had been colonising Eastern Tibet for a decade – to invade Central Tibet. Zhao solidified his reputation on the way to Lhasa, and caused the 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso (1876–1933), to flee into exile in British India (Sperling, 1976). His troops became the first outsiders to occupy the upper basin in over a century, and they entered Pöyül and the upper Lohit River Valley in the upper basin’s far east. The British had assumed Lohit and Pöyül were part of a buffer zone between themselves and the Chinese and were shocked by Zhao’s incursion. They had drawn a line on their map at the edge of Assam, and prohibited entry of outsiders into the region, limiting commercial and colonial expansion (Guyot-Réchard, 2013), and they assumed the Chinese would leave the region vacated too.
When they were disabused of this notion by Zhao’s advance, they responded with an increase in the number of expeditions they sent beyond their self-imposed line and began to map all the region’s major river valleys, with an aim to assess and expel the Chinese presence. Their first post-Zhao excursion was the ‘Abor Expedition’ of 1911–12. Named for a derogatory Assamese term for the Adi people, it was instigated after some Adi killed a British political officer, Noel Williamson. As well as administering frontier justice to those accused of Williamson’s murder, the expedition was tasked with assessing Chinese presence in the valley and solving the ‘riddle of the Tsangpo Gorge’ (Hamilton, 2012). It was only successful in one out of three of these tasks: killing Adi. It did not solve the river’s riddle or find any Chinese influence. Coincidently, the Qing Empire fell while the Abor Expedition was being conducted, and Zhao Erfang was killed.
The change in Chinese leadership slowed but did not stop their designs on the basin. The leaders of the new Republic of China reformulated the idea of China somewhat, but their reformulation reinforced their claims on the upper basin. They promoted a multivalent understanding of Chinese identity that included ‘Five Races (lived) in Harmony’ (五族共和 Wuzu gonghe); the five races being the Han (Chinese), Manchu, Mongol, Hui (Chinese Muslim) and Tibetan (Leibold, 2006). And they signed a treaty with the dissolving Qing Dynasty to govern all the lands they claimed. Their borders, they now claimed, stretched down to the historical maps the British had made, showing the edges of their influence in Assam; the maps’ blank spaces had been filled in by Chinese imaginings (Lintner, 2018: 76).
At that stage, however, Chinese sovereignty on the Tibetan plateau was an abstract idea with no concrete plan for implementation. They were not there, and in their absence, both the Tibetans and the British pressed their advantage in the upper Brahmaputra. The 13th Dalai Lama returned from exile and declared Tibet an independent nation-state (Chhodak, 1978: 30–8), and the British increased their explorations. In 1913, two veterans of the Arbor Expedition, Frederick Marshman Bailey (1882–1967) and Henry Morshead (1882–1931), led a group of Gurkhas back up the Siang River Valley. This time, they reached Pemakö and definitively established the link between the Yarlung Tsangpo and the Siang River. Like Kinthup, Bailey and Morshead were captured by Pöyül authorities when they reached Pemakö, but unlike Kinthup, they were released after several days (Bailey, 1914).
In January 1914, the British sent yet another expedition up one of the basin’s river valleys; this time P. M. O’Callaghan travelled with 39 Gurkha soldiers up the Lohit River on a ‘tour’. He found Qing boundary markers in the borderlands that had been placed there during Zhao Erfung’s 1910 campaign and new Republic of China boundary markers that were supposed to replace them. O’Callaghan removed the markers and claimed the area for the British Empire (Lintner, 2018: 77). O’Callaghan’s expedition, his dubious behaviour, and their growing geographical knowledge convinced the British government that they needed a boundary treaty in the eastern basin. Negotiations with the new Chinese state proved fruitless as they had no power on the ground, but the British could not ignore their claims over the area either. Their compromise was to establish a trilateral negotiation convention at Shimla between the British, Tibetans and Chinese. These negotiations were supposed to determine the boundaries of an ‘inner’, Chinese-ruled Tibet, and an ‘outer’ Tibetan-ruled Tibet. The Chinese delegation would not agree on the proposed limits and withdrew from the negotiations. From the Chinese perspective, this voided the agreement. But the British and the Tibetans nevertheless signed a bilateral agreement that established Tibet’s boundaries, including an international border between ‘Outer Tibet’ and the British that traced the lines of the highest peaks between Bhutan and Burma.
This border, drawn by the British, was called the McMahon Line after the British delegation’s chief negotiator in Shimla, British India’s Foreign Secretary, Henry McMahon (1862–1949). It was supposedly drawn on the basis of the British philosophy of boundaries that privileged ‘natural boundaries’, particularly watersheds and mountain ranges. The topography of the upper eastern Brahmaputra watershed did not, however, lend itself very well to these ‘empirical’ principles of map-making (Van Eekelen, 2015: 33). A line could not separate the region’s intricate and entangled river flows or religious, trade, and kinship relationships. The McMahon Line as it was drawn included Mechuka, Pemakö and Tawang within British territory, and even the British acknowledged that the inclusion of Tawang was problematic. As Alistair Lamb and others have noted in their studies of the Shimla Agreement, the British knew that this area, which stretched down almost to the Assamese plains, had historically close connections to Lhasa. But its proximity to British-controlled territory made its inclusion within Outer Tibet (and, therefore, possibly China) untenable to the British (Lamb, 1966: 530–66).
Like Chinese Republican claims on the region at the time, the McMahon Line’s potential for conflict creation came to nothing because it remained abstract. Nothing happened on the ground. A year later, Captain Nevil of the British Army made a ‘promenade’ to Tawang but did not mention the McMahon Line to its authorities (Nyman, 1976: 156). Indeed, the British did not mention the McMahon Line again until 1935, when the Tibetans in Tawang arrested the famous plant hunter Kingdon Ward. In the process of negotiating his release, British bureaucrats looked back to the Shimla Agreement and determined that Tawang was, on the map at least, their territory. Three years later, they sent a ‘delegation’ of 200 soldiers to Tawang without notifying the Tibetan government. Through the British representative in Lhasa, the Tibetans insisted the British withdraw (Nyman, 1976: 163). They said their acceptance of the McMahon Line had been contingent on the British brokering an agreement on Inner and Outer Tibet with China, which had not happened (Goldstein, 1991: 418). A few weeks later, the two sides negotiated a compromise in which the British would leave an administrator behind at Tawang, but otherwise withdraw. Tawang continued to be managed by a Lhasa-appointed ‘religious officer’ (bla gnyer), and nearby Tsona’s ‘local lord’ (rdzong dpon) until Indian troops arrived there in 1951 (Tenpa, 2016: 98).
The McMahon Line proved to have little influence at its other end in Pöyül too. There, in 1930, when the last King of Pöyül, Kanam Depa (d. 1932) refused to pay taxes, the Ganden Podrang sent in an army, and the king fled into exile in British Assam. He died in exile a short time later, and Pöyül continued to pay taxes to Sera Monastery near Lhasa until the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) arrived in the 1950s (Lazcano, 2005).
New nations, old borders, new wars
In the Second World War, the British fought alongside the Republican Chinese. It was not until the worldwide rush to decolonise in the 1950s that it became an issue again. Tibet lost its independence in this geopolitical reshuffling, but small Bhutan and Sikkim managed to increase their sovereignty. In China, the Maoists defeated the Republicans and established a new nation, the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Like the Republicans, however, the Maoists maintained their predecessor’s boundary claims. The McMahon Line – or Maikema Hongxian (麦克马洪线) as it is called in Chinese – became associated in nationalist lore with other acts of imperial aggression against the Chinese nation. When the newly-decolonised Republic of India followed the Chinese precedent and adopted the international boundaries of their imperial predecessors, the Chinese viewed it as a betrayal (Dai Chaowu, 2014).
Both nations, China and India, were now making land claims in the area based on previously conceptualised but never implemented imperial precedents. The Indian government claimed all lands south of the McMahon Line, and the Chinese claimed all the land down to the Assamese plains in which ‘Tibetans’ lived. In the Chinese worldview, their presence in the region was part of a nation-building exercise to help their ‘backward’ compatriot Tibetans. The Indian government took a more scholarly approach, determining, as they put it, through history and culture that the Himalaya provided a natural border between them and their new northern neighbour (Lintner, 2018: 86).
Both nations assumed a paternalistic attitude to the various ethnic groups that lived in the basin, including the Tibetans. They advocated an ambiguous mix of anti-imperial rhetoric and the implementation of colonial governance models, including the official categorisation of the region’s peoples into ‘backward’ ethnic groups that needed the majority’s help. All the peoples of the basin had become minorities in their own lands (Dikötter, 2015: 323; Guha, 1999: 167).
For the decade of the 1950s, China and India worked to solidify their separate administrations in the upper basin without conflict. The units of the PLA and the Indian Army that performed this task became the first lowlanders to occupy and directly administer the region for an extended period; the imperial British and Chinese had only led expeditions there. Reactions to their occupations were mixed. On the Chinese side of the border, resentment toward the PLA grew during the 1950s, culminating with an uprising in 1959, and the flight into exile of the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso (1922–). Over 100,000 Tibetans became refugees during the next few years (Shakya, 2012: 200–12), and sponsored by the CIA, small groups of them mounted an insurgency against the Chinese that lasted until 1969 (McGranahan, 2010).
The Tibetans’ uprising pressed India to consolidate its administration on the southern side of the McMahon Line. In its fundamentals, the Indian Army’s incursion into the upper basin was similar to the PLA’s entrance into Tibet, but its operation and outcomes were very different. In late 1950, an 8.6-magnitude earthquake struck the region, centred in the Mishmi Hills, just south of the McMahon Line. It caused widespread landslides and flash-floods. Pasighat, where the Brahmaputra flows out onto the Assamese plain, was one of the worst affected sites. Earthquake landslides just north of the town temporarily dammed the river, leaving hundreds of fish stranded. Then, a few days later, the dam burst and a flash flood raged through the town (Guyot-Réchard, 2015: 10).
The Indian state’s response to the earthquake endeared them to locals. When Major Khating arrived with a hundred Assamese Rifles to take charge of Tawang, for example, he came ostensibly to give earthquake relief (Tenpa, 2014: 90). This approach, combined with the locals’ fears about events in Chinese-ruled eastern Tibet – and the sight of bodies floating down the basin’s rivers (Kunga Tsomo, 2017) – led them to welcome the Indian soldiers. The last ‘religious manager’ of Tawang Monastery, Thubten Chopel (r. 1949–51) recognised India’s sovereignty and renounced the Tibetans’ right to collect taxes when Kating arrived (Tenpa, 2014: 92). Inclusion within India meant that the people of Tawang, Mechuka and Pemakö would be cut off from their traditional trade routes and religious relationships, but they believed it would keep them safe from Chinese aggression.
The unresolved border dispute finally led to war in October 1962. The conflict started at the other end of the Himalaya, across another disputed section of the China-Indian border (Lintner, 2018: 222). The fighting spread east within days. The Chinese army massed in the Chumbi Valley near the border with what was then India’s protectorate, Sikkim. They crossed the McMahon Line in the Nyamjangchu River Valley and took Tawang. They travelled down the Subansiri River Valley and the Lohit River Valley in the basin’s far east. In the Lohit Valley they retraced Zhao Ergang’s path and reached the site where O’Callaghan had removed the Republican and Qing era border markers. The Buddhists in Mechuka and Pemakö burnt their crops and headed south, but the Chinese did not enter their valleys (Kunga Tsomo, 2017). Members of other ethnic groups were told that if they stayed in the hills and did not take sides, they would not be harmed (Huber, 2007: 96). The Chinese confined their occupation to the four major trade routes that the Tibetans, the British and Zhao had controlled earlier. Neither the Chinese nor the Indian Army ventured into the surrounding mountains; even in the midst of war, the region was still only partially occupied. A month later, the Indian and Chinese states negotiated a ceasefire and the Chinese army pulled back to behind the McMahon Line; the position they retreated to is the LAC that still operates as a makeshift border (Lintner, 2018: 280).
Almost 60 years later, the war and the border dispute continue to define China’s and India’s relationship. India administers the region south of the LAC as the state of Arunachal Pradesh. China claims this same region as Tsang Nan (Southern Tibet), and insists India occupies it illegally. They have not fought another war over the border, but in 1967, 1987 and 2017 they engaged in significant skirmishes. Neither country seems capable of addressing the underlying historical reason for the dispute: namely, that despite their professed anti-imperial identities, and, as Manjari Chatterjee Miller explained, their ‘dominant goal to be recognised and empathised with as a victim by others in the international system’ (2013: 2), China and India nevertheless make conflicting land claims based on their imperial inheritances. The unexpressed tensions in their own narratives and the competition between the two states have underpinned their approach to both minority issues and development in the upper Brahmaputra basin, especially the building of large state-making development projects (Guyot-Réchard, 2013).
The logic of large dams
The two nations were set on different political paths before the war, and the clash exaggerated their differences. The Chinese Communist Party under President Mao Zedong (1893–1976) practised collectivisation and established a centrally planned economy that led to a series of human and ecological disasters. India, by contrast, under the lead of its first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), sought to establish itself as the democratic and nominally-socialist head of the non-aligned movement. Despite their differences, both nations became devotees of the pervasive post-war doctrine of national development, which influenced the communist, capitalist and non-aligned worlds alike.
The building of dams, first for irrigation and later for hydropower, was a central activity within the developmentalist paradigm, particularly in the Global South, and most notably in Asia. For the Third World, building dams was achievable, easily identifiable and a prestigious icon of progress and modernity (Nüsser, 2014: 1). In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, dams were primarily built for irrigation and urban water supply, but through the 1960s and 1970s many dams were repurposed as hydro-electrical stations and more were built for this purpose.
For China and India, two river civilisations, dam-building was not only a marker of progress but it also represented another continuity with their imperial pasts. In China, the control of rivers, and particularly the Yellow River, had been a prime symbolic representation of the emperor’s power for millennia (Pietz, 2015: 29). Various Indian communities also built dams and established systems of hydraulic consumption over the millennia (Fisher, 2018: 52–4). But the British had taken South Asian hydraulic manipulation to new levels, and post-colonial hydrological interventions built on the patterns the colonists had established. The Indians had little choice but to follow the British lead. To grow crops for export and extract other resources from the subcontinent, the British had developed a network of irrigation projects, transport canals and reservoirs that irreversibly changed South Asia’s hydrological system. Before the British, many South Asians had flexible relationships with river flood-pulses and moved with their seasonal changes. During their rule, the locals had become either dependent on irrigation, flood-prone or both (D’Souza, 2006: 220–4). Post-colonial India necessarily continued to build on its colonial legacy.
Many of the Chinese and Indian dams constructed in the early post-imperial/colonial period were of inferior quality. The People’s Republic of China began building modern, large dams under the guidance of the Soviet Union, who gifted them technologies and trained their engineers. During the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese people constructed more than 600 large dams per year (McCully, 2001: 19). One of the most infamous of these dams was Sanmenxia, built under Soviet guidance on the upper reaches of the Yellow River between 1957 and 1961. After its completion, it was held responsible for deadly upstream flooding, and the river’s high sediment load repeatedly rendered it unworkable. It only reached sediment balance in 1970 (Pietz, 2015: 130–94). Even more disastrous than the floods caused by Sanmenxia were those created by the collapse of the Shimantan and Banqiao dams in 1975. These collapses killed around 171,000 people (Yi si, 2016: 25–38).
Like China, the new Indian state built large nation-defining dams and experienced both catastrophic and long-term problems as a result. Nehru famously called large dams the ‘temples of resurgent India’ and ‘symbols of India’s progress’ in 1954, and inaugurated India’s largest new dam, the Bhakra Dam, in late 1962. The United States provided expertise in this dam’s construction, and the Indian government presented it as an integral part of India’s Green Revolution, which sought to increase India’s agricultural production and, therefore, stop famines (Khagrama, 2004: 33–64). Those planning this revolution followed the British example, and took a supply-side approach to water, ‘producing’ it by building reservoirs and irrigation canals (D’Souza, 2006: 215–20). The results of this approach are still affecting India’s water cycle today. Waterlogging near dams is widespread, and water shortages are endemic across the country (Dharmadhikary, 2005: 169–90, 227–9). India suffered disastrous dam collapses in the 1960s and 1970s (Sandesara and Wooten, 2011), but their casualty counts were nowhere near as high as China’s dam collapses.
As a democracy, India has also experienced substantially more political resistance to large dam constructions than China. In the 1980s and 1990s, the protests over the population displacement and environmental damage that the Narmada River dams would cause were particularly transformative. These protests persuaded the World Bank to pull its funding from the project, and stop funding other large-dam projects for several decades (Gagil and Guha, 1994; Drèze et al., 1997). After the Narmada River protests, relatively muted protests and lawsuits against large dams even began occurring in China (Tilt, 2014: 133–65).
But unlike the anti-dam protests that occurred in developed countries around the same time, the protests in China and India did not dissuade the states from building dams. They slowed construction for a decade or so, but it has picked up pace again. The Chinese government planned and built the Three Gorges Dam as worldwide anti-dam protests reached their peak in the 1990s, and it was inaugurated in 2004. Since then, China and India have become world leaders in dam construction, responsible for most new dams built since the 1990s (Wang et al., 2013: 2). Central and state Indian governments even continued to build the Narmada River dams without World Bank money, and one of its primary backers, ex-Chief Minister of Gujarat, now Prime Minister, Narendra Modi (1950–), opened the largest Narmada-River dam, the Sardar Sarovar Dam, in 2017. At the inauguration, the completed dam was 163 meters high, almost twice as tall as the dam planned in 1983. The 1980s and 1990s push to expand hydro-electrical production in both nations was a response to and enabled by the parallel market liberalisations that occurred in China and India during this period. These reforms created a greater need for electricity and financial opportunities in the world’s two largest, emerging electricity markets.
China called its market liberalisations ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ (中国特色的社会主义 Zhongguo tese de shehui zhuyi). In practice, they amounted to state-managed capitalism, with political and financial elites working closely together in the name of development to increase their profits, particularly in key sectors such as energy. This economic model has proved extremely efficient at fast-tracking large projects such as hydropower projects, and made resisting their constructions almost impossible (Tilt, 2014: 18).
There are similar large-dam backers in India, but they operate in a very different political environment. In India, the central government has set in place pro-hydropower policies, but its decentralised political system means that national hydropower companies must work with state governments (and Bhutan) to build dams. The outcomes within this system have been, therefore, more diverse. The rate of dam construction in India depends on individual state governments’ ability to negotiate with local stakeholders, their constituents. In many Himalayan states the hydropower potential has tended to outweigh other concerns and led to the expeditious granting of hydropower project requests (Alley, 2014; Menon and Kanchi, 2005). But historical enmities and identity politics have made the process more difficult for others.
In the past decade, the hydropower industry in both countries has been further strengthened by hydropower’s inclusion within the international Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which subsidises dam-building, particularly in China and India, as ‘carbon offsets’ (Erlewein and Nüsser, 2011: 293). From 2007 onwards, China applied for CDM registration for nearly all its hydropower project installations (Spalding-Fecher et al., 2012), and they proudly promote their dams as ‘green and low carbon’ (see Figure 4). By embracing the CDM ‘green’ label both governments and the hydropower companies who build the dams are able to ignore their many critics. These critics argue that hydropower projects produce carbon emissions during their construction, release methane from decomposing biomatter in their reservoirs, and have other non-carbon related detrimental effects on the aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, leading to at least species loss and in some cases ecosystem collapse.
The rush for the hills
The dam rush in the upper Brahmaputra basin is, in many ways, a mountainous extension of China’s and India’s national hydro-electrical projects. But the concentration of dams on the basin’s rivers has been perpetuated by several other factors too: the region’s indisputable hydropower potential, its minority peoples’ exploitability, and the basin’s geopolitical importance.
Both Mao and Nehru approached the upper Brahmaputra basin as a peripheral space. In his influential work, Discovery of India, Nehru described the Brahmaputra River as ‘rather cut off from the main current of (Indian) history’ (1985 [1946]: 51). His statement reflects the idea in Indian political discourse, which persisted until this century, that the Northeast was ‘other’ and should be kept apart from the Indian mainstream. As Bérénice Guyot-Réchard explained, rather than ‘nation-building’ in the area, creating links between the locals and the rest of India, the Indian state set itself up as ‘the go-between between tribals (as the region’s ethnic groups are described in Indian discourse) and the nation at large’ (Guyot-Réchard, 2013: 30). The India-occupied section of the upper basin was administered as the North-Eastern Frontier Agency (NEFA) by the central government until 1972, when it was finally transformed into the state of Arunachal Pradesh. Arunachal Pradesh’s first elections were not held until 1977.
The People’s Republic of China’s strong central state ensured change came to the Chinese-administered areas north of the LAC much more quickly, but the majority population’s paternalistic relationship with local people mirrored much of what had occurred in India. State-controlled Chinese discourses on ‘race’ have been heavily influenced by social Darwinism, which perpetuated a hierarchy that privileged the majority Han ‘nationality’ (汉民族 han minzu) (Dikötter, 2015: 179–85). In this framework, the majority Han’s role was and is to show the locals how to develop and modernise, and as for the case of the Indian state, it also facilitates the relationship between the two groups in almost every aspect.
Both nation-states approached the minorities in the upper basin – both Tibetan groups and non-Tibetan groups – as backward and in need of development, but until the region’s geopolitical significance and its economic importance increased in the late 20th century, they did not provide the needed development. Even the region’s hydropower potential remained unexploited until this century. Earlier plans to build dams in the basin came to nothing (Jiang and He, 2011). Even now, unmanipulated markets have not led to the basin’s hydropower development. The region’s hydropower projects have been underpinned by CDM incentives and government subsidies instituted because of the state-making and security dividends that borderland hydropower projects represent (Kurian, 2017: 262–71). From the state’s perspective, any large projects in the border regions are concrete representations of control and establish at least the physical integration of these regions into the nation through electrical grids, road networks, and the influx of majority peoples. They present both states with a means by which the disputed territory of Arunachal Pradesh / South Tibet, and the restive Tibetan plateau, can become ‘normal’ parts of the nation (Baruah, 2007: 35–6).
There are many parallels between the dam rush on either side of the border, but their mechanisms of governance and planning have been very different. Both nations began building dams in the basin through public-private partnerships around the same time, but Chinese planning was much more centralised and geopolitically strategic than India’s program. China built four multi-use hydropower and urban water reservoirs on Brahmaputra tributaries in the 2000s. Neither India’s government nor its commentariat protested these constructions. It was only when the national government commissioned the Zangmu Dam on the Brahmaputra River in 2009 that the Indian government complained. The Chinese replied with assurances that the hydropower station would only use a run-of-the-river dam and it would not affect downstream flow (H Zhang, 2016). After establishing this precedent, they enlarged their already-existing tributary dams and began building three more large dams on the same stretch of river as the Zangmu hydropower station. This concentration of dams in an already developed area caused less concern among the Indian and international commentariat than the construction of dams in still untouched stretches of the river would have.
The broader context for these dams’ construction has, furthermore, minimised any concerns the international community may have had about them specifically. The dams are only one element of the Chinese government plan to build the ‘highest density dam cluster in the world; on the south and west edges of the Tibetan plateau’ (Yong, 2014). They have also announced plans for large-scale water transfer projects that would redirect the plateau’s waters to other parts of China, and away from downstream countries (Webber et al., 2017). The scale of these proposed transformations – which will affect the Yangtze, Mekong, Salween and Brahmaputra Rivers – has dissipated attention from the Brahmaputra dams. When concerns about the Tibetan plateau dams have been raised, China has used its position of relative power as the upstream nation and the region’s most powerful state to press its will. It is a member of the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation but has yet to sign a river treaty with India. After an outburst flood killed 30 people in 2000, the two countries did agree to share river-flow data, but China suspended even this minimal cooperation after the Doklam Standoff in 2017, and has withheld further data for almost a year (Barua et al., 2018: 840).
The Indian government’s strategic response to China’s construction in the upper Brahmaputra has been to build as many of their own dams as possible downstream, establishing what is known in international law as ‘first user’s rights’ on the basin’s waters (Samaranayake et al., 2016: 46). The already mentioned complex relationship between the Indian government, hydropower companies and the two states has compounded the process. State government authorities have had to balance the potential for large income streams from any dams (subsidised income streams that is) with local resistance to the dam. In some cases, this tension has encouraged a paper rush rather than a dam rush. By 2009, for example, the Arunachal Pradesh government had signed 153 ‘memoranda of understandings’ (MOUs) to build dams in the state, including a dam on the Brahmaputra (Siang) River near the LAC that would have been the world’s third largest dam. But so far only one dam has been completed and work has begun on another three (Baruah, 2017: 140–68). Sikkim’s ration of MOUs to dams is better; but even they have signed 31 hydro-electrical MOUs, and to date have completed three, with another seven expected to come online soon (Bosoni, 2017: 8).
Bhutan and India signed a MOU in 2009. This agreement stated that India would help Bhutan build ten large dams and then sell some of the power they produced back to India at a reduced rate. To date, the Bhutanese have built five dams, two are under construction, and another five sites are being assessed (Gyelmo, 2018). Some of the reason for the delay in the building projects on the Himalaya’s southern face have been economic; several large firms have pulled out of dam construction after costs spiralled (Banarjee, 2014). There have also been accusations of corruption made against politicians and hydropower executives who have profited personally from signing moribund MOUs (Huber and Joshi, 2017: 83). But the primary reason for delays in the dams’ construction has been local resistance to them, and this resistance is entwined with the region’s particular history.
The view from the hills
The relationships local peoples have with the dams are as complex as the causes and histories that led to their construction. Some locals, particularly those with links to hydroelectric companies, have proved intent on development and consistently pro-dams. Others were initially in favour of the hydroelectric projects because of the money and trade that they delivered, but then come to resent their potential for disruption. Those who changed their minds have also been disappointed by the slow pace of improvement in local electricity and water supply, even as both resources are extracted from the region and sent down to the plains (Gohain, 2017; Mimi, 2017). Others have always been against the dams and, depending on the political system in which they live, have enacted various forms of protest against them.
One of the most prominent characteristics of resistance to the dams has been their intertwining with the region’s ethnic politics and, therefore, local histories that run counter to Chinese and Indian nationalist narratives. On the Chinese side of the LAC, dam building is another manifestation of the Chinese state’s transformation of the Tibetan plateau, politically, socially, economically and environmentally. In the Tibetan regions of Yunnan, Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai, locals have protested against dam construction in the upper Yangtze, Mekong and Salween river basins, especially when it affected sacred sites (Drolma, 2010). Even these limited protests have been impossible in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, however, where the upper Brahmaputra flows. There, any action against the government has been virtually impossible since the state implemented a strict security and surveillance regime following the 2008 uprising (Topgyal, 2011).
On a recent trip into the region, the author noted the intensification of environmental transformation across the basin, along with wide-scale attempts to sanitise construction works through the use of obscuring billboards carrying colour-intensified images of bucolic scenes. Public television screens also displayed fantastic impressions of virtual, as-yet-unbuilt projects. Thousands of such projects are dotted across the plateau, including railway, housing, tourism and hydroelectric projects. The images obscuring the construction sights are so incongruous with the environmental destruction they obscured as to beg comparisons with the Soviet Union’s approach to the environment, in which, as Berd Richter explained, ‘Nature [became] a mere signifier for aesthetic and ideological functions; thus it is turned into a setting for a teleological plot. Pollution and destruction are censored, not signified and not real’ (1997: 95). Hopefully, the Chinese state has invested more in their technical capacities since the 1970s than they have in their propaganda techniques. Nevertheless, its approach to the region remains focused on engineering the environment for extraction and aesthetic purposes rather than the conservation of its fragile ecosystems.
A survey of Tibetan attitudes to development within the TAR is impossible. Internet chatter and anecdotal evidence, however, suggest they have an appreciation for improved housing and incomes but are generally not in favour of large development projects, including hydro-electrical dams. Everyday acts of political resistance to the dam are evident across the region. Locals refer to the dams, for example, as “Han Chinese projects”; they look the other way as they walk past them, and complain about the inconvenience they cause. The Tibetan exile community, furthermore, vociferously opposes the dams’ construction on environmental and cultural grounds (International Campaign for Tibet, 2018).
Protestors are not subjected to the same restrictions in India as they are in China, but demonstrators have still suffered reprisals for their efforts. They have lost jobs and contracts, been arrested, and in the case of two anti-dam protestors in Tawang, killed (Gohain, 2017; Huber and Joshi, 2017; Baruah, 2017; Bosoni, 2017). They also mirror the reactions to the dams within the PRC by unfolding along historical and ethnic lines. In Sikkim, protests have been led primarily by the Lepchas, and sometimes also by the Bhutia (Bosoni, 2017). Both groups have made their protests on religious and cultural grounds, but they do not usually work together. The Lepcha groups, headed by the Affected Citizens of Teesta (ACT), have stopped at least eight hydropower projects, including four in Dzongu, their most sacred region (McDuie-Ra, 2011).
In Tawang, Monpa protesters led by Buddhist monks from the Dalai Lama’s sect of Tibetan Buddhism have held up the construction of a large dam on the Nyamjangchu River for years. Their protests have focused on the proposed dam’s submergence of sacred sites, and lowland migration to the area which will change its cultural composition (Gohain, 2017). Despite using Tibetan Buddhist symbolism in their protests, and highlighting their relationship with the Dalai Lama, they are also insistent that theirs is a Monpa rather than a Buddhist protest.
Adi and some Tibetan groups have also blocked the construction of large dams along the Siang stretch of the Brahmaputra River. These protests too have been framed around ethnic identities and explicitly addressed the region’s history. The Adi and other non-Buddhist groups in the area are protesting against not only the dams but what they perceive is the Buddhist-dominated state government of Arunachal. One of the protestors quoted in a local newspaper, Vijay Taram, from the Forum for Siang Dialogue, foregrounded the Adi’s history in his protest when he said: ‘We did not get our land from the British or Indians. We inherited it from our forefathers. We will protect our land, and fight for it!’ (Duarah, 2018).
Conclusion
It is hard to see a resolution to the conflicts over dams in the Brahmaputra basin without a thorough process of historical accountability and reconciliation, and it is almost impossible to imagine this. The trend in both countries is toward exaggerating nationalist discourses and sentiments rather than resolving international conflicts. The dam rush will continue, and local protests against it – muted on the Chinese side, virulent on the Indian side – will continue. Any successes these protests have, however, are more likely to be about the positioning of dams rather than the building of them. They may stop dams being built that impact sacred sites, in other words, but it is unlikely they will prevent the dam rush completely.
The region has already been irrevocably transformed. The historical contingencies that led to competing Indian and Chinese control and exploitation of the basin may have been complex and ambiguous, but their material transformation of the region has been so profound it would seem impossible to reverse by political means. Aided by technological advancements and increased wealth, India and China will soon complete the annexation of the basin that the Tibetans began over four hundred years ago. This annexation threatens the region’s cultural and ecological diversity, but both nation-states have too much of their national identities and security invested in the region’s transformation to capitulate its control.
While it is hard to see the watershed’s political situation changing quickly or the pace of its development slackening, it is equally as difficult to see its environmental and social situation continuing indefinitely. The push to control the region is being constantly undermined by forces outside both nation-states’ control: its geology, ecology, hydrology, and climate change. A catastrophic earthquake like the one experienced in 1950 will transform the upper basin again in the foreseeable future. The dam rush, other forms of development and climate change will lead to ecological collapse at least across large parts of the basin. The changing climate is already leading to an increase in landslides and outburst floods, and at some point, these will begin stressing the dams’ infrastructure. Burst dams have caused extensive damage in both India and China historically, but none of the previous dam bursts have been situated in the Himalayan headwaters of rivers that sustain so many. Even if the dams do hold, changes to the region’s hydrology brought about by climate change will make their management increasingly difficult as glacier melt increases and water-flow becomes more unpredictable.
The people of the upper watershed may be bearing the brunt of the changes to their environments and societies at present, but changes to the mountains’ environment will impact the entire watershed and, therefore, a large swathe of India and all of Bangladesh. What is more, the Brahmaputra is only one of eight rivers that descend from the Tibetan plateau, and together these rivers provide sustenance to almost half of the world’s population, stretching from the Indus in Pakistan, through the major rivers of mainland South and Southeast Asia, all the way up to the Yellow River, which waters the north China plain. The centrality and precarity of this, the world’s largest hydrological system, should make the preservation of its headwaters a matter of international concern and cooperation.
The fight to control this watershed may be centuries old, but the combination of nationalist fervour and the technical ability to transform its headwaters is new. From this perspective, from the top of the mountain, China and India’s nationalist-inspired, competitive state-making threatens rather than protects their majority and minority peoples, and their smaller neighbours.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for this research, authorship and/or publication of this article: The David Myers Research Fellowship from La Trobe University, 2017–2019.
Footnotes
1. In this article, I use the term ‘Brahmaputra’ to refer to the basin’s longest channel that runs from western Tibet to the Bay of Bengal. On the ground, the river is known by many names. In western Tibet it is known as the Tachok Khabap (Rta mchog kha ‘bab); in central Tibet as the Tsangpo (Gtsang po) or Yarlung Tsangpo (Yar glung gtsang po), in Arunachal Pradesh as the Yarchab Tsangpo (Yar kyab gtsang po), Dihang and Siang, and in Assam, after the Lohit and many other tributaries join it, it is known as the Brahmaputra. In Bangladesh, it splits into delta channels known as the old Brommoputro, the Pôdda (Padma) and Jamuna.
2. The number of proposed projects varies widely according to the various official reports produced during the past two decades. At one point, the Government of Arunachal Pradesh announced it had signed 153 Memorandums of Understanding to construct large hydroelectricity projects (Rahman, 2016), but it is highly unlikely that all these projects will come to fruition. The number given here includes only those dams located in Arunachal Pradesh that have moved beyond the Memorandum of Understanding stage to assessments or preparation. The number of dams that will be built within the People’s Republic of China is also difficult to assess, as they keep changing with every five- and ten-year plan. Those included in this account were taken from the People’s Republic of China’s 13th Five-year Plan (Yong, 2014).
References
Alley K (2014) The developments, policies and assessments of hydropower in the Ganga River basin. In: Sanghi R (ed.) Ganga, Our National River: Lifeline of Millions. Leiden: Springer, 285–305.
Bailey FM (1914) Exploration on the Tsangpo or upper Brahmaputra. Scottish Geographical Magazine 30(11): 561–582.
Banarjee P (2014) Energy security through privatisation: Policy insights from Hydroelectric Power Projects (HEPs) in India’s Northeast. Perceptions 11(1): 39–53.
Barua A, Vij S, Zulfiqur Rahman M (2018) Powering or sharing water in the Brahmaputra River basin. International Journal of Water Resources Development 34(5): 829–843.
Baruah S (2007) Postfrontier Blues: Toward a New Policy Framework for Northeast India. Policy Studies 33. Washington, DC: East-West Center.
Baruah S (2017) Whose river is it, anyway? The political economy of hydropower in the Eastern Himalayas. In: Joy KJ, Das PJ, Chakraborty G, Mahanta C, Paranjape S, Vispute S (eds) Water Conflicts in Northeast India. London: Routledge, 140–168.
Biggs S (2018) Water management on the Brahmaputra and the applicability of the UNECE Water Convention. Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 51: 555–589.
Bosoni N (2017) Identity salience and opposition to hydropower development: A survey experiment in the Eastern Himalaya. M.Sc. thesis, Wageningen University, the Netherlands.
Carrington M (2003) Officers, gentlemen and thieves: The looting of monasteries during the 1903/4 Younghusband mission to Tibet. Modern Asian Studies 37(1): 81–109.
Cederlöf G (2014) Founding an Empire on India’s North-Eastern Frontiers, 1790–1840: Climate, Commerce, Polity. London: Oxford University Press.
Chhodak T (1978) The 1901 Proclamation of the XIII Dalai Lama. Tibet Journal 3(1): 38–38.
Childs G (1999) Refuge and revitalization: hidden Himalayan sanctuaries (Sbas-yul) and the preservation of Tibet’s imperial lineage. Acta Orientalia 60: 126–158.
Chaowu Dai (2014) Zhongguo dui Yindu zhanling ‘maikemahongxian’ yinan diqu de fanying jiqi yiyi (1951–1954) (India’s occupation of China’s (territory) in the area of the “McMahon Line”, and reaction to it, 1951–1954). Zhonggong dangshi yanjiu (Research on the History of the Communist Past) 12: 59–73.
Dharmadhikary S (2005) Unravelling Bhakra: Assessing the Temple of Resurgent India. Badwani: Manthan Adhyayayn Kendra.
Dikötter F (2015) The Discourse of Race in Modern China, 2nd edition. London: Oxford University Press.
Drèze J, Samson M, Sing S (eds) (1997) The Dam and the Nation: Displacement and Resettlement in the Narmada Valley. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Drolma R (2010) Villagers block work on dam. Radio Free Asia, 30 September.
D’Souza R (2006) Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Duarah CK (2018) Activists continue to protest dam being built on Brahmaputra. The Wire, 14 January.
Erlewein A, Nüsser M (2011) Offsetting greenhouse gas emissions in the Himalaya? Clean development dams in Himachal Pradesh, India. Mountain Research and Development 31(4): 293–304.
Fisher M (2018) An Environmental History of India: From Earliest Times to the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gagil M, Guha R (1994) Ecological conflicts and the environmental movement in India. Development and Change 25(1): 101–136.
Gamble R and Yangmotso (2015) Servant-like lords and heavenly kings: Jangchub Gyeltsen and the fifth Dalai Lama on governance and kingship. Cahiers d’Extreme Asie 24: 145–167.
Gohain S (2017) Robes, rivers and ruptured spaces: Hydropower projects in West Arunachal Pradesh. In: Saikia Y, Baishya A (eds) Northeast India: A Place of Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 262–276.
Goldstein M (1991) The History of Modern Tibet, 1913–1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Grothmann K (2012a) Migration narratives, official classifications, and local identities: The Memba of the hidden land of Pachakshiri. In: Huber T, Blackmore S (eds) Origins and Migrations in the Eastern Himalaya. Leiden: Brill, 125–151.
Grothmann K (2012b) Population, history and identity in the hidden land of Pemakö. Journal of Bhutan Studies 26(2): 21–52.
Guha R (1999) Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Guyot-Réchard B (2013) Nation-building or state-making? India’s north-east frontier and the ambiguities of Nehruvian developmentalism, 1950–1959. Contemporary South Asia 21(1): 22–37.
Guyot-Réchard B (2015) Reordering a border space: Relief, rehabilitation, and nation-building in northeastern India after the 1950 Assam earthquake. Modern Asian Studies 49(4): 931–962.
Gyelmo D (2018) Bhutan’s Balancing Act. The Third Pole, 28.03.2018.
Hamilton A (2012) In Abor Jungles: Being an Account of the Abor Expedition, the Mishmi Mission and the Miri Mission. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Huber A, Joshi D (2017) Hydropower conflicts in Sikkim: Recognising the power of citizen initiatives for socio-environmental justice. In: Joy KJ, Das PJ, Chakraborty G, Mahanta C, Paranjape S, Vispute S (eds) Water Conflicts in Northeast India. London: Routledge, 71–91.
Huber T (2007) Micro-migrations of hill peoples in northern Arunachal Pradesh: Rethinking methodologies and claims of origins in Tibet. In: Huber T, Blackmore S (eds) Origins and Migrations in the Eastern Himalaya. Leiden: Brill, 83–106.
Huber T (2008) Pushing south: Tibetan economic and political activities in the Far Eastern Himalaya, ca. 1900–1950. In: McKay A, Balikci-Denjongpa A (eds) Buddhist Himalaya: Studies in Religion, History and Culture. Proceedings of the Golden Jubilee Conference of the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology, Vol. 1. Gangtok: Namgyal Institute of Tibetology, 259–276.
International Campaign for Tibet (2018) China’s claims in new White Paper about protecting Tibet’s environment are contradicted by increased production of bottled water from shrinking Tibetan glaciers, more dams. International Campaign for Tibet. Available at: https://www.savetibet.org/chinas-claims-in-new-white-paper-about-protecting-tibets-environment-are-contradicted-by-increased-production-of-bottled-water-from-shrinking-tibetan-glaciers-more-dams/
Jiang Y, He H (2011) A new era for Tibet’s rivers. China Dialogue, 17 January.
Khagrama S (2004) Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles for Water and Power. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Tsomo Kunga (2017) Tuting resident, oral interview, March, Tuting, Arunachal Pradesh.
Kurian N (2017) Navigating downstream concerns over China’s water policy. In: Joy KJ, Das PJ, Chakraborty G, Mahanta C, Paranjape S, Vispute S (eds) Water Conflicts in Northeast India. London: Routledge, 262–271.
Lamb A (1966) The McMahon Line, 2 vols. London: Routledge.
Lazcano S (2005) Ethnohistoric notes on the ancient Tibetan Kingdom of sPo bo and its influence on the Eastern Himalayas. Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines 7: 41–63.
Leibold J (2006) Competing narratives of racial unity in Republican China: From the Yellow Emperor to Peking Man. Modern China 32(2): 181–220.
Lintner B (2018) China’s India War: Collision Course on the Roof of the World. London: Oxford University Press.
Mathou T (2004) Bhutan-China relations: Towards a new step in Himalayan politics. In: Papers Submitted for the International Seminar on Bhutanese Studies. Thimphu: Bhutan, 20–23.
McCully P (2001) Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams. New York: Blackwell.
McDougal E (2016) Drakngak Lingpa’s pilgrimage guides and the progressive opening of the hidden land of Pemakö. Revue d’Etudes Tibetaines 35: 5–52.
McDuie-Ra D (2011) The dilemmas of pro-development actors: Viewing state–ethnic minority relations and intra-ethnic dynamics through contentious development projects. Asian Ethnicity 12(1): 77–100.
McGranahan C (2003) From Simla to Rongbatsa: The British and the ‘modern’ boundaries of Tibet. The Tibet Journal 28(4): 39–60.
McGranahan C (2010) Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War. Durham: Duke University Press.
McGranahan C (2017) Imperial but not colonial: Archival truths, British India, and the case of the ‘naughty’ Tibetans. Comparative Studies in Society and History 59(1): 68–95.
McMichael P (2008) Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective. Los Angeles: Pine Forge Press.
Menon M, Kanchi K (2005) Large Dams for Hydropower in Northeast India: A Dossier. New Delhi: South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People and Kalpavriksh.
Miller MC (2013) Wronged by Empire: Post-Imperial Ideology and Foreign Policy in India and China. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Mimi R (2017) The Dibang multipurpose project: Resistance of the Idu Mishmi. In: Joy KJ, Das PJ, Chakraborty G, Mahanta C, Paranjape S, Vispute S (eds) Water Conflicts in Northeast India. London: Routledge, 218–231.
Myers N, Mittermeier RA, Mittermeier CG, Da Fonseca GAB, Kent J (2000) Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities. Nature 403(6772): 853–858.
Nehru J (1985) The Discovery of India. New Delhi: Oxford.
Nüsser M (2014) Technological hydroscapes in Asia: The large dams debate reconsidered. In: Nüsser M (ed.) Large Dams in Asia: Contested Environments between Technological Hydroscapes and Social Resistance. Heidelberg: Springer, 1–14.
Nyman LE (1976) Tawang: A case study of British frontier policy in the Himalayas. Journal of Asian History 10(2): 151–171.
Pietz D (2015) The Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pommaret F (1999) The Mon-pa revisited: In search of Mon. In: Huber T (ed.) Sacred Spaces and Powerful Places in Tibetan Culture. Dharamsala: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives.
Rahman AP (2016) Private dam builders back out of Brahmaputra dams. The Third Pole, 25 February.
Richter BS (1997) Nature mastered by man: Ideology and water in the Soviet Union. Environment and History 3(1): 69–96.
Samaranayake N, Limaye S, Wuthnow J (2016) Water Resource Competition in the Brahmaputra River Basin: China, India and Bangladesh. Arlington, VA: Center for Naval Analysis.
Sandesara U, Wooten T (2011) No One Had a Tongue to Speak: the Untold Story of One of History’s Deadliest Floods. New York: Prometheus Books.
Shakya T (2012) The Dragon in the Land of Snows: The History of Modern Tibet Since 1947. London: Random House.
Spalding-Fecher R, Achanta AN, Erickson P, Haites E, Lazarus M, Pahuja N, Tewari R (2012) Assessing the impact of the clean development mechanism. Report commissioned by the High Level Panel on the CDM Policy Dialogue. Available at: http://www.cdmpolicydialogue.org/research/1030_impact.pdf
Sperling E (1976) The Chinese venture in K’am, 1904–1911, and the role of Chao Erh-feng. The Tibet Journal 1(2): 10–36.
Sperling E (2008) The politics of history and the indo-Tibetan border (1987–88). India Review 7(3): 223–239.
Tenpa L (2014) The centenary of the McMahon Line (1914–2014) and the status of Monyul until 1951–2. The Tibet Journal 39(2): 57–102.
Tenpa L (2016) Notes on the (Tibeto-)mon and Sherdukpen treaties with British India in the 19th century. The Tibet Journal 41(2): 73–101.
Tilt B (2014) Dams and Development in China: The Moral Economy of Water and Power. New York: Columbia University Press.
Topgyal T (2011) Insecurity dilemma and the Tibetan uprising in 2008. Journal of Contemporary China 20(69): 183–203.
Van Eekelen W (2015) Indian Foreign Policy and the Border Dispute with China: A New Look at Asian Relationships. Leiden: Brill.
Wang P, Dong S, Lassoie J (2013) The Large Dam Dilemma: An Exploration of the Impacts of Hydro Projects on People and the Environment in China. Leiden: Springer.
Webber M, Crow-Miller B, Rogers S (2017) The South–North Water Transfer Project: Remaking the geography of China. Regional Studies 51(3): 370–382.
World Commission on Dams (2000) Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision Making. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd.
Yi si (2016) The world’s most catastrophic dam failures: The August 1975 collapse of the Banqiao and Shimantan dams. In: Dai Qing (ed.) The River Dragon Has Come! Three Gorges Dam and the Fate of China’s Yangtze River and Its People: Three Gorges Dam and the Fate of China’s Yangtze River and Its People. London: Routledge, 25–38.
Ye shes ‘phrin las (2009) Mon yul gyi gzhi rtsa’i gnas tshul (Monyul’s Fundamental Situation). In: Bod kyi lo rgyus rig gnas dpyad gzhi’i rgyu cha bdams bsgrigs (An Anthology of Analytical Materials for the Investigation of Tibetan Cultural History). Khreng tu’u: Si khron dpe skrun tshogs pa, 408–432.
Yong Y (2014) World’s largest hydropower project planned for Tibetan plateau. China Dialogue, 5 March.
Zhang H (2016) Sino-Indian water disputes: The coming water wars? Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water 3(2): 155–166.
Zhang L (2016) The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China (1048–1128). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Biographies
Ruth Gamble is a cultural and environmental historian of Tibet and the Himalaya. Her first book, Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Karmapa and the Invention of a Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2018), traces the development of Tibet’s reincarnation lineages and argues that they developed symbiotically with the region’s network of sacred sites. She has also produced an ETextbook, Introduction to the Tibetan Language (Australian National University Press, 2018), and a series of articles about the idea of place in Tibetan literature. She is now researching an environmental history of the Yarlung Tsangpo River, and writing on topics associated with the environmental humanities in relation to the Himalaya and Tibet.
Cite article
Cite article
Cite article
OR
Download to reference manager
If you have citation software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice
Information, rights and permissions
Information
Published In
Article first published online: February 15, 2019
Issue published: February 2019
Keywords
Authors
Metrics and citations
Metrics
Article usage*
Total views and downloads: 3599
*Article usage tracking started in December 2016
Articles citing this one
Receive email alerts when this article is cited
Web of Science: 10 view articles Opens in new tab
Crossref: 14
- Geopolitical assemblages and disasters-in-the-making in Kalimpong, Ind...
- Find the river: Discovering the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra in the age of empi...
- The Himalaya as an International Region
- Militaries on Melting Ice: The Ladakh-Gilgit-Western Tibet Ice Caps
- Competitive Dam Building in the Yarlung Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River Basi...
- Reconciliation of water conflicts? Coalition and contradiction in mana...
- Climate and energy justice along the Brahmaputra river in Northeast In...
- Surviving Pemakö’s pluriverse: Kunga Tsomo, the goddess, and the LAC
- Bordering the postcolonial state: the relevance of Sikkim in India’s s...
- The future of hydropower? A systematic review of the drivers, benefits...
- International relations and the Himalaya: connecting ecologies, cultur...
- Anti-Dam Struggles and the Technopolitics of Hydropower: The Case of A...
- Timescapes of Himalayan hydropower: Promises, project life cycles, and...
- Dams, neoliberalism, and rights: Mainstreaming environmental justice c...
Figures and tables
Figures & Media
Tables
View Options
View options
PDF/ePub
View PDF/ePubGet access
Access options
If you have access to journal content via a personal subscription, university, library, employer or society, select from the options below:
loading institutional access options
Alternatively, view purchase options below:
Purchase 24 hour online access to view and download content.
Access journal content via a DeepDyve subscription or find out more about this option.
