Water, water everywhere
Satyajit Ray's film Shatranj ke khilari satirises two determined chess-playing nawabs who are so engrossed in their game that they ignore the evaporation of their princedoms by the British.
The two Indus Waters Treaty Commissioners are their modern counterparts.
Since the Indus Waters Treaty was signed in September 1960, these two officials, representing their countries, have played the game uninterruptedly, determined to checkmate each other on technicalities, while in the background their countries gradually dehydrated.
The Commissioners have met 99 times, one short of a century. That the game should have continued for so long despite 1965 and the 1971 wars, military standoffs and political stand-downs, is a tribute less to the tenacity of successive Commissioners than to the skill of those who drafted the original Treaty.
An economist who recently retired from the World Bank has predicted that the next war between Indian and Pakistan would be over water. His predecessors sixty years ago feared the same, hence the deal. They could see clearer than Pakistan or India would admit the disastrous effect of Cyril Radcliffe's ragged solution to the division of the Punjab and its five rivers.
Radcliffe had hoped that the two new nations might evolve 'some joint control and management of the irrigation system'. He left the largest irrigation system in the world on one side of the border and the source of its waters on the other.
Unlike India which has innumerable options, Pakistan is dependent entirely upon the Indus. It accounts for one quarter of Pakistan's GDP, two-thirds of its employment, and sustains 80% of its exports. Any future Pakistan has as an agro-based economy is again in the hands of India.
Until scientists can find a substitute for water (so far they have been adept only at inventing different types of containers), every country in the world will have to come to grips with pressures from water stress, water scarcity, and water criticality (the officialese for drought).
Our grandparents will remember at a time in the 1950s when the per capita availability of water was a comfortable 5,177 M3 per head in India and 5,300 M3 in Pakistan. Our generation has seen it fall drastically to about 1800 M3 and 1100 M3 respectively. The critical level is 1000 M3. Meanwhile the IWT Commissioners continue to quibble over ink long since dried while our rivers themselves are drying up.
The issues between the two countries have been too well-ventilated to be repeated again here Wullar Barrage, the Kishenganga Project, and more recently the Baghliar Dam. While neither signatory may or indeed can unilaterally abrogate the IWT, there may be some justification for improving the procedure being followed by the Commissioners to resolve issues. The aggrieved writes to his counterpart, who then refers it to his country's Ministry for its views, which in turn sends it to the executing agency for comments, and then back again. Sowing seasons are lost as the complaint meanders through the rivulets of officialdom.
It is a slur to both Indian and to Pakistan that when they could not agree with each other, they agreed to be bound by the decision on the Baghliar Dam issue by a neutral expert nominated by the World Bank. That such an appointment was in accordance with the terms of the IWT is immaterial; what saddened many patriots on both sides of the border was that Cyril Radcliffe found reincarnation in a Swiss engineer Raymond Lafitte.
It is not for a Pakistani to quote the Taittiriya Upanishad to an Indian readership but recognising that the Upanishads were composed when the Indus was still young, one should repeat its message -'Water is food.'- to two agrarian neighbours, dependent for their nourishment on the same water sources.
Over the years, India has negotiated water treaties with Bangladesh (1972), Bhutan (1993), and Nepal (1996). It is time that in our geophysical basin, countries created after Creation should learn to accept that politics is not (as Napoleon maintained) simply a matter of geography, but a matter of common survival.
The Indus problem was once described as an engineering problem, rather than a political one. Although neither President Asif Ali Zardari nor Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is an engineer, hopefully, their recent meeting in New York will lead to a cohesion of political wills. After all, their people do not drink ink.
Aijazuddin is a Pakistani Journalist
(Will also be publishied in Covert)
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