Animosity at Bay by Pallavi Raghavan

Author:Pallavi Raghavan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Princely Claims

N. D. Gulhati, an official who had been retained in an advisory capacity to the Ministry of Science and Power, headed by Gopalaswami Ayyangar, made a critical reference to the process of the finalisation of partition in a 1951 letter. Complaining about the lack of aid from the United States for the building of the Bhakra Nangal Dam in 1950, Gulhati stated:

This ministry is surprised by at the attitude taken by the US Government to deny technical advice and even to refuse equipment being tested for Bhakra Dam, because of their desire to steer clear of all possible complications connection with the Canal Waters Dispute between India and Pakistan… [But] it may also be remembered that the work on the Bhakra Dam was taken in hand by the United Punjab Government long before the Partition of the country was thought of.2

Indeed, the United States had initially refused to lend technical assistance for the development of the Bhakra Dam, on the grounds that it may further inflame the India–Pakistan dispute. Its reasoning was not as surprising as Gulhati had made it out to be: water being channelled for the development of the Bhakra Dam would have been diverted at the expense of the irrigation supplies flowing into western Punjab. But for Gulhati and other officials in East Punjab, the partition had in fact represented a clear opportunity to establish control over the headworks in more or less exclusive terms. All negotiations on the canal waters between East and West Punjab were also carried out with the intent of establishing this principle in the most unambiguous terms possible. Nehru was not unwilling to support them in this agenda, being, in any case unable, as he told Ghulam Muhmmad, unable to effectively oppose it.

Indeed—regardless of the inherent value in his arguments—it makes sense to chart out the trajectory of the Indus Waters Treaty via the career of N. D. Gulhati, who was closely associated with the decisions of the East Punjab government in 1948, was present at the signing of the 1948 agreement, and who, in the end, got his way with how the clauses of the Indus Waters Treaty were crafted. Ultimately the terms of the Indus Waters Treaty, which specified a division of the Eastern and Western Rivers, with separate linkages being made in Pakistan to supply west Punjab with alternative sources of irrigation, were those that Gulhati had advocated, and which would also ensure that India’s own irrigation plans, such as the Bhakra canal, could continue uninterrupted. The ways in which Gulhati tackled the issue of the canal waters, therefore, are indicative of the processes of the implementation and finalisation of the partition, and which also included, eventually, the signing of the Indus Waters Treaty.

The Arbitral Tribunal—which had been put in place to decide arrangements about allocating resources to India and Pakistan in the period immediately after the partition—had decided that the canal systems would be valued, and that both the provinces of Eastern and Western Punjab would pay a proportionate share of interest for its benefits.

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