Ideas, Institutions, Processes: Essays in Memory of Satish Saberwal by N. Jayaram

Author:N. Jayaram [Jayaram, N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

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Towards an Environmental History of the Indus Water Treaty

ROHAN D’SOUZA

Securitisation theory was given a fresh and surprising fillip in the 1990s with the persuasive writings of Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde of the Copenhagen School (Buzan et al. 1998). These scholars argued that the term security did not reflect an ‘objective condition'. Rather, perceptions about (in) security could be imagined and constructed through specific types of ‘speech- acts', and any type of subject matter or ordinary alarm, could, through a range of ‘securitizing moves' be turned into a security concern.1 These compelling insights have helped us to conceptually grasp how, in recent decades, the environment or natural resources have increasingly begun to be situated within such security frameworks (Dalby 2002).

Among the implications of securitising the environment, however, has been the tendency to restrict the conversation to a narrow band of technocrats, political interests, elite experts and bureaucratic control. Reversing such ‘securitization talk' with ‘de-securitizing' narratives thus becomes crucial to challenging the problems of secrecy, the restriction of information and the limiting of the participation of citizen publics in environmental issues.2 In this essay, I will point out that environmental history writing can offer important strategies for evolving de-securitising narratives by revealing historical complexity and recovering ecological politics.

Discussions on the Indus rivers have become overwhelmingly strategic: flows are discussed as matters of political contest, vested interests, and above all else, national security. What has, however, thus far been rarely acknowledged is the erasure of the historical contexts of these contemporary anxieties. It is as if the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) of 1960 could be almost nonchalantly deployed to snip vast flowing courses into neat divisible segments, and with equal ease ‘rationally' allocate immense volumes between nations. That is, a mere blunt knife approach can comprehensively sever and move about a complex hydrology without so much as an afterthought about disturbing delicately poised fluvial ecologies, or the implications of coarsely stirring whole river-based communities.

The Indus Water Treaty, with this structured ‘forgetting' of the Indus basin's many pasts and varied environments, is not unexpectedly often concluded by experts to be a ‘successful' legal-technical arrangement that has suffered from frequent and exceptional political ‘misperceptions'. It can, however, be more convincingly argued the other way. The Indus Water Treaty was an unsteady political project to begin with, and is now fatally failing as a legal-technical arrangement. But reversing the analytical vantage requires a sharp perceptual shift as well. A type of taproot understanding of IWT is urgently called for, by which new facts, so to speak, must be dug up, sunned, and differently seasoned in order to have us go beyond the limited simplifications of hydraulic data, official statistics, engineering opinion, and statist imperative.

Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, the Mughal Empire held, in a single firm embrace, vast territories of what today comprises India and Pakistan. For the Mughal ruling elites, applying a regular squeeze over agricultural surpluses was the preferred route to wealth and privilege. Typically enough, given this

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