Indus Divided: India, Pakistan and the River Basin Dispute by Daniel Haines

Author:Daniel Haines [Haines, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143439615
Publisher: Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Published: 2017-01-10T18:30:00+00:00

Conclusion

Throughout the avowedly technical phase of negotiations during the early and mid-1950s, politics simmered just below the surface. Soon afterwards, as the next chapter will show, politics—explicitly framed—became more prominent. Technocratic internationalism, like joint development, had failed to resolve the Indus dispute.

Personally, too, Lilienthal had little continuing involvement in the Indus issue. He was reportedly disappointed when the World Bank did not ultimately set up a supranational engineering corporation and ask him to lead it, though according to his published diaries he turned down an earlier State Department proposal that he should mediate between India and Pakistan.111 After his work on the Indus waters problem, Lilienthal set up a consultancy called the Development and Resources Corporation, which worked as a contractor with foreign governments and specialised in river valley development.

Nevertheless, Lilienthal remains a key figure in the history of the Indus negotiations. He wrote his article to address the specific concerns of US foreign policy and South Asian political stability, but drew on much wider currents. His proposal encapsulated the post-war confidence of large-scale, top-down developmentalism. His ideas were attractive enough to Eugene Black, Jawaharlal Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan to forge an initial consensus on the need for technical negotiations under the World Bank.

Apart from providing this impetus, Lilienthal’s role is mainly important because of what he failed to do. He did not reconnect the engineers of Indian and Pakistani Punjab into an epistemic community that existed beyond and above nationalist politics. He did not succeed in establishing the Indus Basin as the scale of cooperative water development. His vision of joint, cooperative development foundered on these two points.

Lilienthal’s proposal deserves attention because it alerts us to the alternatives of historical possibility. In the unstable context of the early 1950s, Indian and Pakistani stances on the Indus dispute did not seem as entrenched as they later proved to be. Despite Nehru’s reservations about the practicalities of anti-politics, he and the other leaders were willing to suspend disbelief and take a new kind of action to work towards resolving the dispute. Lilienthal was naïve about the strength and durability of political division that followed Partition. In hindsight Partition seems a sharp break that thrust India and Pakistan down interacting but fundamentally different national paths. It did not seem so at the time, though. Just as the international borders in Punjab and Bengal remained fuzzy, and the Indian and Pakistani governments took time to resolve issues surrounding refugees and citizenship, the final division of the Indus Basin was not inevitable. The next chapter shows how and why that division came about.

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