View: A new book explores Indus Basin with a lesson on war and peace

Uttam Sinha’s Indus Basin Uninterrupted, written with remarkable ease, engages not only with the ‘hydrology heritage’ of the basin but also with the history of major developments on its banks. The Indus Basin is a powerful symbol of the passage of time and the rivers, since time immemorial, have governed peoples’ lives, sharpening identities, and facilitating the ‘intercourse of peace and commerce’. The land around the rich flows of water dictated agriculture, ordered territories and attracted invaders. The book while accounting all this intermixes just the right amount of historical context with political analysis to the sociological-economic unfolding on the Indus Basin ending with the signing of the Indus Waters Treaty that the author calls a “historical pause”.

Today as we look at the Indus system of rivers traversing two sovereign lands that are divided politically and bitterly, we are reminded that history remains one.

The scale of the book is undoubtedly breathtaking and one could question the massive periodicity (from Alexander to Nehru) yet the connecting thread runs through seamlessly. The text very rarely sidetracks and while information flows abundantly (there are over 750 references) it does not seem overloaded. The author has shown great communicative skills, like a story-teller, in masterfully weaving diverse facts and information with the events. Resultantly the book is both exciting and entertaining.

The book begins with the incredible fluvial and natural drainage knowledge that the people of the Indus civilisation knew and their ability to cope and adapt to the changing conditions of the rivers. Such knowledge, the author reminds us, has remained instructive even today when we are dealing with water resources in the Indus basin.

Very interestingly what we know of the Indus today as embracing the waters of the five rivers of Punjab and then flowing into the sea was described by a number of travellers in the 9th, 10th and 11th century as two parallel rivers – the westward Indus and the eastward Mihrān. This has been beautifully brought out from the diaries, notes and travelogues of these travellers from the west. It was only in the first decade of the 19th century that the British cartographers and surveyors firmly established the Indus as the main stem and thus the Indus become the all-encompassing river and a powerful expression of unification. The territorial significance of the Indus, as part II of the book describes, eventually led to the British frontier policy, depicted fascinatingly through Lord Minto’s three emissaries or ‘Three Wise Men’ – John Malcolm, Charles Metcalfe and Stuart Elphinstone.

There are five parts in the book intricately interconnected. The last two are in particular quite riveting offering some very interesting facts to chew on. For example, the role of the civil engineers in the Partition process like Kanwar Sain who was the chief engineer in the Bikaner principality as Sinha argues, “While much of the Partition history is about the role of the great leaders, their differences, actions and miscalculations, the foresightedness of the Indian civil engineers in understanding the seriousness of the asset distribution, in this case the headworks, and their fear of India being at a disadvantage by the boundary has received inadequate attention.” (p.160)

There are some very interesting conversation between Sadul Singh, the maharaja of Bikaner, Sardar Pannikar, Jawaharlal Nehru and Lord Mountbatten over the canal headworks and how eventually the headworks by drawing the Partition line came to India as a ‘strategic asset’.

Likewise the Lok Sabha debate in November 1960 over the Indus Waters Treaty is very educative. A few months earlier Nehru had signed the Indus Treaty in Karachi and India, gave 80.52 per cent of water from the Indus basin to Pakistan. The ratio of 4:1 heavily favoured Pakistan and India’s initial demand for 25 per cent of the water was debated threadbare and angry voices were raised as a failure of India’s negotiations.

The author analyses Nehru’s approach to the treaty and by doing so we get a clinical understanding of Nehru’s personality and at times his ego. As Sinha writes, “Nehru’s interest in international problems was well known. His ideals of oneness, though, clashed with the realities of power politics and interest-oriented relations which he understood but adamantly refused to accept.” (p.272)

This volume, a historical tour de force, is a valuable contribution to the public discourse on the transboundary waters and contains lessons for war and peace. A must read for anyone interested in the Indian subcontinent’s past, present and future.

Col DPK Pillay (Retd) is a decorated war veteran with MP- IDSA . He was commissioned in 4 GUARDS and earned his Shaurya Chakra and is honoured more for his act of self-sacrifice in saving the lives of two young children while he himself was nearly fatally wounded.