HISTORY, LOGIC, LAW AND POLITICS OF WATER AND INDUS
BY JAVED QAZI
(THIS ARTICLE APPEARED IN IBRAT ON 22ND MAY 2003)
Indus is goddess, historically it was ‘wild and dynamic, forever changing and eroding its bed, depositing the silt, seeking its new course, bursting its banks’, making the ecosystem work and its flow used to bring to a close the intrusion of sea. In Indian myths it was pride, symbol of prosperity, civilizations and enigmas. Like life it was metamorphosed as a spirit. In Indian myths it is not taken as stuff that is to be disturbed, but worshipped. Shah Bhittai of Sindh has sung it; his poetry revolves around the whole Indus. But then the population increased beyond the ecosystem. In 20th century alone it trippled, the demand of renewable water has grown to six fold. Unfortunately population of human has multiplied to an extent where whole nature has been disturbed. The ecosystem, rivers, species, many are endangered. It is equally a fact that 10,000 years ago we human came out of caves, took the food production in our hands and thus stepped outside the local ecosystem. The very essence of society began from the arable lands. The lands that produce grain, cotton, fruits, vegetables and their major input is water.
Water is now a scarce resource, therefore an economic good; whose opportunity cost is high. The societies where population has massively increased, such as South Asia or Pakistan in particular, the country that is multi-national, multiethnic and it has another real divide which is in shape of rural and urban. The country where society and the polity is very primitive- of the time when the population or demand was not high- the water crises have come up as a most conflicting and antagonistic in nature. To the world donors and those who see economics not as macro management phenomenon alone but also to make it sustain just and equitable in all walks and strata of life that should provide facilities and opportunities irrespective of caste, creed, gender etc, to them this country is nothing but a failed state. Unfortunately the very logical point is that this is a state, which has no strength to resolve these conflicts amicably among the stakeholders, concerned users and claimants of water. Unfortunately this state is a party since the military has ruled this country as a single party with complex structure of other allied forces such as civil bureaucracy and feudal lords that could only glue with the system if it is patronizing and safeguarding the vested interests. The state has very great vested interest in grabbing lands and making them arable for their serving and retired military officers. Thus the state is herself the major reason of misappropriating the resources of water and therefore is partisan. This is a system, which has politics of patronage as it used to be in the states where communist parties had a rule and their rules wrecked those countries from within. At macro level this water robbing is executed by Punjab since it is powerful. To the establishment, they are like the Tikrit of Saddam in Iraq, those who built dams in the center at the cost of people of Basra and South. Basra and its surroundings’ arable lands turned barren like the lands of Sindh.
Quite identically this country has also gone through one such wrecking in 1971 when serious jerks of injustices that were applied on the Bengalis of Pakistan ever since this country came into being. On the contrary in order to make this country proceed towards a track of modern state, the state which shall be plural and democratic and will have market economy to allocate resources and create a demand, it requires a politics of good governance. Such were the ideas of Meiko Nishmizu, the Vice President World Bank for our region, to which she delivered in the Development Conference that was held few days back in Islamabad. Such politics of good governance would only be capable to nurture institutions and the state organs where conflicts on water etc. can be resolved in a participatory way. The precise phrase for that scenario and dynamics would be ‘New Pakistan’.
However until the new Pakistan emerges, the Pakistan, which will be having a politics of good governance as a rule in its veins and nerves, the Pakistan, which will have such ingredients only when the army withdraws or is made to get aside of playing its role as a major political force. The military will leave this role only when the Kashmir issue is resolved (not going into the complexities that how this issue will be resolved)-, this water issue has become so alarming that it is killing the nation, the ethnic groups and clans, those who are weak in stakeholders bunch, such as the indigenous Sindhis in Pakistan, and within these indigenous Sindhis the people of south, the fisherman, the dwellers of Manchar and Kenjhar lake, Thatta, Badin etc. The unfortunate people of Thar have never been counted in those who historically had the right on the Indus water. In Thar food security had never been sustainable as it was in other parts of Sindh, until recently. And now the whole Southern Sindh is gradually getting to be at the point where it will also give a dilapidated look like Thar. Thatta and Badin where sea is in course of intrusion for the natural resistance that was provided by mangrove forests, which are decaying and fish is dying. The 50% of total arable lands of district Badin and 70% of District Thatta has become barren. This has happened in a very short span of time. These are the districts, which SPDC and Kaiser Bengali in their last years repot on poverty have reckoned to be most rapidly getting poor. Kaiser reported that in these districts the 80% of the population is living below poverty line.
There are laws and there is logic on which Sindh is demanding from international community and water forums such as Global Water Partnership (GWP), which defines water governance as the range of political, social, economic, and administrative system that are in place to regulate the development and management of water resources and the provision of water services at different level of societies. International River Network has resolved plenty of conflicts within the countries and also in the different stakeholders inside the countries. And there is also an authority on the world water disputes, Professor Irving Fischer of MIT. The whole world has developed the consensus that all resources of water be pooled first and then divided. Unfortunately Punjab is not ready to pool its underground water resources. These resources, which are seeped from the flow of Indus in a natural pouring system and can, remain fresh for years.
Opportunity cost of the water is very logical. Under such conventional definitions, which are elaborated by Irving Fischer, Thal project is highly unviable because it is designed to fertile barren lands. Those lands have been given to the military officers. That is the reason that another white elephant like Motorway is underway on the joint money of all provinces and particularly of Sindh. The province, which generates more revenue, is being given little. This time this project is precisely to divert the water of Indus. Indus is already running short of water, it is already hardly enough for those who have historic claim on it. Punjab is least bothered on the ecosystem front. Sindh has equally to address this issue.
The silt was another protection from intrusion, which is five times lesser in discharge. Now the intrusion of the sea is the major cause of destroying those arable lands. That Indus delta which was 2600 sq. km now has been reduced to 260 sq. km. It all needs 27 MAF to maintain the forest of mangroves deep down to Thatta the tail end and generally 34 MAF for all that ecosystem. But now it is almost squeezed for they say the water is running short for the irrigation of the head end users. It is not the ecosystem alone, 100,000 thousand people have been dislocated, those who lived in the coastal villages of Indus delta.
The Sindh Irrigation Department has proved to be a complete failure, almost all modules are tempered, and the banks of canals and sub- canals have not been properly managed. Their breaches last year created havocs. It is totally run on the might is right principle. No SEDA plan will work unless a significant political change that comes at higher political structures and the politics of good governance initiate its course. In rural Sindh the sanitation system is yet playing another havoc. Unhygienic water has spread the diseases epidemically.
Indus is dying. That Indus from whose pure water, South Asia inhabited the great civilizations, history, art culture and most of all the philosophy that went making deep its roots into Baghdad and then Berlin of Hegel and Kant. It was as old and as great as the Greek. And even far beyond then Babylonians. It will not be a death of Indus, the roots and the great nature rather the goddess and the spirit. The enigmas and magic, the heritage and the art, the philosophy etc. the pioneers of gender parity, plurality Vedic philosophy and in modern history the mysticism. The mysticism that gave Islam a docile and oriental colour so as not to become hostile to indigenous and whenever Islam went back to clerics, it went creating disharmony.
The arbitrarily attitude of the state and establishment to resolve these water conflicts would aggravate the crises and deepen them. It is thus a security issue. The cause of these crises is political. It is basically the politics of patronage that is the root cause of present security threats and these were the same causes in 1971 partition. This country for all practical reason is quite incompetent to resolve these issues. The food insecurity, epidemic diseases the nonfunctioning of laws characterize the places where indigenous Sindhis concentrate. The indigenous Sindhis are devoid of genuine leadership also, demand from the conscience of the world to help them at this critical juncture of history where their survival is at stake.
Today when Kaiser Bengali is coming here to Hyderabad for the reference and dialogue on his recently published book by the Oxford, like him there was one another pro-justice: Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who lived most of his Jail life in Hyderabad but he was quite pessimist on the politics of patronage, that is worn by the state here. In one of his poem about his love for the country he says:
“These are same greedy, those who are judges and those who are defendants, It is quite indistinct therefore to find an advocate or those whom one could appeal for justice”.