Discord on dam hurts process: Pakistan-India talks
By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI: One year after India and Pakistan initiated peace talks, dialogue between the nuclear-armed rivals appears to be floundering over the sharing of waters of the Indus River that runs through the disputed territory of Kashmir.
Early this week Masood Khan, Pakistan's Foreign Office spokesman, announced at a press conference in Islamabad that his country would seek World Bank arbitration to resolve a dispute over the Baglihar Dam that India is constructing across the river Chenab, one of the five tributaries of the Indus river.
Khan's counterpart in India, Navtej Sarna, responded by saying that differences between the technical experts of the two countries were actually narrowing and he did not believe that "reference to the World Bank is justified."
This is the first time Pakistan will approach a third party for resolution of an issue arising out of the 1960 Indus Water Treaty. Negotiated by the World Bank, the treaty has stood the test of time in the worst periods of relations between India and Pakistan.
Leading analysts believe that India-Pakistan talks, initiated last January at a regional summit in Islamabad, were doomed anyway and these include Stephen P. Cohen, a leading South Asia expert from the United States who is currently in the Indian capital to release the India edition of his book 'The Idea of Pakistan.'
At a discussion of his book on Tuesday, Cohen said he expected the talks to break down but said he hoped that both sides would then "draw lessons from why the process failed."
Cohen's personal view was that the talks lacked "political ownership." They were initiated by former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee whose right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) unexpectedly lost the May elections to the Congress party.
In recent weeks, apart from acrimony over the Baglihar dam, there have been unmistakable signs that the talks were sliding backwards. On Tuesday, the Indian Army claimed that mortar shells were fired across the Line of Control (LOC) that separates parts of Kashmir but officials on both sides refrained from calling it a violation of a cease fire that has held good for 14 months now.
Following high level contacts between the armies of both countries on Wednesday, Islamabad agreed to investigate the incident. But the deputy commander of the Indian Army Lt. Gen. B S Thakur, said India's response to the firing would be based on " a case-by-case evaluation of any future violations."
Although the two countries have since remained at some level of confrontation over Kashmir ever since, they managed, in 1960, to sign the Indus Water Treaty under the auspices of the World Bank.
Under the treaty, India was to have exclusive rights over the waters of the three eastern tributaries of the Indus, the Sutlej, Beas and Ravi while Pakistan was to get similar rights over the westward flowing tributaries of Chenab, Jhelum and the Indus itself.
However, India as the upper riparian nation, was allowed to have non-consumptive, run-of-the-river projects on the westward flowing tributaries. The question, now, is whether the construction of the Baglihar Dam, intended to produce 450 megawatts of electric power, violates the Indus Water Treaty.
Pakistan says it does and the dam would affect the flow of the Chenab into its territory, and contravene a 1960 river water-sharing treaty brokered by the World Bank. India counters that the power project does not propose to store water and will not disrupt flows into Pakistan.
Since the latest round of talks between technical experts from both countries conducted earlier this month failed to resolve the issue, Pakistan wants the World Bank, as the guarantor of the Treaty, to intervene.
New Delhi, though, has come under increasing pressure from the elected state government in Kashmir which believes that the Indus Water Treaty deprives people living in the state of their right to use the river to generate cheap electricity.
"The Baglihar power project is extremely important for people in our state," said Qazi Mohammed Afzal, the state's minister for irrigation and public health engineering, who briefed journalists soon after Pakistan indicated that it would take the dam dispute to the World Bank.
Qazi said while the rivers of Kashmir irrigate almost the whole of Pakistan, the 1960 treaty prevents Kashmiris themselves from harnessing the huge hydroelectric potential of the rivers or optimally use their waters for irrigation.
Kashmir also has to share the irrigation and power potential of the river Ravi with the Indian state of Punjab, Qazi said. The minister added that his state deserved to be compensated for the huge losses it has suffered as a result of the water treaty between India and Pakistan.
There have also been protests by the supporters of an independent, undivided Kashmir against the construction of the Mangla Dam by Pakistan in Azad Kashmir in the sixties that displaced thousands of people. Nonetheless, in 2000, the height of the dam's water level was raised and its covered area expanded.
Officials in both India and Pakistan have said that the row over the Baglihar dam will not come in the way of the ongoing "composite dialogue" between the two countries under which India's Foreign Minister Natwar Singh is to visit Pakistan in February.
But analysts like Cohen believe that a real breakthrough in resolving the Kashmir issue can only happen through "statesmanship" rather than "diplomatic sparring." -Dawn/The Inter Press News Service.
