In every civilisation’s story, water has never been just a resource — it has been power itself. Those who commanded its flow commanded destinies, shaping empires, hierarchies, and enduring inequalities. Across centuries and continents, this elemental force has mirrored control and exclusion in equal measure.

In Pakistan, cradled by the mighty Indus (one of the world’s great river systems), the politics of water runs deep, revealing how history, bureaucracy, gender, and infrastructure intertwine in a struggle for authority.

The hydraulic mission

To understand Pakistan’s water politics, one must return to what scholars call the hydraulic mission — a 19th-century global project of control. From British India to Egypt and the American West, colonial and postcolonial states sought to dominate nature through massive dams and sprawling irrigation works. These were not merely feats of engineering; they were declarations of power. The state’s authority quite literally flowed through its canals and concrete.

In Pakistan, this legacy endures. The Tarbela and Mangla dams, the vast Indus Basin irrigation network, and the formidable bureaucracies that govern them are all products of the same hydraulic ambition. The engineers of these systems became symbols of state authority. Their institutions, known as hydrocracies, remain among the most entrenched and powerful bureaucratic structures in the country.

But this infrastructure-led model has a dark underside. As researcher François Molle and his colleagues argue, the “hydraulic mission” often treated infrastructure as an end in itself — legitimising governments while concealing inefficiencies, corruption, and rent-seeking. Pakistan’s irrigation departments, still operating in the colonial mould, epitomise this: sprawling, opaque, and resistant to reform. This has resulted in both institutional weaknesses and deep vulnerabilities.

The 2025 floods, triggered by heavy monsoon rains and glacial lake outbursts since June, starkly exposed these flaws, overwhelming outdated dams and canals, causing over 1,000 deaths, and destroying thousands of homes, mostly belonging to impoverished communities. Moreover, elite-driven decisions such as constructing the Expressway near Jalalpur Pirwala have worsened flooding in southern Punjab, diverting water destructively into already vulnerable settlements.

Water and power: A colonial legacy that still governs

In Pakistan’s rural heartlands, water control is synonymous with political control. From Punjab to Sindh, powerful landlords have long dictated who receives canal water and who does not. They create unauthorised water outlets (or manage to get direct outlets approved that should be impossible), manipulate irrigation schedules, bypass rotation plans, and exploit their influence over irrigation officials to bend the system in their favour. What began as a centralised colonial bureaucracy has evolved into a network of local despots — a form of “decentralised despotism” where water serves as an instrument of patronage and dominance.

This structure reflects what historian Karl Wittfogel once called hydraulic despotism: centralised control over water, breeding political submission. Only now, in Pakistan’s case, that despotism operates through feudal influence and bureaucratic inertia rather than emperors and dynasties.

During the 2025 floods, these power dynamics deepened; influential landowners reportedly controlled the flow of aid and reconstruction resources, while small farmers and marginalised communities were left to shoulder the losses across more than 1.8 million acres of farmland. Established power dynamics continue to determine who receives state relief and rehabilitation — and when. Reconstruction and humanitarian assistance often bypass those most in need, favouring the well-connected instead.

Masculinities of water — The gendered politics of control

Yet, there is another current in this story: a quieter but equally powerful one. As feminist scholar Margreet Zwarteveen reminds us, irrigation and water management are not gender-neutral fields. They are overwhelmingly masculine domains: symbolically, structurally, and professionally. Across much of South Asia, the irrigation engineer has long been imagined as the heroic man mastering nature — a colonial archetype that continues to shape modern institutions.

In Pakistan, women remain largely invisible in water governance, even as they bear the brunt of its failures — fetching water, sustaining households, and working in fields. Their exclusion is not accidental; it is systemic. Engineering departments, decision-making boards, and policy forums remain male-dominated, reinforcing the notion that expertise and authority are inherently masculine. Even well-meaning “gender mainstreaming” initiatives struggle against this entrenched culture of exclusion.

Here, gender intersects sharply with power. The hydrocracy’s authority is not merely bureaucratic — it is patriarchal. The 2025 floods have laid bare this gendered burden: women and girls have faced heightened risks during evacuation and recovery, with limited access to safe sanitation, healthcare, and shelter. In camps across Lahore and south Punjab, as the Ravi River inundated newly built housing schemes in floodplains, women’s voices rose in protest and pain. Yet, the PDMA, revenue departments, and other authorities failed to meet even their most basic needs.

Infrastructure and the rise of new despotisms

As anthropologist Veronica Strang puts it, infrastructure is never merely physical. It is profoundly political. Dams, drains, pipelines, and canals shape social relations, determining who is connected, who is excluded, and who profits.

Today, a new form of despotism is emerging globally: the privatisation of water.

When public water systems are handed over to corporations, control shifts from bureaucrats to markets — from visible authority to unaccountable power. The British experiment of 1989, when water utilities were privatised, offers a telling example: profits soared while regulation weakened and public accountability evaporated. Similar trends are evident in Australia and Latin America, where water trading and corporate consolidation have turned rivers into commodities.

Pakistan stands on the brink of the same trap. Proposals to privatise water institutions and utilities have sparked protests, fuelled by fears that such reforms will deepen inequality and strip citizens of what should remain a shared right. In a system already marred by elite capture and bureaucratic masculinity, privatisation risks creating a new corporate despotism: one even less accountable to the public.

Critics argue that poorly planned road and motorway projects have obstructed natural waterways, intensifying the 2025 floods. These disasters have shown how floodplain encroachments and legally allotted lands involve the powerful’s grip over rivers, water channels, and floodplains, endangering the lives and livelihoods of the poor and lower middle class.

Bureaucracy, gender, and governance

The nexus of water, power, and governance in Pakistan is the product of layered histories. Colonial legacies built the hydraulic bureaucracy. Patriarchal norms cemented its masculine character. Political elites captured its flows for private gain. And now, market forces threaten to commodify whatever little remains of public ownership.

Pakistan’s water crisis, then, is not merely one of scarcity; it is one of equity. It is about who controls, who benefits, and who is silenced. The inequities between provinces, the rural-urban divide, the marginalisation of small farmers, and the invisibility of women all stem from the question of how water is governed and by whom.

The floods of 2025 have only deepened these fractures. As swollen rivers devastated communities and submerged farmlands, bureaucratic inertia and delayed relief compounded human suffering. Inter- and intra-provincial tensions over water management resurfaced, exposing the deep structural divides within the state. While mainstream media captured fragments of the misery, power and control continue to dictate what is revealed, and what is concealed, muting the full extent of the crisis.

A way forward — From control to care

To break this cycle, Pakistan must move beyond the old hydraulic mission — beyond the obsession with concrete, control, and command. The future of water governance must rest on inclusivity, transparency, and local participation. Women’s leadership in water management is a structural necessity. Bureaucratic reform, too, must aim to democratise decision-making, not merely decentralise it into the hands of new elites.

Equally, the march toward water privatisation must be resisted unless supported by strong regulation, equity safeguards, and public oversight. Water cannot be reduced to a commodity. It is a public trust, a shared right, and the foundation of life itself.

As Pakistan faces intensifying climate stress, from melting glaciers to erratic monsoons, its survival will depend on transforming its understanding of power. True resilience will not emerge from new dams or privatised pipelines, but from building a just and inclusive system where every drop serves the people.

Lessons from the 2025 floods, driven by climate-induced heavy rains and glacial outbursts, emphasise the urgency of this transformation. Yet the human toll continues to unfold: families displaced by the Chenab River’s waters still live in makeshift roadside camps, long after the Punjab government declared rescue and relief operations over. Many continue to commute by boat to their drowned villages — conditions largely overlooked by prevailing power dynamics.

The simple truth is that the politics of water is the politics of life. To control it is to shape society itself. The recurring floods are not just a symptom of climate change, but a mirror reflecting deeper structures of power and exclusion. If we look closer, the destruction and deaths unleashed by the 2025 floods reveal something far beyond climate impacts — they expose a crisis of governance, justice, and imagination.