LAHORE, May 25: India can disturb the flow of river Jhelum and divert Chenab’s water to Ravi if it decided to use river flows as a weapon and unilaterally abrogate the Indus Basin Water Treaty, water planners said here on Saturday as a Pakistani delegation left for India to attend a mandatory meeting of the permanent treaty commissioners.
The planners have been busy studying various scenarios on the instruction of the government, to meet any eventuality.
Despite the exercise in run up to the meeting, they professed their faith that India would not take such a route. “This will guarantee a regional and, perhaps a global, disaster.”
“Due to the hilly train India cannot divert Jhelum’s water to another river or stop it from flowing into Pakistan. But it can certainly build a dam and regulate its flow to the detriment of Pakistan,” an expert in the Irrigation and Power Department said. He said India could regulate the river flow in a way to disturb the farming pattern in Pakistan, flooding it when water was not required stopping it when it was needed.
The central Punjab as well as parts of southern Punjab depend on Jhelum’s water for irrigation. An Agriculture Department official said if India disturbed the flow, it could make a large part of the Punjab barren. The possibility, however, was at least be 15 years away, the time required to build a big enough dam.
“Chenab is the river most vulnerable to Indian mischief,” an expert in the Pakistan Indus Basin Treaty commissioner’s office said. The river flows only 50 kilometres away from the Ravi in the Indian planes. India can thus easily dig a canal to transfer its water to Ravi and consume its entire flow. With additional water from Chenab, it can expand its irrigation network to Rajhisthan desert.
River Indus is by and large safe from Indian designs. Originating from Tibet, it flows through the Ladakh valley into area controlled by Pakistan. Along its route in Indian controlled area, there is no site suitable for a dam. Even if a site should be found and the dam built, most of the water in Indus comes from its tributaries in the areas under Pakistan’s control.
A hydrologist working for the Wapda said, “Indian can disturb river flows but it would be at a phenomenal engineering cost.” Engineering solutions, he said, could be found for even the most difficult task, but one should not lose sight of the cost. He hoped that the Indian people will not support such an adventure.
An official in the Wapda’s water wing said projects involving changes in river flows took a long time, decades in most cases. He said Pakistan could invoke guarantees and mount diplomatic pressure which may be unbearable. Being the upper riparian country India can certainly create problems for Pakistan. In fact, that is what it has been doing for the last many months. It snapped all links with Pakistan in December and has refused to transfer data and there has been a decrease in Chenab’s flow since January, reportedly because India has built a reservoir at Baghliar.
A lawyer said it was not easy to revoke international treaties like the Indus Basin Treaty because they affected lives of billions of people. The present Indian leadership could create the hype around the treaty and derive some political mileage out of it, but legally speaking its options were limited.
In practical terms, a river diversion would amount to a declaration of war, an official in the Ministry of Water and Power said. Pakistan would be bound to retaliate. “How could India expect Pakistan to let it squeeze it drop by drop?” This would also expose Indian dams to attacks by Pakistan. Dams are not attacked even during a war. But such niceties are observed only on reciprocal basis.
He also expressed his faith in international guarantees and rational behaviour. Most of the worst-case scenarios never happen because their cumulative cost is too much for everybody. With the passage of time, the Indians would realize that most of their hostility is misdirected and blaming others for one’s own failures does not bring any dividends.
