(Inter)Nationalist rivers?: cooperative development in David Lilienthal’s plan for the Indus Basin, 1951

Abstract

Sharing water resources in the Indus Basin, split between India and Pakistan and 1947, helped sour relations between these hostile neighbours until the signing of the Indus Waters Treaty in 1960. This article explores a radical early intervention into the dispute. David E Lilienthal, an American development expert, published a plan for trans-border cooperative development in 1951. He used a discourse of technocratic internationalism to privilege shared expertise over political difference. His proposal, I argue, tried to align politics in the Indus Basin with a constructed notion of the basin itself as a "natural" entity, contrasted with the political boundaries that divided India from Pakistan. I show how Lilienthal's appeal to engineers to effect a "scale jump", shifting the waters dispute from a nationalist to an internationalist plane, reinforced an existing reliance in South Asia on technocratic water management. While subsequent negotiations dropped his proposal for cooperative development, his novel use of the idea of engineering to produce the basin as a depoliticised space helped to frame the terms of the debate. The paper is based on material from diplomatic archives in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Transboundary impact assessment of Indian dams: a case study of Chenab River Basin in perspective of Indus Water Treaty

“…Negotiations continued and finally in 1960 the IWT was signed between both the states with the World Bank as a third party for certain purposes (Alam, 2002;Salman, 2008;Zawahri, 2009;Wani & Moorthy, 2013). The importance of the treaty can be studied at various interrelated and manifold scales (Haines, 2014). Although China and Afghanistan also make up part of the Indus basin they were not included in this treaty as 86% of the basin is occupied by India and Pakistan.…”

Desiring the data state in the Indus Basin

“…The technocratic authority over water (including the legitimacy to produce and control representations of water) and political authority over populations and territory are intimately connected. Geographers have theorised this connection between water expertise and state formation in Spain (Camprub ı 2014; Swyngedouw 2015), the US West (Akhter and Ormerod 2015;Carroll 2012), West Asia (Harris andAlatout 2010;Mitchell 2002), East and Southeast Asia (Moore 2013; Sneddon 2015) and the Indus Basin in South Asia, which is the geographic focus of the present paper (Akhter 2015a(Akhter 2015bAli 1998;Michel 1967;Gilmartin 2015;Haines 2013Haines 2014Mustafa 2001Mustafa 2002Mustafa 2013. A powerful theme that cuts across these diverse historical-geographical contexts is the role of state experts as agents of depoliticisation.…”

“…Rather, Pakistani and Indian state elites valued the Bank's involvement because it was an external source of expertise – external to the nationalistic loyalties and prejudices that seemed to make the Indus dispute such a bitter one. Ultimately the Bank was unable to completely depoliticise the Indus dispute, and the final form of the Indus Waters Treaty represented a political negotiation, not a technical optimisation of the basin's resources (Haines ; Michel ). This was because the repoliticisation of the conflict at the inter‐state scale was not rooted only in the nationalistic attitudes of postcolonial state elites.…”

“…The Indus Basin in South Asia is one of the most intensely engineered watersheds in the world. For over a century, state authorities have attempted to transform the river, and its users, into a smoothly operating integrated agricultural machine (Akhter 2015a(Akhter 2015bGilmartin 2015;Haines 2014;Michel 1967;Wescoat et al 2000). Time and again, however, these schemes have fallen flat.…”

Recentralizing groundwater governmentality: rendering groundwater and its users visible and governable

“…These rules saw substantial innovations in the 20th century as the above bureaucracies constructed a series of projects that ultimately led to the need for new legal instruments to adjudicate disputes between states (e.g., the Colorado River Compact) and in international watercourses (e.g., Indus River Treaty), which were the result of technically transforming watercourses. 12,13 Together, the technical manipulation of surface water systems and the legal questions surrounding these changes drove the production of water science, leading to domination in scientific institutions around fluvial dynamics and the examination of surface water quantity/quality concerns. So too, while surface water has advocates in both scientific and engineering institutions, groundwater has historically had no such advocate for its centralized development or management.…”