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| Lessons from World Bank verdict on Baglihar | | Panic buttons being pressed on Pakistani side | | BL KAK
NEW DELHI FEB 14 If the verdict of World Bank's neutral expert, Prof. Raymond Lafitte, on the Baglihar hydro-electric project under construction in the Jammu region has gone in favour of India, it is not surprisng that Pakistan has claimed "victory". And at a time when the two leading political personalities from Jammu and Kashmir, Ghulam Nabi Azad, currently the Chief Minister of the troubled State, and Prof. Saifuddin Soz, Union Minister for Water Resources, issued separate statements in relation to India's victory, Pakistan's Water and Power Minister, Liaquat Jatoi, said in Islamabad that the World Bank expert had determined that the design of Baglihar dam "violates the Indus Water Treaty and directed India to lower the height of the proposed reservoir on the Chenab".
Jatoi requires to be told that Pakistan had raised four objections of which three have been accepted by Prof. Raymond Lafitte. The World Bank expert has asked India to reduce the height of the dam from 144.5 metres to 143 metres. The expert has also reduced the size of the reservoir from 37.722 million cubic metres (MCM) to 32.56 MCM. According to Jatoi, India’s planned spillways for the dam — Pakistan’s major source of objection — were found in conformity with international practices, but India’s design and analysis were found to be incorrect. This is where the obfuscation has clearly crept into the media management.
A glance at what India has said about the World Bank decision seems to point to panic buttons being pressed on the Pakistani side. The Baglihar dam is essentially on line and the changes recommended by the expert are only minor in nature. New Delhi has announced that once again Pakistan has been proved wrong. The Indian Minister, Prof Saifuddin Soz, said that there would be no loss of power generation from the reduction in the dam’s height. He said that India had offered to make this change before Pakistan had approached the World Bank. He said that Pakistan’s biggest objection, the installation of the sluice spillway gates, had been rejected.
Pakistan went to the World Bank in 2005 objecting to India’s design and height of the dam on the Chenab river awarded to Pakistan under the 1960 Indus Water Treaty (IWT). India was not allowed to use its waters but was permitted to produce electricity from its waters. Pakistan as a lower riparian suspected that the dam had been designed to store more water than was allowed for purposes of electricity generation. Many meetings were held, but Pakistani experts were not able to overcome their suspicion that India was constructing “gate-like structures likely to affect Pakistan’s agriculture by making it lose 8,000 cusecs of water every day”.
Hence, Islamabad, no matter how it looks at the World Bank verdict, cannot claim victory, if only because its objection to the spillway gates has been set aside. While there is no harm in claiming victory — which purports to convey to the people of Pakistan that India has been once again defeated — it would be a mistake not to learn all the lessons embedded in the water dispute and its final denouement. While the matter was given in the hands of specialists, no estimate was made of the psychological orientation of the Pakistani bureaucrat going to India and accepting the Baglihar dam design. In other words, even a Pakistani expert — usually a bureaucrat — is affected by the lower riparian alarmism of the nation.
The Baglihar dam began to be discussed in 1992 and Pakistan lost no time in invoking the IWT to say that it might not allow it. After that, till 2005, when the two countries went for arbitration, a lot of damage was done to India-Pakistan relations. The quarrel over the dam unfolded during the worst years of the Kashmir unrest. Both sides deployed enormous amounts of agitprop to smear each other and arouse fear and loathing. In lower riparian Pakistan those in charge of jihad started naming the water issue as one of the reasons behind the covert war. The public mind in Pakistan was poisoned till the elected governments were destabilised finding themselves unable to allay the sense of insecurity of the people.
Pakistan is not unfamiliar with the mind of the lower riparian. One simply has to examine the Sindhi rejection of the Kalabagh dam to understand its depth and in some ways its helplessness. And Pakistan's English-language newspaper, Daily Times, has this advice through its editorial: "Pakistan, therefore, must learn to approach the water problems with upper riparian India with a new non-alarmist attitude, so that its specialists and experts do not feel under pressure to play the role of spoilers rather than fair-minded evaluators".
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