Using dams as weapons

CHINA’S EXPANSIONIST DESIGNS

‘Military tactics are like water, for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downwards’.

-Sun Tsu, Annals of War

The importance Chinese give to Sun Tsu’s teachings can be gauged from the fact that one of the first acts of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on taking over the Galwan Valley in Ladakh was to send bulldozers in order to block the flow of the Galwan river as it enters the Indian side.

One interpretation being given is that the Chinese have blocked the river to build a mini dam. Others claim that since the Galwan river flows along the road built by the Indian government, this water could be used whenever required by the Chinese to create a flash flood.

What satellite pictures also reveal is that what was once a blue flowing stream of water is now a muddy dry bed on which the Indian army has parked its trucks.

For the Chinese, water is a key weapon in their expansionist designs. This is obvious in the way they are building huge dams to block the flow of rivers including the Indus, Brahmaputra and the Mekong. This helps them control the quantity of water flowing into the lower riparian countries including India thereby using water to further their own geopolitics.

From the start, India has expressed concern about the construction of the Diamer-Bhasha dam being built on the river Indus in Gilgit-Baltistan which India claims to be its territory.

The MoU for the Diamer-Bhasha dam was signed last month between the Chinese state-run firm China Power and the Pakistan army’s commercial wing Frontier Works Organisation and is expected to be completed by 2028.

The Diamer-Bhasha dam, which will have a height of 272 metres, will be the highest roller-compacted concrete dam in the world and produce 4,500 megawatts of electricity.

Next in line is the Bunji dam, also being built on the Indus river with an installed capacity of 7,100 mw. A large portion of the capital for this construction will come from the Three Gorges Corporation.

The sheer scale of this venture can be assessed from the fact that these dams are much larger than any existing dam in India. In fact, the entire installed hydropower projects in Jammu & Kashmir do not equal even the Bhasha Dam, which is the smaller of these two dams.

These two mammoth dams are part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) of the Chinese government to bolster their economic and geopolitical footprint across a swathe of nations.

China is also planning to build 55 reservoirs on the rivers flowing from the Tibetan plateau. They completed construction of the Zangmu dam, built on the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra in 2010.

Three more dams at Dagu, Jiacha and Jeixu are presently under construction. In 2015, work started on the Zam hydropower station – which will be the largest dam on the Brahmaputra river - which the Chinese refer to as the Yarlung Tsangpo.

Medog which is located just 30 km north of the Indian border is the site for this mega project as the river makes a huge bend inside a giant canyon, which is around 198 miles long and 3.1 miles wide.

The Chinese are using the entire team which built the Three Gorges dam to execute these mammoth projects, expected to generate 40,000 mw of power. Water from this dam will be diverted to irrigate the arid regions of Xingjian and the Gansu in China.

India has rightly been apprehensive about these hydro projects on the Brahmaputra and as far back as 2013, it had lodged a complaint to China. An Inter-Ministerial Expert Group was set up to study this issue but nothing much has come out of this.

Post-Pathankot attack, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that blood and water cannot flow together and that he might well consider abrogation of the Indus Water Treaty if Pakistan does not end these militant attacks, China went public with its plan to build a large dam, with an investment of $740 million, on Xiabuqu river, close to the city of Xigaze located close to Bhutan and Sikkim.

Brahmaputra Authority

Chandan Mahanta, who heads the Centre for Environment at IIT Guwahati and is an expert on the Brahmaputra river basin, has for the last decade been demanding the setting up of a Brahmaputra River Valley Authority to undertake a comprehensive study of the Brahmaputra basin.

Mahanta points out that with China building four dams on the Brahmaputra, it was imperative that India gets details of the kind of dams they are constructing and how this will affect the river flows as otherwise, Brahmputra would end up becoming a seasonal river.

China’s open-and-closed-tap policy is best illustrated when it refused post-Doklam in 2017 to share hydrological data on the Brahmaputra with India but continued to do so with Bangladesh which is the lowest downstream country of the Brahmaputra.

These apprehensions are now being expressed across Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. China has already built eight huge dams on the Mekong river and another three dams are on the cards.

This has adversely affected the livelihoods on 60 million people dependent on this river for their fishing and agricultural requirements.

China today is on an expansionistic mode. It has now set its eyes on the waters from Indira Col drain to the Siachen glacier and also the Nubra and Shyok rivers of Ladakh.

This may sound far-fetched but till a few weeks ago, no one would have imagined they would sweep across the Galwan Valley either.