Hydropolitics and the Weaponization of Water Infrastructure
BY AYESHA VEMURI
In December 2020, the president of the Power Construction Corporation of China (Powerchina) announced plans to develop a large hydropower project on the lower Yarlung Tsangpo river. This run-of-river dam is projected to be the biggest hydroelectric power station in the world, with a generating capacity of 60 gigawatts, which is three times more than China's current largest dam, the Three Gorges. Immediately after Powerchina’s announcement, India’s Ministry of Water announced its own plans to build more dams on the lower reaches of the same river when it enters India’s northeastern states. Notably, both the Tibetan and Northeast Indian territories through which this transboundary river flows, are politically contested territories where Indigenous peoples (and other communities who have never sat frictionlessly within the imagined community of either nation) have long struggled for self-determination, and which have become key sites where both China and India have exercised military, colonial power to quash Indigenous resistance.
The Yarlung Tsangpo, known as the Brahmaputra in India and the Jamuna in Bangladesh, traverses the Tibetan plateau before flowing through the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam before entering Bangladesh where it merges with the Ganges (known as Padma in Bangladesh) and empties into the Bay of Bengal. One of the most important rivers in the Indo-China region, the Brahmaputra is estimated to support the lives and livelihoods of millions of people in China, India and Bangladesh. It is also projected to be one of the most contentious sites for the so-called “water wars” (Farinosi et al. 2018). This apocalyptic term refers to longstanding, politically-stoked fears of a near-future in which people will struggle and wage war over access to increasingly scarce water resources, especially along sites of shared and transboundary rivers.
News reports about these planned dams have largely tended to focus on the geopolitical effects and scientific concerns about megadams in the seismically-active Himalayan region. An unsurprising but notable absence in English language media are the voices of local communities of people living along the Brahmaputra. Despite the fact that these communities and the nonhuman ecologies they live within would suffer the greatest impacts of these large dams, there is little attention devoted to their needs, experiences, or perspectives. As I watch this story unfold, I wonder about the work that such silencing does. I think of Gayatri Chalraborty Spivak’s still-poignant question, Can the Subaltern Speak? in relation to the river. The subaltern subjects whom Spivak is thinking with in this influential essay are Dalit (oppressed caste) and Adivasi (Indigenous) women in India. In the Brahmaputra valley, as elsewhere, it is the people from these communities, as well as from undocumented and poor Muslim communities, whose lives are rendered most precarious as a result of colonialist and developmentist infrastructures such as these dams. In this short reflection, I offer that it might be useful to think not of whether the people from these communities can speak but rather to think of the ways in which major infrastructure projects act as weapons to silence them. I propose it might be more productive to ask, how are the subaltern silenced?
Riparian ecologies are multifaceted places made up with complex relations between humans, nonhuman beings and elemental worlds. Large-scale infrastructural interventions into these ecologies, such as the proposed dams, are known to have massively destabilizing effects on those relations, including effects that compound and intensify the precarity of many of these life-sustaining relations (in some cases, eliminating them altogether). For instance, ecologists in India warn that large dams in the upper reaches of the river have the potential to create drought in the lower regions, as well as to stop the flow of aquatic life and rich sediment, both of which are essential for the sustenance and livelihoods of communities that live downstream. However, these concerns are often minimized in favour of arguments that stress the power-hungry goals of both nations. I use the term “power-hungry” deliberately to stress the dual appetites that these planned dam projects hope to satisfy: the appetites of ever-increasing energy needs and the desires for ever-greater geopolitical power. Specifically, the ambition of scale and grandness—the “biggest dam in the world”—is suggestive of these nations’ overtures to empire, in which their imperialist aspirations are realized through large scale infrastructure projects that subjugate both nature and peoples. While hydraulic infrastructures have historically been a part of nation-building projects in many parts of the world (Desbiens 2013, D’Souza 2006, Gilmartin 2015, Prakash 1999, Swyngedouw 2015, ), the specific sites for the proposed dams—Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh—act not merely as nationalist projects, but as imperial ones. Through these dams, China and India each attempt to definitely capture contested territories as part of their empires.
These infrastructure projects, then, are designed to serve the interests of states and capital. In order to proceed, the needs, claims and voices of the people and their nonhuman relatives must be marginalized, silenced or eliminated. This is accomplished in many ways, including by expertise, plans, policies, and public discourses that validate some interests, experiences, and knowledges while invalidating others. In other words, large-scale infrastructural projects such as these dams are not only material, but also discursive artifacts that have politics. They intentionally erase, silence and eliminate already precarious human and non-human constituents and relations, in order to reproduce and extend existing imperialist, colonialist and capitalist relations. Indeed, when one considers the millions of people, nonhuman animals and nonliving matter that will be impacted by these dams, who seem to be an afterthought in this geopolitical grab for both electrical and imperialist power, the story that emerges is instead one that exemplifies the ways in which infrastructure and water are weaponized in the service of empire. Hydraulic infrastructure acts both as a means of materially displaying the power of the state, and also as an instrument of silencing the ecologies, waters, and peoples who currently reside in the valley.
The weaponization of water, moreover, is especially important in the current political moment, given that this announcement comes in the wake of a months-long territorial conflict between China and India in the Himalayan region of Ladakh. While the two countries have now withdrawn their troops from this region, tensions have been escalating for months and continue to fester. Although the conflict over the riverine resources of the Brahmaputra is rarely reported in relation to the military standoff between the two nations (which is located in a different part of the border region) juxtaposing these developments is illuminating. Considered alongside the expansion of both China and India’s militarised claims to borderlands, their claims to the Brahmaputra’s waters might be better understood as a threat to withdraw and divert water away from India as well as the lower riparian state of Bangladesh. The planned hydraulic infrastructures are poised to become instruments of more completely accomplishing their goals of colonizing these territories. After all, as the rich literature on infrastructure in previously (and presently) colonized nations illuminates, infrastructure is not merely an effect of colonization, but the very means through which colonialism is exercised on the ecologies, bodies and lives of people and other beings who live along the river and depend on its sediment- and critter-rich flows for their sustenance. While technoscientific and geopolitical decision-making takes place in political centers of Beijing and Delhi, the heavy costs of their decisions are borne by those who live locally, irrespective of the nation state of which they are citizens.
The announcement of plans for these dams in the midst of a global climate catastrophe sheds light on the ways in which nature, and “renewable” energy sources like hydropower are enlisted into the service of nationalist, authoritarian regimes. The resurgence in large infrastructure projects like megadams, especially led by China, exemplifies the ways in which infrastructure kills several different political “birds” at once. First, the scale of the proposed infrastructure acts as a means of displaying the power of techno-engineering solutions to subjugate nature to Man’s will, in what seems like a return to the hypermasculinized glorification of mega dams in the early and mid twentieth century, when massive dams like the Hoover dam on the Colorado river, and the Aswan dam on the Nile were seen as exemplars of western imperial might and spectacular modernity. Second, the dam becomes a material means of state claims to contested territories. In this case, the proposed dam becomes a means of laying claim to the long-contested autonomy of Tibet on the one hand, as well as the autonomy of Arunachal Pradesh and the many Indigenous communities and old growth ecologies which inhabit the region now identified for hydroelectric power generation. As Rob Nixon has noted, megadam projects are sustained not only by the material construction of the dams, but the production of imaginary national communities who will reap the benefits of such developments, and the “active production of unimagined communities” (2010, 62), those whose presence is an inconvenience or barrier to the idea of national progress. The displacement of these communities from their traditional ways of life is an intended design of these dams.
Finally, the turn to “renewable” energy sources such as dams in the current moment is not only justified as a means of reducing national carbon footprints but promoted through financialized incentives such as green bonds. Green bonds are market solutions designed specifically to support climate-related or environmental projects, typically offering tax incentives to investors. China’s plans to build this massive dam is argued as being a “green” infrastructure project, with the aim of achieving carbon neutrality by 2060. With this singular focus on decarbonizing energy, what is often obscured is the other forms of ecological, social and political violence enacted through these mega dams. Thus, the story of this dam is about the ways in which market- and state-driven infrastructure solutions to climate change seem to now provide new means of furthering the very forms of imperialist, racist, and ecological violence that resulted in the climate crisis to which they seek to respond. In other words, China and India are not building these dams as responses to climate change. Rather, they are building them for the purposes of cementing their claims to the long-contested territories and resources of Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh, and for furthering their colonial ambitions, which long predate climate change. Climate change provides convenient alibi for these other ambitions and their terrible environmental effects. Collectively, I see these as modes of foreclosing solutions from those communities, relations, and ways of life who might offer more socially, politically, racially, and ecologically just responses to the problem of climate change. Infrastructure, in other words, is weaponized as an instrument of silencing the Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim, and other poor communities who will be displaced, dispossessed and severed from their relations with the waters and ecologies of the Brahmaputra river.
In other words, the proposed infrastructures along the Brahmaputra river in both China and India reproduce colonial, imperial, ecocidal relations. In many ways, I am reminded of the capacious definition of reproduction that Michelle Murphy urges us to think with; that “infrastructures of technoscience, governmentality, and political economy… are themselves also the very processes of reproduction” (2017, 143). The infrastructures that are planned are non-innocent means of reproducing some futures over others. The investment and planning for these forms of infrastructure along the Brahmaputra river is not merely an investment into energy sovereignty and resource capture in the present, but also a projected desire into the future. The desires here are suggestive not only of the extension of an extractive and consumptive worldview that demands more energy, more resources, more territory, and more growth, but also suggests deeper investments into the nation-state, the promulgation of its political institutions into the future, and the persistence of colonial relations into the future, albeit with new actors. As I read the unfolding of this story, it is admittedly difficult to not fall into a sense of despair and futility. Yet, as the work of critical Indigenous scholars and anticolonial thinkers reminds us, the future remains a field of contestation and struggle.
In a recent essay, Murphy advocates a collective reframing of reproduction “towards a reparative path, envisioning a distributive reproductive politics that stretches beyond bodies, choice, and babies to extensively include all our relations and responsibilities within damaged worlds” (2018, 102). As I read the news that tells the unfolding of these plans to capture the energy of the Brahmaputra, I wonder what the river might say if it could speak. Submerging ourselves in its waters, to channel Macarena Gomez-Barris’ evocative method, might allow us to ask questions not focused on narrowly conceived visions of carbon neutrality (that can be so easily captured by capitalist and imperialist power) but on a vision of better relations that the river itself might be able to teach us. The Brahmaputra is a tempestuous and sometimes fickle river that has historically resisted efforts to contain and direct it: it is a braided river with many channels, often changing course, and is highly prone to flooding every year. It remains one of the least developed great rivers in the globe, at least in part due to its highly erosive and changing flows and the seismically charged riverbed through which it flows. Seen from the perspective of its unruly waters, the imperialist constructions of borders and nation states seem doomed to fail, if not in human timescales then certainly in geological time. Yet, other mighty rivers have been silenced, at least temporarily, and so the Brahmaputra might too have its waters diverted or subdued. As this story unfolds, it might be best to ask: what relations, ecologies, and forms of being are sustained within and through its waters? Which of these might continue to flourish, and which might falter, in a new hydraulic regime wrought by infrastructure? These are questions that might help us shape better futures.
AcknowledgementsWith many thanks to my friends Hannah Tollefson, Burç Köstem and Darin Barney, as well as the wonderful editors at Heliotrope, for their generous and helpful comments and edits on previous versions of this article.
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Ayesha Vemuri is a PhD candidate at the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill university. Her research focuses on the construction of risk in the context of climate change induced flooding and migration in Assam, India.
Banner image by Kiersten Ferguson on Unsplash.
