China’s water war

China building a dam close to LAC in Arunachal Pradesh amounts to questioning India’s territorial integrity

China’s plans to build a super dam on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo river, close to the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Tibet, must ring alarm bells in India. As a lower riparian country, India faces an almost insurmountable challenge in ensuring shared access to trans-boundary rivers. Against the backdrop of the bitter showdown along the LAC, New Delhi needs to assess how China might weaponise its advantage over those countries downstream. Control over these rivers effectively gives Beijing a chokehold on India’s economy. Originating in what China calls the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), the trans-border river flows into Arunachal Pradesh where it is called Siang, and then to Assam as the Brahmaputra before flowing into Bangladesh and draining into the Bay of Bengal. For years, China has been quite unabashed in displaying its territorial and economic hegemony, whether it is the expanding footprint in the Indian Ocean region or its growing influence in Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives through a string of infrastructure and development projects being offered as baits. The timing of the announcement on dam construction coincides with the ongoing border tensions rooted in China’s refusal to acknowledge the McMahon Line. Instead, it claims 90,000 sq km in India’s Arunachal Pradesh as Southern Tibet. Beijing has clearly upped the ante in Ladakh and Sikkim sectors. Building a dam close to the LAC in Arunachal Pradesh amounts to questioning India’s territorial integrity. According to the plan, the dam, one of the three proposed in the region, will be constructed 30 km from the Indian border.

In the past, many incidents over the river inside the Indian boundary have been attributed to China’s designs against India. These include the increase in turbidity and blackening of waters in Siang, temporary stoppage of data sharing by China over the high season flows as per the China-India memorandum of understanding during the Doklam standoff (2017) and news of a series of check dams being constructed along the Tibetan boundary. The new dam’s ability to generate hydropower could be three times that of the Three Gorges Dam, which has the world’s largest installed hydropower capacity. Beijing’s plan envisages using the 50 km straight section of the river bend to build a giant tunnel to divert water, and then lay out six large hydropower stations each with an installed capacity of 10 million kilowatts. The gigantic project is obviously aimed at equipping China with strategic leverage over India. Such huge water storage capacity could be used as a tool for consolidating supremacy in the disputed territories. India should be aware that the Yarlung Zangbo-Brahmaputra dam issue is not just about resource management because China is using Tibet’s waters to further its territorial ambitions.

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