How dams climb mountains: China and India’s state-making hydropower contest in the Eastern-Himalaya watershed

Abstract

The dam rush in the upper-Brahmaputra River basin and local, minority resistance to it are the result of complex geopolitical and parochial causes. India and China's competing claims for sovereignty over the watershed depend upon British and Qing Dynasty imperial precedents respectively. And the two nation-states have extended and enhanced their predecessors' claims on the area by continuing to erase local sovereignty, enclose the commons, and extract natural resources on a large scale. Historically, the upper basin's terrain forestalled the thorough integration of this region into both nation-states, but recent technological and economic advances have enabled the two states and their agents to dramatically transformed these landscapes. Many of their projects have perpetuated the interventionist hydrological regimes that India and China also inherited from their imperial forebears. Nevertheless, as with their definition of their borders, neither state has highlighted this historical contingency. Instead, both governments have consistently presented their hydropower projects as shining examples of necessary and benevolent development. Their economy-focused, monolithic development paradigms have, not coincidently, also enabled the systemic sidelining of non-majority cultures, religions and histories. The combination of this cultural exclusion and the nation-states' late integration of this peripheral region has laid the ground for conflict with local groups over the dam rush. Local identities and experiences have evolved around complex religious, cultural and trade networks, many of which were heavily influenced by the now-defunct Tibetan polity, rather than via modern Chinese and Indian nationalist discourses of development. The dam clashes

Timescapes of Himalayan hydropower: Promises, project life cycles, and precarities

“…In the Himalayan region—where geographical and geopolitical knots are particularly dense—dam construction has invoked a variety of discursive and ideological conflicts over competing visions of development (Dharmadhikary, 2008; Drew, 2017a; Gyawali, 2003; Khagram, 2004; Nüsser, 2014) as well as an array of situated debates about transboundary water conflicts and water sharing agreements (Crow & Singh, 2000; Gamble, 2019; Gyawali & Dixit, 2001; Hanasz, 2015; Hill, 2017). At the same time, official forecasts of abundant energy futures and national prosperity via dam construction have always been tempered by hydrological, geological, meteorological, and epistemological complexities that famously produce “uncertainty on a Himalayan scale” (Thompson, Warburton, & Hatley, 2007; cf.…”

Dams, neoliberalism, and rights: Mainstreaming environmental justice claims

“…A political process "only ever emerges in the very gap between the abstract literalness of the rights and the polemic over their verification" (p. 72). In other words, politics facilitates the possibility for claims 7 For the link between dam opposition and different epistemologies and world views, see Gamble (2019), Del Bene et al (2017 The point of a gap could be explored even further. The fixed jurisdiction of the nation-state is often in direct opposition to the intricate and reflexive relationships that indigenous communities have with the natural world (Cajete, 2000).…”

“…As Banerjee (2014, p. 47) points out in the case of India: "he state's prioritization of a specific growth-model-manifested by state-backed commercialization of resources and privatization in the name of energy security-has reached such an intensity that even the state has to bend some of its own environmental regulations and social safeguards or even take recourse to violence against its own citizens." Inadvertently, such positioning further exacerbates local schisms and ethnic divisions that reflect new controversies and prior historical realities and historical tensions (Gamble, 2019). Here, in another perverse twist, members of local communities are often co-opted by private companies to support the construction of dams (Desai, 2016;Huber & Joshi, 2017).…”

“…It does so in light of the growing violence and injustice perpetrated against dam protestors (Del Bene et al, 2018) and links the prevalence of violent repression with discourses highlighting the ever-expanding synergy between neoliberal ideologies and state policies (Brown, 2015;Oksala, 2011). The article also contributes to recent efforts to engage in comparative conversations about India, China, and the surrounding region beyond studies of foreign policy or comparisons of regime forms (Gamble, 2019;Ling et al, 2016).…”

Nation’s body, river’s pulse: Narratives of anti-dam politics in India

“…11 Touting hydro-electric power as renewable energy, seemingly all the more attractive in an age of fossil fuel-driven climate change and made to appear that way by politicians seeking to show their commitment to meeting internationally-set carbon-emission targets, the state is building a string of high dams across the Himalayan mountains. The vast basin of the River Brahmaputra in north-east India, where wild rivers cascade through forests dense with biodiversity, is to have dams on every tributary, on a scale that will double India’s entire hydro-electric power capacity (Baviskar, 2009; see Gamble in this issue, 2019). The steep gradients that these tributaries traverse enables them to gather energy, picking up and breaking down rocks that they deposit as mineral-rich sediment in the Brahmaputra’s floodplains in Assam.…”