Kashmir: Death and the River

On a recent spring afternoon I took one of my usual weekday walks along the high, grassy banks of the Jhelum River, near my home in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir. A fisherman stood in a narrow boat in the middle of the river and cast a net into the jade waters. Sitting down, he grabbed his hookah and took a drag. Nearby a few workmen shoveled out scoops of wet sand from a shallow patch and dumped them on an old barge. In the distance behind them were the Himalayas, their peaks gleaming with snow, and a vast Indian military camp—a turreted fortress of barracks, machine guns, and concertina wire.

Fed by snowmelt and ample spring and summer rains, the Jhelum has sustained life in Kashmir for millennia, furnishing its people with drinking water and fish, irrigating agricultural land, providing sand that is used as a construction material, and fueling the hydropower projects that power the region’s homes. Tens of thousands of people live along its banks. Periodically it becomes a source of tragedy: when I was a child our neighborhood would go into mourning each time a boy drowned in its waters.

I knew some of those boys. My cousins, my brother, and I grew up on the river’s edge at my parents’ home in Baramulla, some thirty miles downstream from Srinagar, but never dared venture too close. I could only cross in a boat if accompanied by my mother, who would clutch my forearm tightly as we climbed in and pull me back whenever I dipped a hand in the current.

In 1989 Kashmiris—with Pakistan’s encouragement—launched an armed insurgency against India’s deeply resented rule. In the years that followed, the Indian military snatched young men from their homes, tortured and killed thousands of them, and dumped some of the bodies in the Jhelum. I was still in school; from our house we watched bodies float downstream and neighbors pull them out, the water red with blood. “Shaheed kee jo maut hain woh kaum kee hayaat hain,” crowds chanted at the funeral processions: “the death of a martyr is the life of a nation.”

Sometimes the Jhelum has been the source of larger-scale disasters. In September 2014 melting glaciers and persistent rains caused the river to overflow its dykes, drowning Srinagar and nine other districts. At some points the floodwaters reached up to twenty feet high. Around three hundred people in India-controlled Kashmir died; the disaster caused billions of dollars in damage as homes, businesses, roads, and bridges were washed away.

Now the river could be the occasion of another catastrophe. This time the causes lie in the region’s ever-volatile politics. In 1947, shortly after the Partition of India and Pakistan, Kashmir controversially acceded to India as a semiautonomous state; Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru promised to hold a plebiscite under UN supervision on Kashmiri self-determination, which never arrived. India and Pakistan went to war over the territory. Among other things, the conflict exacerbated what had already been a fraught relationship over water: the Indus River system flows through both countries, but India lies upstream, giving it, in theory, the power to curtail Pakistan’s access. Thirteen years later, after nearly a decade of negotiations, the World Bank brokered a treaty that allocated water from the system between the perpetually fractious neighbors.

The Indus Waters Treaty assigned India control of the eastern rivers (the Sutlej, Ravi, and Beas) and Pakistan rights over the western ones (the Jhelum, Indus, and Chenab), regulating how and to what extent each country could impinge on the other. Both parties had reason to uphold it. Pakistan can hardly survive without the rivers assigned to it under the terms of the treaty: around 80 percent of its farmland irrigation and nearly a third of its hydropower depend on river waters that flow through Kashmir. India, for its part, has for decades stopped short of using the Indus system to punish Pakistan. Successive governments may have worried about the diplomatic repercussions with Pakistan itself, or about incurring bad publicity in international forums for trying to deny their neighbor its rightful share of a necessary resource. In any case, in the short term they lacked the infrastructure—canals, reservoirs, dams—to do significant damage. For nearly sixty-five years, even during three more wars between the two countries in 1965, 1971, and 1999, the agreement held.

Now, however, the treaty faces its gravest threat since it was signed. India has hardened its stance on water rights after Narendra Modi’s hardline Hindu nationalist government assumed power in 2014; two years later, when rebel fighters killed eighteen soldiers at an Indian army base in Kashmir, Modi declared that “water and blood cannot flow together.” Then, this past April, assailants murdered dozens of Hindu vacationers in southern Kashmir, precipitating a four-day conflict between the two countries the following month. Immediately after the attack India suspended the treaty and threatened to stop the flow of river water into Pakistan.

It is not, for the moment, a threat on which Modi can fully follow through: building the reservoirs, canals, and dams necessary to significantly obstruct the flows of the Jhelum, Chenab, and Indus would take India significant time and an enormous infusion of resources. Even if he tried, many practical and logistical factors stand in the way. For one thing, over the past decade his government has been investing in run-of-the-river hydroelectric dams, which have only limited water storage capacity.

But nor are Modi’s threats entirely empty. In the shorter term India could close sluice gates or release dammed waters from its existing hydropower projects, as well as withhold environmental data on which Pakistan depends to anticipate flooding. In the coming years, with the treaty suspended, Modi’s government could pursue larger-scale projects capable of diverting more water. Pakistani officials have stressed that, if India makes good on these threats, it would amount to an “act of war.” On April 26 Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, the country’s former foreign minister, gave a speech in Sukkur. “I want to tell India,” he said, “that the Indus is ours and will remain ours. Either water will flow in this Indus, or their blood will.”

*

The Indus River and its tributaries have existed for millennia. For centuries they have irrigated agricultural land and provided drinking water across the region. In the 1640s the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan built a waterway that ran 130 miles from the Ravi River to Lahore, which later came to be called the Upper Bari Doab Canal. In the middle of the nineteenth century British engineers set about modernizing the network and constructing new watercourses. This colonial-era upgrade created one of the largest systems of canal irrigation in the world, nourishing millions of acres of land. For the next century the river water meandered through undivided India without any major disruption, except for minor squabbles here and there between villages or tahsils (subdistricts).

As British rule of the subcontinent came to an end in 1947, horrific communal violence broke out between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. Hundreds of thousands of men and women were slaughtered, millions of dollars of property looted, and millions of families displaced. The Muslim-majority areas joined Pakistan, whose leaders saw Kashmiris as their coreligionists and expected them to join the newly minted Islamic republic. Instead Nehru, a Kashmiri Hindu, strong-armed the Hindu Dogra ruler of Kashmir, Hari Singh, into allowing it to accede as a semiautonomous state. The deal gave Jammu and Kashmir its own constitution and allowed local legislators to make laws on all significant matters except for defense and foreign relations—a status that lasted formally until 2019, when, against the wishes of Kashmiris, the Modi government withdrew it for the sake of “fully integrating” Kashmir into India.

Like so much else after Partition, the water system, too, was sliced in half, leaving the headworks in India and a large maze of canals in Pakistan. India took control of the waters flowing downstream from the Indus and five of its tributaries. The irrigation system laid out under the Mughal Empire and then the British mostly channeled waters of the three eastern rivers—the Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej—from East Punjab (now in India) to West Punjab (now in Pakistan). The three western rivers—the Jhelum, Chenab, and the Indus’s main branch—flowed through Kashmir.

In the summer of 1947 the two neighbors signed a “standstill agreement” to allow the flow of water from India into Pakistan. By the time the agreement expired in April 1948, they were fighting their first war over Kashmir. India lacked the infrastructure to shut off or even reduce the flow of the western rivers, but that month it stopped the westward flow of the eastern branch to several important canals, threatening to parch swaths of Pakistan’s farmland.

The following month, as the war was winding down, the countries reached an agreement called the Inter-Dominion Accord. India’s regional leaders in East Punjab would allow the water to flow into Pakistan again in exchange for annual payments; they would, they said, reduce their supply over time, but “progressively,” buying time for “the West Punjab Government”—i.e., Pakistan—”to tap alternative sources.” By the summer of 1948 the water was again flowing west, but the distrust between the two countries—each of which now held onto part of Kashmir—precluded any permanent pact.

Resolving the water dispute would, it seemed, take outside intervention. In 1951 David Lilienthal, the former head of the US Atomic Energy Commission and the Tennessee Valley Authority, toured the Indus Valley. Aghast at the recriminations between the two countries, he pushed for them to jointly administer the Indus River system, with help from the World Bank. Years of discussions followed, and in 1960 Nehru and Pakistani president Mohammad Ayub Khan at last signed the Indus Waters Treaty. Having distinguished between the western and eastern rivers and allocated them between the two countries, it established that neither party would keep the other from accessing the river waters. They also agreed to share data about such matters as engineering work on dams and reservoirs and the timing and scale at which they discharge water—information of vital importance for Pakistan in particular.

The agreement proved remarkably durable. In 2016, however, the first cracks began to appear. Propelled to a stunning electoral victory under the banner of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Modi’s newly seated Hindu-supremacist government began to assert more control over the flow of water from Kashmir into Pakistan. In 2017 it completed work on the Kishanganga dam, a hydropower station in Kashmir’s Gurez Valley on the Kishanganga River—known in Pakistan as the Neelum River—on which construction had begun in 2007. (Pakistan, troubled by the project’s threat to its water sovereignty, appealed in 2010 to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague, which stayed development for three years but ultimately ruled that India could go ahead with the construction as long as it modified the dam’s design.) In 2022 India further unnerved Pakistan by restarting the long-paused Ratle hydroelectric project on the Chenab River in Kashmir; this May Modi’s government announced that it would accelerate work not just on that development but also on three other hydropower projects on the same river—Pakal Dul, Kiru, and Kwar.

In February 2019, after a Kashmiri rebel killed forty Indian police officers in a suicide bombing, Modi ordered air strikes on what he called a Jaish-e-Mohammad camp in Pakistan; the country retaliated by shooting down an Indian fighter plane and capturing its pilot. Sending warplanes to bomb a nuclear power, it seems, met with favor from the Indian electorate: that May Modi won his second term as prime minister by a wide margin. The situation worsened still three months later, when the Modi government abruptly revoked Kashmir’s semiautonomous status. In this environment there was scarcely any progress over water-sharing to be made.

*

This spring the crisis came to a head. In late April at least three armed assailants emerged out of a grove of pine trees in Pahalgam, a summer retreat in southern Kashmir where hundreds of tourists from India were gathered. The attackers accosted groups of vacationers and asked the men to identify themselves. Whenever anyone gave a Hindu name, they shot him in the head or chest. (They spared women and children.) By the end of the forty-minute-long rampage they had massacred twenty-six people. A local horseman, the only Muslim casualty, was killed when he tried to intervene.

A Kashmiri militant group called the Resistance Front at first claimed responsibility and then, three days afterward, issued a denial; it insisted that Indian intelligence had hacked their online platforms and posted the original message. In any case it seemed clear that the atrocity was meant to provoke Modi’s government—and it did. By the next day India had accused Pakistan of backing the attack. Two days later Modi addressed an election rally in the northeastern state of Bihar. “India will identify, track, and punish every terrorist and their backers,” he said in English. “We will pursue them to the ends of the earth.”

Pakistan, for its part, denied complicity and asked India for evidence connecting the country with the assassins. Even though information about the incident remains sparse—the killers were never found—Pakistan can never completely disassociate itself from violence against Indian troops or civilians in Kashmir. For some thirty-seven years the country has supported Kashmiri rebels with weapons and training, even shoring up their ranks with battle-hardened militants from various rural and urban Pakistani states. Whenever political violence erupts in Kashmir, then, the Indian government has consistently pointed the finger at Islamabad.

For several nights beginning in late April the two armies started firing at each other on either side of the Line of Control, the de facto border dividing Kashmir. Then they escalated to artillery duels. Scenes from the border started circulating online: tin-roofed houses had been reduced to rubble; civilians who lived around the LOC were crying in agony and dripping with blood after being struck by shrapnel. Dozens were killed or wounded on either side of the line.

It didn’t take long for the fighting to move from the periphery and make itself felt in Kashmir’s densely populated urban centers. The sound of fighter jets is hardly unusual here, but when it woke me up in Srinagar on the night of May 7 I could sense that something was different. Soon a series of explosions rattled my bedroom windows. It was 2:15 AM. I went online to check the news—nothing yet. I knew there would be many others across the Kashmir valley struggling to sleep.

At first light the news was everywhere: the Indian military had launched missile strikes on Pakistan. With barely concealed glee, journalists quoted government officials to the effect that the assault had struck “terrorist infrastructure” deep in Pakistan, killing “over a hundred terrorists.” But the triumphalism was short-lived. Pakistan’s military officials soon announced that the country’s fighter planes had shot down five Indian jets without crossing into enemy territory. Now we knew the source of the explosion that had shaken our home overnight: one of the jets had crashed on an empty school building five miles east, in the small town of Wuyan. Wreckage of a few more jets was also spotted in Kokernag, some fifty miles south of Srinagar, in Bhatinda in Punjab, and in Akhnoor in Jammu.

Indian military officials were at first guarded about discussing these losses. Then, in late May, Anil Chauhan, chief of defense staff of the Indian Armed Forces, told Bloomberg TV in Singapore that India had lost an unspecified number of fighter jets in the confrontation. Most bruising was the admission by a high-ranking French intelligence official to CNN that the IAF had lost a French-made Rafale fighter jet. Some years ago the Modi government had spent $8.7 billion to procure thirty-six jets from Dassault Aviation. At the time the deal was touted as a way to ensure the IAF’s technological superiority over its rivals, but that upper hand turned out to be illusory: Pakistan shot down the Rafale using a Chinese-made J-10C. It was the first time that Dassault had ever lost a Rafale jet in combat. The company’s share price on Euronext promptly fell by 7 percent; that of Avic Chengdu Aircraft Co. Ltd., the maker of the J-10C, rose over two days of trading by 36 percent.

By May 10, the day the US mediated a cease-fire between the two countries, Pakistan claimed to have struck some two dozen Indian air bases and weapons depots, both in Kashmir and in several Indian border states. We woke that morning to the sound of more heavy explosions. When the news of the truce broke later that afternoon, I drove through relatively empty streets into the city center. At a friend’s place, eight of us gathered for tea and breathed a sigh of relief. Our celebrations were slightly premature: as the sky darkened outside, several explosions rang out in quick succession. Apparently, my friends and I soon learned, a large swarm of Pakistani drones was hovering over Srinagar. It took another forty-five minutes for the staccato blasts of Indian air defense guns to die down—at which point we hurried home.

*

The cease-fire has held so far, but peace may well be elusive. Water will be one of the major fault lines. The Modi government has held the water-sharing treaty with Pakistan “in abeyance” since April, and on June 21 India’s home minister, Amit Shah, insisted it would “never be restored.” Instead he doubled down: “We will take water that was flowing to Pakistan to Rajasthan by constructing a canal.” Pakistan, he warned, “will be starved of water that it has been getting unjustifiably.”

Over the past two months the Modi administration has given the world a glimpse of how it might use the suspension of the agreement against its rival. On April 27 Pakistan blamed India for abruptly releasing the dammed water of a hydropower project on the Jhelum, causing the water line to rise dangerously in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. A week later India shut the sluice gates of the Baglihar Dam on the Chenab River, reducing the flow of water to a trickle. India’s official position was that releasing water from the dams and then refilling them was a “routine, annual activity.” But that routine work happens every year in August—not in April or May.

There is a limit on just how much water those run-of-the-river projects can hold. But Modi is clearly eyeing other methods. On May 16 Reuters reported that he had “ordered officials to expedite planning and execution of projects” on the Chenab, Jhelum, and Indus, including lengthening an important canal on the Chenab to a degree that would let it divert more than three times as much water from the passages as it currently can. In a televised address that week, he again insisted that “water and blood cannot flow together.”

Even setting the logistical challenges aside, Modi has reason to hesitate about seriously withholding water from Pakistan. Doing so would also inflict grave damage on Kashmir’s delicate ecology by making it more vulnerable to flooding and landslides—an outcome he would surely rather avoid now that billions of dollars have already poured into India’s fledgling settler-colonial project in the region. Nonetheless Modi does not seem to be bluffing. Especially now that his crucial lieutenant has gone public with the government’s resolve never to revive the treaty, his base will want him to keep his word.

In the short term India could inflict pain on Pakistan by shutting sluice gates on its dams in the summer, reducing the current when it is already running low. In the spring, when the rains swell the current, it could abruptly release dammed water without informing Islamabad, which could cause flooding downstream. Now that the two countries have also stopped sharing hydrological data, Pakistan will be left further unprepared for floods. Last month, when the Hague’s Permanent Court of Arbitration urged India to resume the treaty, India’s Ministry of External Affairs said that the country “never recognized the existence of this so-called Court of Arbitration.”

Further complicating these mercurial water politics is China, India’s other rival in the region, which has had a close alliance with Pakistan for more than sixty years. That alliance has only deepened during the last decade: China has invested more than $60 billion in the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which would give Beijing access to Pakistan’s deep-sea port in Gwadar by linking it with the Xinjiang region, cutting down the time and cost of shipping goods and energy to China by avoiding the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea. Meanwhile Beijing has supplied Islamabad with an array of military hardware, from fighter jets to missiles, and sent overt signals to New Delhi that it plans to defend its strategic partner’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

Beijing is not without leverage. Last December China approved the construction of what would be the world’s largest hydropower dam. Estimated to cost $127 billion and to generate 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, the project sits on the Yarlung Tsangpo River in Tibet, known in India as the Brahmaputra River, a mighty waterway that runs into India before emptying into the Bay of Bengal. Anxiety is running high that the dam could displace residents in Tibet and have ecological effects farther downstream in Bangladesh and India, which has also expressed concern that the project might affect water flow in the country’s northeastern states. China has hardly eased those worries. In a TV interview on June 1, Victor Zhikai Gao, the vice president of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, made a veiled threat to India about water use: “don’t do unto others what you don’t want others to do unto you.”

*

All it would take to push India’s tensions with Pakistan into all-out violence is another rebel assault on Indian troops or civilians in Kashmir. India has revised the country’s security doctrine to declare “every instance of terrorism” on its soil an act of war. At the end of April it stepped up its crackdown in the region, arresting more than two thousand young men in raids on homes; we are quite familiar with what is done to them in detention. In Bandipora one family accused Indian forces of killing their son while he was in custody. Many homes have been demolished.

The Modi government seems convinced that it can use military might to keep Kashmir under control without having to address the region’s seething political discontent. But it is precisely that strategy which has made Kashmir a powder keg. Last month I flipped through my notes of a conversation I had in 2019 with the parents of Adil Dar, the rebel fighter whose suicide attack on an Indian military convoy precipitated India and Pakistan’s previous major military confrontation. Dar had grown up in a village in Gandibagh, in Pulwama, some thirteen miles south of Srinagar. His parents’ two-story house stood off a narrow road at the end of a large plot of land, surrounded by furrowed paddy fields.

When I visited them a month after the attack, they told me that in 2016 Indian troopers had stopped Adil at a checkpoint on his way to school, beat him with rifle butts and a bamboo stick, and tore up his dress clothes. His mother could never forget how humiliated he felt. His parents tried to console him and talk him out of violent retribution. But something in him had changed.

When pro-freedom protests erupted in the town that year over the killing of a popular rebel commander, Adil and other young men attacked the troops with stones; the soldiers responded with rifle fire, shooting him in the leg. It took almost a year for his limb to heal, at which point he slipped away from home and joined the rebels. I asked Adil’s father how he felt about his son bringing the two nuclear-armed neighbors to the brink of war. He replied that India lost forty security men in the bombing and went to war with Pakistan over it. “Our young,” he said, “die every day.”