owhere perhaps are the lines (and swords) as clearly drawn as around one as-yet-unconstructed dam and nothing, it seems, is a better litmus test for one's ideas on nationhood and progress than the question of whether or not it should be built. In the public imagination, the proposed Kalabagh Dam has become many things: An answer, an excuse, a conspiracy against the federation.

More crucially, it is a mirror. The road from Islamabad to Mianwali, the district where the town of Kalabagh is located, is a difficult one: The landscape is sparsely populated and it undulates wildly. After several hours, our driver, a naturally nervous man whose anxiety seemed to mount as distance from the city increased, brings the car to a halt. "We can't go any further," he says firmly. "The area ahead is dominated by the Khattaks. They are extremely dangerous." Gaadi, who has been lost in his own thoughts thus far, suddenly looks up and at the driver, his inner anthropologist alerted. "It's true," he agrees, completely deadpan. "They're a terrible people."

The driver's eyes brighten up at this apparent affirmation. "So I should turn back, yes?" Gaadi shakes his head gravely. "No. Say a little prayer and carry on, saeen." The driver tries again. "The thing is, you can't trust a Pathan. He will stab you in the back. He will go back on his word."

There is a hierarchy, the driver goers on to explain, of people who must not be trusted: Poised at the very top of this pyramid is the flighty Pathan. ("Don't call them Pathans," whispers Gaadi. "It angers them. Call them Pakhtun.") Tied for second place were the Baloch and the Sindhis, continued the driver, himself a Kashmiri resident in Islamabad.

"And what are your thoughts on the Punjabis?" inquires Gaadi, with the air of a scientist scrutinising his subject. The driver thinks for a while. "A Punjabi might go back on his word. But he is definitely less likely to do so. He'll stick with his word for a while at least."

owhere perhaps are the lines (and swords) as clearly drawn as around one as-yet-unconstructed dam and nothing, it seems, is a better litmus test for one's ideas on nationhood and progress than the question of whether or not it should be built. In the public imagination, the proposed Kalabagh Dam has become many things: An answer, an excuse, a conspiracy against the federation.

Baba Kaala was a teenager that year, fifteen or perhaps sixteen years old. He lived then where he lives now, on the bank of the river Ravi, in a settlement called Sagian on the outskirts of Lahore. In order to cross the Ravi, he would take the boat or, if the current wasn't too strong, swim to the other side. But on the day the river ran dry, there was so little water he could place bricks on the river bed, hitch up his shalwar and simply walk across to the other bank.

(Elsewhere, the humourous poet Anwar Masood quipped, the folk heroine Sohni prepared to make her nightly trip across the river Chenab to meet her lover, pitcher in hand — only to discover that India had halted the river.) India released the waters a month later but made it very clear that she would control the tributaries that she could: Ravi, Sutlej and the fading Beas. Pakistan scrambled to find a solution, appealing, in June 1949, to the International Court of Justice — but India refused to participate. Meanwhile, David Lilienthal, an American technocrat who had been touring the Indus basin, proposed a plan to alleviate Pakistan's "fears of deprivation and return to desert". As it turned out, this wasn't Lilienthal's primary concern; having recently become a partner in an international financial advisory and asset management firm, his "main interest at present", according to a confidential British memo, was that his scheme should involve "a lot of money". He suggested building dams all along the river.

The newly found World Bank was paying close attention. In August 1951, its president Eugene R Black wrote to the prime ministers of India and Pakistan, enclosing a copy of Lilienthal's proposal and offering his organisation's ‘good offices' for the execution of the scheme — and thus was born the Indus Waters Treaty. For a fixed sum of 62 million pounds sterling paid to Pakistan, India assumed control of Ravi, Beas and Sutlej and, with the assistance of the Bank, Pakistan embarked on a series of ambitious replacement works: two large dams, five barrages, one gated siphon and eight inter-river link canals.

Baba Kaala, a wrinkled old man now, refers to the treaty as "that time when [President] Ayub [Khan] sold the rivers" but there is an understanding among experts that the settlement was among the best options at hand at the time — a report by the Pakistan Institute for Legislative Development and Transparency goes so far as to call it the "most successful confidence building measure" between India and Pakistan.

But for hypernationalists, Indian control over water remains a source of paranoia and easy propaganda: Soon after the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, Pakistani military officials began highlighting India's alleged violations of the Indus Water Treaty, suggesting that water issues constituted a "latent cause" of the ongoing conflict in Kashmir; a few months later the then President Asif Ali Zardari voiced similar concerns in a Washington Post op-ed. "The water crisis in Pakistan is directly linked to relations with India," he wrote, adding that failure to resolve the water imbroglio "could fuel the fires of discontent that lead to extremism and terrorism." In April 2010, Jamaatud Dawa chief Hafiz Saeed put it even more directly: India was "‘imposing war" on Pakistan through its water-related policies, he thundered at a rally in Lahore; his angry audience shouted slogans, warning that "either water would flow or blood".

The Balloki headworks on the Ravi river downstream from Lahore looks like any other irrigation structure in Pakistan: a mass of faded concrete trimmed with bright blue paint. Water flows lazily into canals, whatever little there is — according to an estimate offered by Irsa's Rao Irshad Ali Khan, Pakistan receives a combined average of 6 million acre feet of water from the three eastern tributaries to the Indus; by contrast, the three western rivers account for 139 million acre feet.

The rest of Ravi's water is rain and toxic waste; only three out of 100 industries using hazardous chemicals in Lahore treat their wastewater adequately, revealed a 2006 study by the World Bank, and almost all of them, directly or indirectly, drain their effluents in the river. Much like the Cuyahoga in Ohio, infamous as "the river that caught fire", the Ravi is so polluted that it sometimes appears to "ooze rather than flow".

Balloki is currently undergoing rehabilitation, according to a plaque at the site, a project for which the ADB has provided a loan of four billion rupees. According to an official at the barrage, this rehabilitation is necessary in case river flows increase. "But there's p-0ly any water in the Ravi," I say to the official, gesturing towards the sluggish river. "Yes, but there could be. India could release water."

Baba Kaala relates the story of when India last let water flow into the Ravi. The water rose above their roofs; Sagian was washed away. He remembers rounding up buffaloes that belonged to people living up the river; he then placed an ad in the local newspaper inviting claimants for the lost livestock. He still has that cutting saved.

That was roughly twenty five years ago, in 1988. "They did it after [General] Zia died," Baba Kaala says. "They didn't dare do it while Zia was alive."

I mention this date to the official at the Balloki Barrage. He sighs. "Yes, but that doesn't mean they won't do it again, does it?" At a recent press conference, Khwaja Asif floated the idea of revisions in the existing Indus Waters Treaty, claiming that it currently tilts heavily in India's favour. Such a view is likely to gain political traction in Pakistan in the light of some recent developments: The International Court of Arbitration recently announced its final ruling on the Kishanganga hydroelectric project, a run-of-the-river dam being built by India on a tributary of the Jhelum river in Indian-administered Kashmir and to which the Hague-based court has given a green light, stipulating only that a minimum flow of water is ensured at all times (the set minimum is far lower than the amount requested by Pakistan).

But as observers point out, Pakistan and India aren't the only claimants on the Indus and its various tributaries; China and Afghanistan have access to the water too and as the lower riparian in all these cases, it is in Pakistan's best interests to reach water-sharing agreements with these countries. The Kabul river alone brings 17 million acre feet of water from Afghanistan into Pakistan, part of which is stored in Warsak Dam and then used to irrigate the Peshawar Valley. Afghanistan has planned a series of hydro-electricity generation projects on the river (in which the country will be assisted, to the horror of our hypernationalists, by none other than India). This could affect water supply to the farmland growing wheat, sugarcane and tobacco, all economically strategic crops in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa which relies in large part to the output of fields to sustain its burgeoning population. And there is little awareness in the public sphere that there is already a dam constructed by another country on the Indus: The Shiquanhe, a run-of-the-river structure, built so discreetly by the Chinese in Tibet in the early 2000s that it completely threw off travel writer Alice Albinia, author of Empires of the Indus:

"Now that I am here [in western Tibet], I stand on the river's bank in confusion, wondering whether I am in the wrong place. There is a blue boot and a bicycle tyre where the water should be; Chinese instant-noodles are scattered about like flowers—but where is the water? My map clearly shows the Indus running straight through the middle of this town … I look through the list of Emergency Chinese in my guidebook and stop a passer-by: ‘Shooee?' I say. Water? Tsango? River? Darya?"

Despite this, Pakistan's fears of deprivation and return to desert remain tied to India and April 1, 1948 continues to be regarded as the starting point of the country's water troubles. But an emerging collection of voices is pointing towards another year, from an earlier time, which could be more instructive in identifying the source of our water woes — when a group of merchants from the tiny British Isles landed in the subcontinent and, over the course of time, conquered our rivers and changed the way we thought about them.

he Indus is a foul and perplexing river," grumbled Lieutenant John Wood, an officer of the East India Company. The year was 1836: Wood, along with three other Company employees, had been despatched to Sindh to test the navigability of the river. Sailing into the mouth of the Indus on "the first steamboat that ever floated on its celebrated waters", the officers proudly unfurled the Union Jack but couldn't entirely shake off a sense of wariness. This was a river that didn't quite make sense to them.

The British colonisation of the river, like most colonial endeavours, was profit-oriented and the Indus was viewed in purely fiscal, and frankly adversarial, terms. "The shallow, shifting, treacherous nature of the river Indus," lamented the chairman of the Indus Steam Flotilla, W P Andrew, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, "makes it inefficient, uncertain, unsafe, costly." Indeed, as far as the British were concerned, the river's potential as a means of transport was proving to be rather disappointing – there were far too many shipwrecks, freight damage and passenger deaths. The conquest of Sindh, given the rising costs of its administration, was beginning to appear less and less "a useful piece of rascality".

"In the end," wrote Albinia, author of Empires of the Indus, "it was irrigation that rescued Britain's conquest of the Indus from financial disaster."

Engineering projects, primarily the introduction of perennial canals which flow throughout the year, had been initiated upstream on the Indus river system as early as the mid-nineteenth century (after the Company conquered Punjab in 1849) and, when famine struck northern India in 1878, the projects were further expedited. "By 1901, four of the five rivers of the Punjab had been ‘canalized' or dammed," wrote Albinia. "Grain poured out of the Punjab, feeding hungry mouths in India, and transmitting new taxes to London. The Punjab became a ‘model province' in British India: productive and peaceful." Consequently, the colonisers turned their eyes to Sindh.

The Governor of Bombay laid the foundation stone for Lloyd (later Sukkur) Barrage in 1923, at the time the world's largest irrigation project. Colonial interests, economic and political, were clearly vested in this barrage: The steady supply of raw material to Lancashire's cotton mills, for one; appeasement following the arrest of the top leaders of the Khilafat Movement, for another, many of whom had the support and cooperation of Sindh's pirs and, by extension, of the rural population.

The public narrative was quite literally a different story. The Barrage would "convert a desert into a garden," declared the project's Executive Engineer at the stone-laying ceremony. Moreover, it could potentially transform what nearly a century earlier British explorer Sir Ricp-0 Burton had referred to as the "general torpidity of Scindianism" and what had been expounded upon by the author of the 1907 Sindh Gazetteer in the following manner:

"The truth is that, in the absence of competition, ambition and every other stimulus which urges the husbandsman to get the most he can out of his field, the Sindhi has for generations cherished the ideal of allowing his field to divorce him as little as is possible from his hookah as might be compatible with keeping the latter filled."

In a nutshell, then, science was saving Sindh (and the Sindhi). Modernity was knocking at the door. The idea caught hold of the local imagination: Symbols of technology (aeroplanes, cars) began appearing in local tales and riddles and poets started composing verses commemorating the barrage. Wrote Khano Panhwar, a young Sindhi poet, in the early 1930s:

hey don't make them like they used to," says Ishaq Mughriye, an activist based in Kambar Shahdadkot and head of the area's abaadkaar board. He is referring to the flood managers and irrigation officials stationed in the area — there was a time, he says, when an official could look at a distributary and correctly estimate the amount of water flowing through it. Now, he laments, they don't even bother leaving their airconditioned offices for a field visit.

The 2010-2011 floods raised serious questions about the country's irrigation structure and the extent to which it contributed to the scale and extent of the disaster. The findings of the Punjab Flood Commission, constituted to investigate the 2010 floods in the province, acknowledged the serious lapses committed by concerned officials, who "saw the glorious Indus pass by knowing little what to do." Much of the damage was due to these "inexperienced, incompetent, ignorant and nervous flood managers, pirouetting and gyrating in meaningless frenzy — without any preparedness, plan, equipment or strategy." Indeed, continued the indignant report, "the inability of the flood managers" was reminiscent of a childhood nursery rhyme. It then went on to quote the final three lines from Humpty Dumpty.

Engineer Zulfiqar Ali, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Engineering and Technology (UET) in Lahore, claims that we haven't learned our lesson, that mismanagement is still continuing apace. Like Mushtaq Gaadi, he believes that the flawed rehabilitation of Taunsa Barrage in 2007, for which he says 11 billion rupees were borrowed from the World Bank, contributed to the devastation of Muzaffargarh in 2010. The Punjab Flood Commission has not addressed these allegations, but Dr Ali claims this is because the project designer and the member of the advisory group were part of the inquiry tribunal.

Now, he claims, something similar is happening at Jinnah Barrage further upstream. In an article highlighting the issue, he wrote: "Common sense dictates that a hurdle in the flow of water will raise the water level on the upstream. Then why is a 6 ft high wall (sub-weir) at 800 ft d/s [downstream] of Jinnah Barrage being constructed? Who are the originators, checkers and approvers of this conceptually wrong project?"

"If money is being spent on unnecessary rehabilitation, that's one thing," he says, sitting in the living room within the UET premises. But if the rehabilitation is ill-planned, he argues, or if it is a source of potential danger, that's another story altogether. He says that he has written to the former Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, to former President Asif Ali Zardari; he even filed a petition in court, a petition that was heard but then dismissed. But he says he will continue trying.

"Someone needs to raise their voice."

ear midnight on a moonless night, a white-haired man makes his way towards the river, tailed by an unusual entourage: a horse, a tractor, a young boy and several men with their shalwars rolled up to their knees and their sleeves to their elbows. They pause before a small rivulet, a minor channel of the river, before crossing it —the men wading, the horse sloshing, the tractor trundling through. When they reach the river bank, they unpack supplies from the tractor, lay out a picnic blanket, settle down and fall silent. Then Ashu Lal begins to speak. "You couldn't reach this point before," he says. "It would take an entire day. You would need a boat." Ashu Lal is a doctor by profession but in this town of Karor Lal Esan -- in fact, in all of the Seraiki wasabi, and perhaps a little beyond -- it is his poetry that he is known for. Much of his literary output is a paean to the river and, just as often, a requiem. The young boy, the only person in the group who shuns the reverential circle around Ashu and instead attempts to strike up a conversation with the horse, is Ashu's son Hans, named after a white-winged bird native to the Indus. The name choice is part tribute, part aspiration: The hamsa, given its ability to walk on the earth, fly in the sky and swim in the water, transcends the limitations of the creatures around it.

Ashu Lal does not carry a cell phone. He thinks that the money that once upon a time would have been used to, say, raise a clutch of chickens is now subsumed by phone credit. He worries, often and at length, about the impact that television is having on his son and about precisely what it is that he is being taught at school. He is apprehensive, also, about the bridge being built across the river — it will bring crime to their doorstep, he fears. After all, it is well known that the Sulaiman mountains are a favourite hiding spot for outlaws. The development he sees around him, in his mind, spells doom.

"When we wanted a road, they were too busy building one from Taunsa to Lahore," he says, as an indictment of the development priorities of the bureaucrats and politicians based in the faraway capital of Punjab.

Ashu Lal's memories of growing up by the river have a prelapsarian feel to them, populated as they are by cranes and dolphins and barasinghas; the first memory he has of ever feeling shocked is when, as a child, he watched two huntsmen bound after a stag, then shoot it point-blank. His suspicion of technology borders on neo-Luddism but it appears to be based on a more widely held apprehension that ‘development' is a selective benefactress, that it facilitates the flow of resources from one region to another, persistently making one poorer and the other richer. Ashu Lal fears that his region is among those that have lost out.

A small sound punctures the air, a rustle in the river.

"Did you hear that?" asks Ashu. "It's the first time that we've heard anything."

He looks wistfully towards the water. "There was a time when the river wouldn't let you talk. Now it is lying silent and we're the ones left talking."

ew forces have so clearly shaped the destiny of human civilisations as water or, indeed, have as firmly captured the human imagination. Consequently, the ability to shape water, to make it climb heights and cascade down, to funnel it through airless passages straight to agricultural fields and urban homes, is regarded as one of man's greatest achievements. For the poet, there may be considerable transcendental value in watching a river run wild and free. For the engineer, there is equal thrill in watching water leap, with leonine ferocity, from the spillways of a dam.

The Indus roars at Tarbela. The dam is a monument to ordered progress, so much so that even a scraggly goat munching grass by the spillways looks out of place. It is also, admittedly, a testament to a young country's will and ambition. "Tarbela makes one think of hubris: the hero's challenge to the gods that was the theme of the tragedies of ancient Greece," an American engineer had warned at the time. There were tragedies: Shortly after the dam became operational, a tunnel collapsed and, pierced with guilt at the ensuing damage, one of the engineers committed suicide. But on the whole, the project was, and continues to be, touted as a success: It doubled water supply during the dry months, recovered its costs in due time and provided the country, or at least certain parts of it, with cheap electricity.

The dream, an official at Tarbela tells me, is for all three dams – Diamer-Bhasha, Tarbela and Kalabagh – to be functional on the Indus. Water would flow through Bhasha in Gilgit-Baltistan, generating electricity, then flow through Tarbela in Haripur, generating some more electricity, and finally flow to Kalabagh in Mianwali, where it could be stored or released, depending on irrigation needs. In case of floods along the lines experienced in 2010 and 2011, the water could be stored in all three dams. What could be a better solution to the country's water and energy needs?

But just outside the premises of the dam, in the town of Ghazi, an old man m-4ing a wheelbarrow down the street complains of the amount of load shedding in the area. "Who is getting this electricity?" he asks, jabbing a thumb in the direction of the dam. "We aren't."

At Khalabat township, one of the settlements for the affectees of Tarbela dam, the Khan of Khabbal, whose village is among those that now lies beneath the Tarbela reservoir, says something similar. "I don't want these lights, I don't want this electricity," he had proclaimed, pointing at the churning fan above him. "I have seen a piece of heaven and I want it back."

Back in the Wapda office at Tarbela, a senior official, surrounded by charts and numbers and figures and hydraulic models, waxes eloquent about the many gifts of the dam. It is not easy to pay a visit to the dam site — with control comes the need to preserve it and the structure is a high-risk strategic target. In 2007, a deadly attack took place on an army base within the premises; the Taliban were suspected to be the likely perpetrators.

But the official is a positive man, his cheery optimism characteristic of the can-do attitude of engineers. Gesturing expansively, he describes the many amenities available inside the gate community of officials deployed at the dam. There is uninterrupted electricity. There are schools for the children of the officials—one for boys and one for girls. There is a college. There is even a hockey field. He lists these off as if they are personal achievements.

"We have everything here," he says, beaming.

"Really, when you think about it, this is like heaven on earth."