Ashfaq Mahmood, former federal secretary for the (now-defunct) Ministry of Water and Power, Government of Pakistan, has marshalled his considerable experience at the helm of water policy and administration to cover the vast expanse of the history of transboundary water relations between Pakistan and India. He dedicates his book, Hydro-Diplomacy: Preventing Water War Between Nuclear-Armed Pakistan and India, to the “Peace-loving people of the Indus Basin” and it is in this spirit that we must understand his explication of the complex set of issues, as well as the ways forward that he proposes.

It is certainly a truism that post-retirement, civil servants — particularly in the subcontinent — become more reflective and adopt positions that they may have had a hard time advocating while in active service. Through this book, Mahmood offers us cogent insights of why that may be and how we may begin to do things differently. Especially if we want to advance better outcomes throughout the basin, in the words of former Pakistani president Gen Ayub Khan, “for the welfare and good of a vast number of people both in India and Pakistan” — to which Mahmood adds “the environment” with the wisdom of hindsight.

This timely book by an official insider adds to the growing literature being written from the Pakistani perspective on the history and current state of the consequential Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) signed in 1960 between Pakistan and India, with a continuing role for the World Bank in its dispute settlement mechanism. With the IWT approaching the start of its sixth decade in 2020, now is a good time to take stock of how the treaty has fared since its signing, what we’ve learned about its operations, the growing stresses on it because of increasing demands — including pressures from a changing climate — and what we need to put in place in terms of better norms to achieve its potential. This is the same hope that is expressed in the treaty’s preamble, to achieve “the most complete and satisfactory utilisation of waters” … “in a spirit of goodwill and friendship”… grounded in an overall “cooperative spirit” between the two countries.

A timely book adds to the growing literature being written from the Pakistani perspective on the Indus Waters Treaty

Mahmood starts with a concise overview of the reasons for, and the conditions in which the treaty came about. As these are relatively well-known by now, he rightly chooses to touch upon them only briefly. He does, however, identify the crucial element of mistrust between the two nations as being the prime driver of the particular structuring of the treaty. The focus on the principles of ‘Let Flow’ and ‘Non-Interference’ was to overcome Pakistan’s mistrust of its upstream neighbour when it came to the crucial issue of how the shared use of the so-called three western rivers would operate going forward after the treaty led to the diversion of the three eastern rivers towards India.

Given the recent tone of public discourse, particularly in Pakistan, every time high profile disputes surface regarding India’s efforts to produce electricity from the waters of the three western rivers, Mahmood points out dispassionately that the treaty, in fact, allows India to build run-of-the-river plants, but that it does so within precise design and operational criteria. The recent disputes around the Baglihar plant on the river Chenab and Kishanganga on the river Jhelum need to be seen in this light.

Mahmood goes further and makes it clear that the treaty does not, in fact, put an upper limit on the number of run-of-the-river plants that India can construct. Indeed, in the very first decade of the treaty’s signing, Mahmood informs us, India constructed 16 such plants on the Jhelum, 15 on the Chenab and 12 on the main stem of the Indus for a total of 43 such plants, without any hindrance or complaint arising from Pakistan.

Given this history, Pakistan’s water administrators must do a better job of explaining to its public as to what changed that led to the subsequent formal uptick in utilising the treaty’s dispute settlement mechanisms. Was it simply a concern that it was the cascade effect of these individual projects that, taken together, would threaten Pakistan’s water-security? Or the fact that, with the design of the two high profile projects, India was attempting to push the interpretation of project design features to gain the maximum possible advantage under the treaty?

Mahmood is of the view that after the protracted and long-drawn-out history of both projects — Baglihar with the ruling of the World Bank-appointed neutral expert and Kishanganga with the ruling of the International Court of Arbitration — most of the technical issues that could potentially arise about project design between the two countries have, in fact, been resolved satisfactorily enough to enable the permanent Indus commissioners — one from each country — to more easily work together to develop improved working norms.

This means that, taken together, Pakistan is technically more water-secure after the collective outcomes of the two cases. This assessment is very heartening indeed and can lay the foundation for advancing towards the goals that Mahmood truly wishes the two nations to take.

In his view then, it is time for the two countries to move towards adopting better working norms and addressing the gaps that the treaty left, as well as issues that have subsequently become salient in the decades since the treaty’s signing. To begin with, there is the crucial issue of data-sharing. In the main, it is upstream India that, because of its control of the watersheds of the three western rivers, has the greater responsibility for more timely and active sharing of data. Mahmood believes that a joint task force under the aegis of the Permanent Indus Commission could easily work on developing mechanisms for all the unresolved issues of data-collection and sharing.

He also believes that it is time to begin to address the limitations of the IWT and other key areas that the treaty does not attend to, such as over-abstraction of the shared transboundary aquifers and the growing stress on the groundwater resources of the basin. There are other crucial issues — such as increasing pollution of the rivers and aquifers, the lack of a formula for shortage-sharing between the countries in dry years, and environmental flows for the eastern rivers — that the countries need to work on. Crucially, Mahmood tells us that government functionaries are not working on developing the vision and plans that all of these issues taken together require; they are instead working on operational day-to-day issues. He also advocates a bigger role for academia and research and to develop ways in which they can input into government policy.

A final comment on publishing quality: towards the end of Mahmood’s book, in what is his crucial ‘Part 3: Hydro-Diplomacy to Avert Water War’, several pages of text are missing, in that the pages of the book are blank and printing continues from subsequent page numbers. Given that this is the final section of the book in which Mahmood makes important summary remarks and proposes strategies for resolution of post-treaty issues — absolutely critical elements that have emerged and grown in importance since the signing of the treaty — the fact that his ideas in key parts are missing from the published version of his manuscript is disappointing.

If specialised presses wish to take up important topics and fill crucial gaps in our collective knowledge, surely they can do better. Putting out a book with the key insights of the author missing deprives readers of a chance to fully engage with those insights. It is a disservice to those who may wish to use the author’s ideas to advance policy changes and innovations. Producing more research is great, doing a shoddy job of it is not, and doing so unfortunately robs the research of some of its potency.

The reviewer is a Visiting Fellow at the Islamic Legal Studies Programme: Law and Social Change, at Harvard Law School

Hydro-Diplomacy: Preventing Water War
Between Nuclear-Armed Pakistan and
India
By Ashfaq Mahmood
IPS, Islamabad
ISBN: 978-0199403547
584pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, November 11th, 2018