The British Raj, which had taken over Mughal India from the hands of the East India Company in the late 1850s, took upon itself the mission to prevent Afghanistan from falling into the hands of its rival power, Russia. It dreaded a situation, whereby the enemy could reach the warm waters of the Arabian Sea and threaten its Asian colonies–the most prized one, being the subcontinent.
A “forward defence policy” had called for using the floodplains of Punjab, as a food basket to feed the Army, raised from nowhere but the region itself. A community of landlords was created investing in them magisterial and revenue powers, which were meant to not only control the local populace but also persuade them to join the royal army. Besides drawing a salary for their services, the poor farmers were offered virgin lands, fed by a network of canals drawn from barrages.
To keep the royal subjects in line with the spirit of the time, a penal code was introduced, and police were constituted to implement them with the help of magistrates and revenue department. The new lands were allotted to the “marshal classes.” The same could be purchased by the agriculturalists from elsewhere. The communities, which had held sway over them since unknown times and had only engaged in rearing livestock, were evicted and displaced.
The elderly Ahmad Khan Kharal, who had once exchanged his turban with Raja Ranjit Singh, raised his standard against canal colonies but the Sikh Army, that now had extended its allegiance to the British Raj, played crucial role, along with Shahpuri tribes and the armies of Bahawalpur State, in defeating the spirited souls from riverine communities.
“With the martyrdom of Ahmad Khan Kharal, who stood up for rivers and the forests, a golden age was over. The tillers indulged into the plunder of virgin lands forcing the herders and the fisher folks to the margins of poverty and hunger,” said mournfully Rashid Chaudhary, who has roots in Gogera, adding the “son of the soil” still lives in the folklores composed in praise of his valour.
Ahmad Khan was martyred in the course of his heroic struggle against the new order, and he happened to be the last to stand up in favour of the flowing rivers and vast jungles that ran along with them. Centuries after, that is 1960, when British Raj had gone and America had come forward shouldering its colonial burdens, India insisted on exclusive rights over to it three eastern rivers of the region – Sutlej, Ravi and Beas – the riverine communities had become too marginalized to even raise voice against their death warrant.
Ayub Khan, who had eagerly accepted millions of pounds from the World Bank, was there to give a shut-up call to the engineers and the members of the bureaucracy, which believed the treaty was an environmental disaster and a conspiracy to transform the whole region lying between Ravi and Sutlej into a desolate desert. The martial law administrator had saved canal colonies and secured a huge sum of money hoping to bring a ‘green revolution’ with the help dams and link canals in exchange of the three rivers.
Rivers provide natural habitat to pulses, fish and livestock. They mean food security to the people stuck to their banks other than keeping in control the arsenic level by replenishing the underground water
Out of three eastern rivers, Sutlej was perennial. On it, the Bahawalpur State had built three barrages. The canals brought so much prosperity that the loans taken from the Bank of England, due to be paid till the 1990s, were disposed of within a decade of the completion of the Sutlej Valley Project. Not only this, the most prosperous royal state willingly joining Pakistan was merged into One Unit but also its lifeline was handed over to the eastern neighbour as well. The ill-fate also struck to the Indus Delta where the waters of the eastern rivers stop reaching after India completed and started operating the Bhakra Dam. Beas River, which had been diverted from its course running in Pakistan by the British Raj to Harike Pattan, India made its waters flow to Rajhastan. Last year, the ex-Senator, Muhammad Ali Durrani, the staunch supporter of the revival of the provincial status of Bahawalpur, was so much moved by the plight of the people of the dry region due to the Sutlej not carrying waters enough to recharge the aquifers, became the moving spirit behind the movement for the restoration of the rivers insisting that India had no right to stop the water meant for aquatic life. To his utter disappointment, WAPDA chief seconded the Indian Water Minister when he, following Pulwama incident, bragged of having made arrangements that not a single drop of the eastern rivers would flow downstream.
But the eastern rivers have flown downstream – thanks to an extended monsoon that has struck the subcontinent this year, making the Met Office to surprisingly observe that the monsoon turned to the direction of the South instead of Central regions. It made Beas and Sutlej rise in their levels and reach downstream after playing havoc with the canals and barrages of the Indian Punjab. “We know this has happened due to climate change but don’t know exactly whether it is a temporary phenomenon or a pattern,” said Director Khalid Maqbool Malik. Rivers provide natural habitat to pulses, fish and livestock. They mean food security to the people stuck to their banks other than keeping in control the arsenic level by replenishing the underground water. The flowing of the eastern rivers used to render hunger a non-entity down to the Indus Delta, which remains out of water in the months other than July and August. “Keep the rivers flowing, and it has become the norm,” says Dr Hassan Abass, noting it was time, we abandoned the development paradigm, which guided the British Raj to make rivers an instrument to advance their colonial policies in the subcontinent. His best advice was to deconstruct dams, which Pakistan and India had built to produce electricity (they can produce a lot from the wind and sunlight), and let the rivers flow for the sake of food security – an indispensable component of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The writer is a freelancer