China’s unapologetic announcement in December 2024 to go ahead with the construction of a massive $137 billion dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo, as the Brahmaputra is known in Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) of China, will deepen riparian disquiet. The announcement has highlighted several aspects of South Asia’s friction over sharing of river waters. Indeed, this contention over sharing of river waters, and both real and perceived inequities, is as much an exclamation point as a root for expletives in an over-populated, largely impoverished region that has the grammar of dissonance down pat.
This dissonance irritates Bangladesh-India relations over the Ganga-Padma and the Teesta, two of the 54 rivers which flow from India to Bangladesh. Pakistan retains a long-time paranoia about India stanching the flow of the Indus and some of its tributaries; decades earlier, this led to the World Bank being appointed mediator. Nepal and India butt heads each monsoon over massive run-offs from Nepal, some via significant tributaries of the Ganga, that frequently inundate the northern Indian plains and swells the Ganga. This last has downstream implications for Bangladesh.
Back to the proposed new dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo AKA the Brahmaputra in India, through the transgender twist, the Jamuna in Bangladesh, and its collective impact on the sub-region of eastern South Asia.
Four major and three minor dams, mainly geared to produce hydro-electricity, already exist on the “main stem” of the river; and more than a dozen on tributaries of the Yarlung Tasngpo. These have for long been points of irritation with India, though less so than India’s repeated border meltdowns with China.
But the so-called “Great Bend” project, just where the Yarlung Tsangpo effects a riverine hairpin before it barrels down to the far-eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, is a gamechanger. It is designed to boost the infrastructure and economy of TAR and regions to its east. But the sheer size of it — an indication: The hydropower output expected to be triple that of the massive Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in Central China — has got India wound up about the potential of China squeezing this lifeline of a river. It is, of course, also a lifeline for Bangladesh, which the Brahmaputra — as the Jamuna — splits from the north to the centre and joins the Ganga-Padma to flow into the Bay of Bengal.
As far as China is concerned, the Great Bend dam is signed and sealed. A country driven remarkably, and obsessively, to long-term planning, the dam is a part of the “Long Range Objectives” target till 2035, effected by a policy committee of the Communist Party of China. The go-ahead for construction is a massive brick in that wall.
A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson smoothly played down regional concerns over the dam. “The project will not negatively affect the lower reaches,” South China Morning Post quoted her as saying. The publication added her statement: “China will continue to maintain communication with countries at the lower reaches through existing channels and step up cooperation on disaster prevention and relief of the people by the river.”
This is dissembling as high art. Besides, to expect China to listen to others at the cost of its own domestic needs of political economy, economic growth, and national security is foolishness.
Take the Mekong, southeast Asia’s grand river. The Mekong has its source and significant headwaters in southwestern China. This river then flows along the tri-junction of Myanmar, Lao, and Thailand before entering Lao, and after, along much of the Lao-Thai border before entering Cambodia. The Mekong traverses that country north-to-south before exiting southernmost Vietnam into the South China Sea.
The river is a significant enough lifeline for Lao, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam to have formed the Mekong River Commission — an excellent cooperative example for South Asia, with the Commission’s several monitoring stations and regular updates, meetings, and information sharing. For instance, a three-nation commission between India, Bangladesh, and Nepal to work the Ganga-Padma. And a three-nation commission between India, Bangladesh, and Bhutan to work the Brahmaputra system. Even a four-nation commission comprising China, India, Bhutan, and Bangladesh for the Brahmaputra … and perish that thought. Because China is absent from the Mekong River Commission.
Bangladesh, which has remained massively vocal about India’s missteps and misdemeanours with rivers that decant into Bangladesh, has typically remained pacific about China’s dam-building activities on the Brahmaputra
China does little except offer occasional updates about the Mekong’s flow and flooding alerts. And, it has for decades claimed, without credible evidence, that several dams along the Mekong in China have done nothing to devastate the river system in the downstream — or lower riparian — countries, contrary to several research outcomes. Mostly Western voices in the spaces of hydrology and ecology, and their liberal counterparts in several politically-suppressive countries in Southeast Asia, have raised numerous objections, all assiduously deflected by China through public statements and the clout it brings through trade, investment, tourism dollars, and, whenever possible, the girdle of the so-called Belt and Road Initiative and its subsidiary operations: Several associated “economic corridors.”
What China has done with the Mekong in Southeast Asia is exactly what it is doing with the Brahmaputra in Eastern South Asia — indeed, has done with the Brahmaputra for several years. Much like its Teflon arrangement with the Mekong River Commission countries, China and India only share patchy memoranda of understanding, based on which China shares information about the Yarlung Tsangpo-Brahmaputra and studiously deadpans when asked about various dams on its side of the river.
Any pushback is fraught with risk — and, given the politics of things, hypocrisy that so smoothly and so clinically masquerades as national interest.
Bangladesh, which has remained massively vocal about India’s missteps and misdemeanours with rivers that decant into Bangladesh — the flap with the Ganga-Padma and Teesta being uppermost — has typically remained pacific about China’s dam-building activities on the Brahmaputra’s source stream and headwaters. This mirrors the explicable quiet that attends official and public Bangladeshi reactions to China’s massive trade surplus with Bangladesh when compared to the windmill of India’s trade surplus with Bangladesh; and the stunning quiet about gross mistreatment of Uyghurs, for instance, in China’s Xinjiang province — but all that is another chapter in the frenetic chessboard of regional strategy and byplays.
There is awkwardness with India’s position too. As much as India rails against China, what it accuses China of doing with the Brahmaputra is similar to what it does with the Teesta. The India-Bangladesh treaty on the Ganga-Padma, that is up for renewal in 2026, is at least a face-saver because it has definite official mechanisms; even though hydrological parameters and aspects of climate-change induced needs must surely be updated for the renewal. India steadfastly declines to work anything with the Teesta, often using India’s federal technicality that permits the state of West Bengal to use the Teesta’s flow as it wishes, including to build several dams — in a sub-national, micro sense doing with the Teesta what China does with the Brahmaputra.
This awkwardness has a China overhang. As this column has noted, China’s emphatic offer in end-2023 to resuscitate the devastated Teesta basin in Bangladesh — located near the so-called Chicken’s Neck or Siliguri Corridor that links Mainland India to far-eastern India — led to a knee-jerk Indian offer in mid-2024 to displace the Chinese offer. But the proposal offered no solution to the equitable sharing of the Teesta’s water with Bangladesh.
China’s Great Bend dam has only highlighted these messy, vexing aspects of transnational impunity, which can only be solved, as far as South Asia is concerned, by working as a collective for a shared peace and prosperity.
Sudeep Chakravarti works in the policy-and-practice space in Eastern South Asia, greater South Asia, and the Indian Ocean Region.
dhaka tribune
