After nearly four years of the Doklam Valley clashes, India and China reached a settlement on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit in 2024 bringing relative peace to Eastern Ladakh and building hopes for a potential cooperation between the nuclear giants in Asia. In the meantime, China has continued to develop its infrastructure projects on the eastern borders with India along Arunachal Pradesh. In the most recent case, China announced the construction of a hydropower plant in the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo River, the Tibetan name for the Brahmaputra, according to an official statement quoted by state-run Xinhua news agency on Wednesday, December 25, 2024. The project will cost about $137 billion and is projected to be the world’s largest dam once constructed, it is expected to generate more than 300 billion kWh of electricity each year — enough to meet the annual needs of over 300 million people.
It is a contentious geopolitical project because this new project is set to be built in a large gorge in the eastern Himalayas, making a U-turn before entering Arunachal Pradesh for India and Bangladesh. Over 114 million people depend on the waters of the Brahmaputra River—one of the largest rivers in Asia stretching across 2,900 kilometers, for drinking, irrigation, a major transportation route for internal shipping as well as a major source of hydroelectric power, it also supports the regional ecology housing rare species of fish including wildlife sanctuaries like Kaziranga National Park. Given the importance of the river, the arbitrary and non-transparent dam constructions by China along the Brahmaputra River will not only limit access to water resources for the downstream countries i.e., India and Bangladesh, it points to the larger geopolitical tensions between India and China over control of water resources, regional influence and infrastructural capabilities.
Over the last decade, China has built several dam projects in the Yarlung Zangbo River from Tibet including Zangmu, Jiacha, and Lalho in the past decade, for the following officially stated reasons, first, it helps develop the Tibetan Autonomous Region, improving living standards, generating revenue and employment i.e., economic and social development. Second, it fulfills China’s goal of developing clean energy in achieving Net zero carbon emissions and extreme hydrological disasters.
A major concern about these projects come from the control China would have in releasing large amounts of water in a region prone to flooding i.e., Arunachal Pradesh and Assam. In hindsight, it does provide leverage and control, especially for an upstream country over the water resource-dependent downstream countries, water resources can be an influential diplomatic trump card in negotiations and could potentially develop into a conflict situation as witnessed in the contentious Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam with the case between Ethiopia and Egypt.
However, if India-China-Bangladesh are able to cooperate with each other in the governance of the Yarlung Zangbo-Brahmaputra River, provides trade-offs and synergies among hydropower production, waterway navigation and agricultural irrigation; provides higher assurance rate of irrigation water requirement in Bangladesh, effectively mitigating flood damage by reducing downstream flood-affected area in India and Bangladesh by up to 32.56 % and 14.8 % respectively.
In March 2022, answering a question in the Rajya Sabha, the Minister of State for External Affairs made it clear that the Indian Government acknowledges and monitors the developments happening in the Brahmaputra River in Mainland China and has sought diplomatic engagement through the Expert-Level Mechanism (2006) on trans-border rivers to address concerns, to ensure the interests of the downstream countries against the activities in the upstream.
China too has shared that it continues to maintain communications with the lower riparian countries i.e., India and Bangladesh, defending the project stating that it will not affect these countries and that the projects are being carried out after decades of studies. The same was observed during the Special Representative (SR) talks held on December 18th, with data-sharing of trans-border rivers i.e., Brahmaputra (Yarlung Zangbo) and Sutlej (Lungqen Zangbo) as part of border questions, resulting in a positive direction for cooperation between India and China. However, the fact remains that India and China do not have a water-sharing agreement with each other, and the MoUs with China, to share hydrological data, have not been renewed for either of the rivers.
How India Counters
India has proposals to build dams to counter the Chinese dams to ensure its own resource security with the Lower Subansiri and the Dibang Dam with flood control and electricity as major priority but have been delayed due to environmental and opposition from the local tribal communities. China’s ability to build large scale infrastructure as per its five-year plans within its set timeframes against India’s delayed democratic procedure also points towards the pace at which infrastructure race in the region is progressing.
In the larger context, both China and India have taken infrastructural developments in the region as measures to counter each other. Chinese incursions in the Arunachal Pradesh region had become a common occurrence, building military outposts and villages. India’s Arunachal Pradesh Frontier Highway (NH-913) and the development of the Sela tunnel, connecting military headquarters in the region help in developing a road network to ease reconnaissance and rapid movement in times of Chinese incursion or a potential invasion. For a geopolitically contentious region, any infrastructure development serves as a tool for strategic counter in times of heightened tensions.
India has also ramped up efforts to improve political ties with its neighbors like Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh, more so when India’s neighborhood has grown more unstable in 2024. In addition, India’s ties in QUAD in the Indo-Pacific, competition over dominance of the South Asian and Indian Ocean regions (String of Pearls vs Necklace of Diamonds), while also having ties with China in BRISCs and SCO and simultaneously maintaining trade dependency with China have put India in a precarious position. The deeply rooted political and military mistrust between the two countries, historically, compels one to view such developments with a biased lens.
China is one of the economic and strategic opportunities for India’s unfinished quest for major power status. Sino-Indian relations are at a cornerstone in the new century, as two of the world’s largest economies and populations, a mutually cooperative relationship is imperative to make the Asian Century a reality. The 2024 Border Patrol Agreement provides a stage for renewed hopes of cooperation and efforts to improve relations, now, the Brahmaputra Dam projects come as a test for the efficiency in the maintenance of the primary definitive aspect of the relations, the trust factor between the two countries that are yet to make strides in countering geopolitical tensions.
