Dredge Wular Lake to maximise the positive spinoff of holding IWT in abeyance

One of the first immediate short term measures that should be initiated is to start dredging the Wular lake.

Weather forecasts for whole of Pakistan, particularly Islamabad and Rawalpindi, for the next few days, weeks and months have been predicted as dire. By two gentlemen who live in glass houses there, none other than Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and army chief General Asim Munir, respectively.

From hot to very hot is the forecast as mercury, and tempers, rise on two sides of the border.

The real rise in temperature is being felt all over Pakistan due to Prime Minister Narendra Modi announcing that Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) is being put in abeyance immediately. In other words, it is being mothballed and put in cold storage.

The weaponisation of water has just got real.

What can be done immediately? To reduce flows of Jhelum from reaching Pakistan? Well, in the next few paragraphs how and why it needs to be done is explained in some details.

That brings us back to where our focus should be, on the Western Rivers, through which 135 MAF (Million Acre Feet) of water was allotted to Pakistan. Out of a total of 168 MAF of waters available in the Indus system, India has got only 33 MAF (under 20 per cent) and Pakistan 135 MAF (over 80 per cent). On the basis of total volumes of water, Pakistan gets an additional 102 MAF of waters and hence outcries of the Treaty being unfair to India are being raised now.

Is Pakistan 80 per cent share = India’s 20 per cent share?

Under the IWT, the official Indian and Pakistani documents said that Jhelum had recorded mean annual flows of 22.6 MAF at rim stations between 1921-22 and 1945-46.  Incidentally, that means that even if there be some variations in monthly water flows in the Jhelum, the total volumes remain more or less the same. For the sake of convenience in our calculations regarding Jhelum, let us assume that its annual flows now are in the range of 21 MAF per annum.

The Mangla Dam on Jhelum drowned old Mirpur town when it was built up with money from India and western nations, following the IWT signing over several years. This is one of the largest dams in Pakistan built till day but silting over the last many decades gradually eroded its holding capacity substantially. As a result, the Pakistan government then raised its height over several years, in an attempt to improve its holding capacity.

The policy planners in New Delhi may be aware and conscious of the benefits of Wular lake (Asia’s second largest freshwater lake situated near Bandipora). But it is worthwhile to try to point it out to them that one of the first immediate short term measures that should be initiated, now that IWT is in abeyance, is to start dredging the Wular lake. This is an urgent step that the Union government should start on a war footing.

As summer starts becoming more scorching and temperatures start rising, the timing will be ideal to undertake dredging on a massive scale, at hundreds of places simultaneously, in Wular catchment area. As waters recede, in the days ahead, restore it to its original size, or at least its size that was extant on September 19, 1960, the day Treaty was signed.

Of course, there can be attacks on people involved in dredging as had happened on August 27, 2012, at Adipora. The attack was carried out at the behest of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agencies by some Hizbul Majahideen (HM) terrorists. During the dredging, which was a pet project of Taj Mohiuddin, a Cabinet colleague of Omar Abdullah, a narrative was sought to be created that it was a violation of Indus Waters Treaty! The next logical step was then for the terror proxies of Pakistan to attack these works, machinery and threaten the workers involved in dredging.

The attack effectively stalled the dredging, never to be picked up again.

During the day dredging was going on, this author met Taj Mohiuddin at his Gupkar residence, trying to understand the significance of the works. He was candid and to the point. He said: “Sant, I tell you one thing. This is a sincere attempt to help ordinary Kashmiris as a flood of massive proportions is due. Any time now. Wular is a natural sponge that is God’s beautiful gift. Trust me, if enough dredging doesn’t happen, due to lack of funds, less availability of machinery and equipment, Kashmir will be drowned.”

His words proved prophetic for dredging stopped after that August 2012 attack, it could not be resumed in 2013, and a year later, Kashmir was drowned by Jhelum following torrential rains of September 7, 2014. Some insane men who attacked dredging works and manpower were responsible for the large extent of damage those floods that inflicted on Kashmir.

In the Treaty, under Annexure E are given guidelines describing "Storage of waters by India on the Western Rivers’’. It runs into several pages and gives highly technical data. Under paragraph (9), it reads:

(9) India may construct on Jhelum Main such works as it may consider necessary for flood control.

It was these works related to dredging for preventing floods and mitigating their severity that were hit by Hizbul Mujahideen on August 27, 2012. Their action of disrupting dredging drowned a good part of Kashmir.

It was anti-Kashmiri harming them immensely, just as the present massacre of Hindu tourists in Pahalgam on April 22 that started this cycle of lows in bilateral relations with Pakistan.