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The tussles over water that are at the source of India and Pakistan's historical conflict are not over. Some people are looking for new solutions, but not enough
The Upper Riparians batted first and reached 260 for nine. The Lower Riparians were somewhere around 40 without loss when our next seminar started, and for a couple of hours it became impossible to follow the game (at least so far as I could tell; it was hard to be certain of the kind of information arriving on the laptop screens and mobiles of my fellow seminarians). But even when the game's outcome was wide open – 40 runs scored and every wicket still standing, 260 to beat – the supporters of the Lower Riparians were assuring the Upper Riparians that the Upper Riparian side would win, and vice versa. The opposite of swank: "You'll do it, no problem, we don't have a big enough score on the board", and "No, no, we'll lose, you'll see, we always fall apart." The spirit was "After you, Cecil, after you, Claude," but perhaps only as a civil disguise for nail-biting desire.
Cricket reached India in the 18th century, and Indians had begun to rival Englishmen in their skill and technique before the Victorian era was over. India played its first Test match in 1932. A year later a Muslim student at Cambridge invented "Pakistan" as the name for a homeland for subcontinental Muslims that was then pure conjecture. Subsequent events moved very fast and often violently to make facts on the ground. The division of India established Pakistan as nation state in 1947. The Imperial Cricket Conference, meeting at Lord's, awarded Test match status to its cricket team in 1952. Ten years later English counties began to play limited-over cricket with a result guaranteed inside the stretch of a day, and international cricket adopted the form for its world cup in 1975. On Wednesday, nine world cups later, India met Pakistan in a semi-final at Mohali in northern India. The prime ministers of both countries attended, and a billion people are said to have watched the game, which, outside the opening of the Beijing Olympics, must be a sporting event's largest-ever TV audience.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars since they started playing each other at cricket – three wars, in fact, since 1965 – and the enmity between the two is as bitter as anything in the Middle East. But what does this brisk history amount to in the long flow of time? A few wars and cricket games are the blink of an eye, as quickly missed as a catch. On Wednesday afternoon, while (as it turned out) Pakistani wickets were falling in Mohali, what we were being asked to consider in a room at King's College London was the 5,000-year-old civilisation of the Indus valley, and how its future was imperilled by the same political geography that had created the rivalrous cricket teams, as well as by the same imperial instincts that had introduced cricket in the first place. "Is water a source of conflict?" was the topic, and a couple of dozen academics and journalists, drawn mainly from India and Pakistan, were present to discuss it.
A PowerPoint display told the story. The plain of the Indus, now the heartland of Pakistan, had once been pastoral and nomadic, irregularly irrigated by monsoon flooding. British engineers made this landscape perennially irrigated in the 19th century by building head-water works, weirs, barrages and canals – building that continued throughout the 20th century, so that today the land watered by the Indus and its tributaries forms the largest contiguous irrigation system in the world (still regulated across two countries by the Northern India Canal and Drainage Act of 1873). All very well, but it brought, said one speaker, "insoluble differences between upper and lower riparians" over the fair share of water – between the upstream river-bankers of Punjab and their downstream equivalents in Sind – which were exacerbated when India was partitioned and the new political boundary, based on religious identity, cut against the grain of the physical landscape. The rivers that feed the Indus rise mainly in India, or like the Indus itself (which starts in Tibet), flow though it before reaching Pakistan. The upper v lower riparian conflict became an international problem, which was solved for a time when the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, backed by the World Bank, gave India and Pakistan three tributaries each. But now that populations have swollen and water is either scarcer or comes in a flood, the lower riparians of Pakistan fear that their neighbours over the border will never give them an even break.
"A middle-class guy standing under a shower that's ended up as a drip will blame India for stealing his water," said a speaker from Pakistan. Elsewhere, among the rural and urban poor, shortages have more serious effects. Four-fifths of Pakistan is naturally arid and gets three-quarters of its water in three months of the year, and yet agriculture employs nearly half of Pakistan's workforce, and accounts for 90% of its exports. Another fact, by the same speaker: "In a year, more children will die in Karachi – or Delhi for that matter – for the lack of fresh, clean water than the thousands on both sides who died in all the India-Pakistan wars."
Nobody had a solution, beyond the need to turn the water problem into "a debate for civil society and the political leadership" and wrest control from the engineers and (in Pakistan) their friends in the military. Delegates from Pakistan readily agreed with delegates from India. I can't name names because our two-day conference was held under the Chatham House rule that forbids attribution, but even on subjects more flammable than water, it was rare to hear anyone who'd be harmed by attaching a statement to his or her name, whether it concerned Afghanistan, Kashmir or terrorism (this was a conference organised, after all, by the university's department of war studies). The exceptions came when somebody said Indians felt Pakistan needed to be treated like "an errant child" – though whether the speaker endorsed this view wasn't clear – and somebody else thought that now India was so powerful, prosperous and stable, it could afford to make a "bold and generous gesture" that would sap the hatred and suspicion of its old enemy.
Sweet reason mainly, and an anxiety to see the other side. But where were the mullahs, the generals, the politicians and the policy makers, or the man on the Lahore omnibus? Absent, every one. Our differences of national identity were submerged by what, as members of the well-intentioned, spectating classes, we held in common.
We watched the last few overs in the student bar. The Indians cheered. The Pakistanis, one of them keen enough to wear a cricket shirt in Islamic green, looked sad for a minute or two. A lot has been written about "cricket diplomacy" and the subcontinental wounds it might heal. On the other hand, by stressing and preserving national difference, what can it do for a problem like the Indus? It has seen cricket come and may well see it go, and it will depend for a solution on new ways of thinking about borders and nation states.