Elusive consensus

Try as they might, the authorities are still chasing the will-o'-the-wisp of consensus on dams and water storages. It is instructive how, despite being master of all he surveys, even President General Pervez Musharraf is finding it difficult to have his way on this issue. For example, when the President tried to take advantage of a public rally organised for him by the ruling coalition partner, the PPP, in Nowshera the other day, his advocacy of the Kalabagh Dam not only failed to impress the audience, it even aroused all the latent opposition to the idea.
For one, it seemed the President had been wrongly briefed about the benefits of a canal to irrigate lands in Nowshera, a city in the forefront of opposition to the Kalabagh Dam in NWFP because of its residents' fears of the town being drowned by Kalabagh's lake.
The next day, there was embarrassment all round when the non-existent canal had to be denied. Second, it seemed the President had failed to take even the main organiser of the rally, Federal Minister Aftab Sherpao, into confidence regarding his intention to raise the Kalabagh Dam in his speech at the rally. Even while the President was speaking, the audience was treated to the spectacle of the organisers of the rally gesturing emphatically from behind the dais that they rejected the Kalabagh Dam.
If this was not bad enough, there was further negative news to follow. The Technical Committee addressing the issue of big dams has asked for and received an extension of four months to its deadline for coming to any final conclusion. The Technical Committee still feels hamstrung by its inability to pin down, from the contradictory data available with different line organisations involved with irrigation, the actual total water availability.
It goes without saying that no planning worth the name can be carried out without first settling this basic parameter. Even otherwise, the whole debate about big dams and their sequencing is still bogged down in contradictory advice from disparate quarters concerning Kalabagh, Bhasha and Skardu as possible locations for the first big dam. Whether all this will be sorted out even in the extended timeframe available to the Technical Committee, cannot be predicted with confidence.
But the real reasons for the lack of consensus, nay mistrust that exists about any new big dams, has more to do with the track record of bad faith exhibited repeatedly by the Centre and the upper riparian province, Punjab, on water sharing and the accords that govern it.
The Jehlum Link Canal proved that Punjab and the Centre's assurances that it would only off-take excess water during peak flooding seasons were only a smokescreen for converting the Canal into a perennial stream, thereby disadvantaging the lower riparian province, Sindh.
The opposition to the Thal Canal can be traced directly to this negative past experience. Sindh still waits for the implementation of the relevant clause of the 1991 Water Accord to allow an interim 10 MAF of flows below Kotri pending studies on the need for such flows to keep the sea from encroaching on the Indus Delta.
Almost the entire agriculture, flora, fauna and ecology of the delta have been affected by the fact that not a trickle has flowed south of Kotri for many years. The bed of the once mighty Indus below Kotri resembles nothing more than a desert.
It is interesting to note that the assurance being held out now by the Centre of constitutional guarantees for lower riparian rights has failed to impress. The reasons for scepticism on this account are not hard to find. The Constitution, that much abused document, no longer inspires any confidence that bad faith and even violations of solemn undertakings can be avoided.
The courts having failed to uphold the Constitution's provisions in numerous cases of military take-overs, including the last one in 1999, by falling back on the notorious doctrine of necessity, there are few takers for the notion that the courts could be relied upon to ensure that no violations of solemn agreements on water sharing would take place.
After this brief survey, it seems obvious that if the idea of big dams and water storages is to regain currency through a consensus, the authorities will first have to address the sense of wrong and deprivation from which the smaller provinces suffer.
That implies honest implementation of all past agreements, including the 1991 Water Accord, for some time in order to re-establish the lost trust between the federating units on this score. Perhaps when good faith and adherence to solemn agreements has been demonstrated in practice for some time, a modicum of that lost trust may return, providing a more fertile soil for efforts to forge a long elusive national consensus on water sharing and storages.