India deploys extra forces after protests over dam on Chinese border escalate

GUWAHATI: India has deployed hundreds of additional security personnel in its remote northeast, authorities said on Tuesday, after youth protesters clashed with police last week over a plan to build a mega-dam to counter a Chinese hydropower project upstream.

Protests in Arunachal Pradesh’s Siang Valley, which borders Tibet, turned violent last week, triggering clashes with police, who made at least 21 arrests.

Police fired tear gas shells, while youth protesters pelted stones and set fire to a police station and an office of the state-owned National Hydroelectric Power Corporation, authorities said.

“Forces are being increased in the places where it is required. We do not want any law and order problem,” SD Singh Jamwal, police chief of Arunachal Pradesh, told Reuters.

Sporadic protests have taken place in the Siang Valley in the last two years, the location of the proposed 11,200-megawatt Siang Upper Multipurpose Project, which will be developed by state-run National Hydroelectric Power Corporation.

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Villagers who oppose the project fear that the dam would submerge ancestral villages belonging to the Adi tribe.

“We will keep opposing this dam till they cancel it. If it is constructed, 27 of our ancestral villages will be completely submerged. At least 40 or 50 more will be affected,” Gegong Jijong of the Siang Indigenous Farmers’ Forum told Reuters.

The Siang river flows into Arunachal Pradesh from Tibet, where it is known as the Yarlung Zangbo. China announced plans in December 2024 to build the world’s largest hydropower dam upstream, triggering fears in New Delhi that its longtime strategic rival could weaponise its control of the river.

China claims Arunachal Pradesh, which it calls Zangnan, as part of southern Tibet. India says the state is an integral and inalienable part of its territory.

Arunachal Pradesh’s chief minister, a member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, has called the Chinese project an existential threat and said the government would protect national interests while respecting the rights and aspirations of the people of Siang Valley.