By Aleeha Ali
I fear there will be war.
I, from a continent away, think of my parent’s house. My family lives in a large city near the border. Once in 2019, our city announced a blackout in case of an airstrike. I remember looking at up the stars that became visible when the light pollution was gone and thinking about my mother’s house. It is made of red bricks, the stairs are lined with the portraits of elders staring out in sepia, mustachioed and turbaned. In a series of wedding photos, women with long dark plaits glint in gold and the jewel tones of silk, banarasi, and kimkhwab. I imagine how these faces would look lying between rubble, in ghostly echoes of ruin what befell our ancestors 78 years ago when the subcontinent was partitioned.
For the first time since partition, India has announced a suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty. On the other side of the border, where I am from, fellow Pakistanis hold their breath- and churn out memes, cutting the tension with humour that ironically reflects classic desi meme culture, including both Indian and Pakistani. Keyboard warriors joke about finally visiting the Taj Mahal and seeing Bollywood celebrities in a surreal and idealised picture of what collapsed borders might look like. I could get behind this if it weren’t a facade obscuring the reality of violences already occurred at the time of writing: a massacre in Pahalgam; people rapidly returning to their home countries based on nationality that doesn’t reflect cross-border mingling, often at the expense of families being separated; increased media furor; and military crackdowns especially in Indian-occupied Kashmir.
This essay is an emotion- oriented and mnemonic response to the bloodlust in the current mediascape. Emotions are political, as argued in the work of scholar Sara Ahmed. They constitute of cultural scripts, and as such are politically manipulated. This also an argument for harnessing a politics of emotion towards de-escalation, nonviolence and justice based on cooperation rather than retaliation. I touch upon entanglements through land and water. I think of Gaza, which remains a heartbreaking lesson in the violence that sustained dehumanisation, political othering, and resource acquisition can result in.
The collapse of the Indus Waters Treaty comes in the wake of a terrorist attack in Pahalgam in Indian-occupied Kashmir. The fatal attack targeted Hindus, mostly civilians, and has left shock and grief in its wake. Pakistanis, having seen such attacks towards their own people, do not find it difficult to empathise with the immense loss and emotional toll the families of the victims, as well as the Indian public. Indian politicians and media hold Pakistan squarely responsible, despite a lack of conclusive evidence. Instead of the neutral investigation that Pakistan proposes, the Indian government has adapted the tactic of scapegoat politics regarding Pakistan; the uneasily severed twin, the one true enemy to unite an India torn apart internally. No war with Pakistan can absolve India of the fascism and Islamophobia cultivated by the BJP, and the consequences of colonial oppression. And yet Pakistan manages to haunt the Indian political imagination, as a mirror-image ghost across the borderlands.
My heart twists in fear for my family, loved ones, and the minority groups in both India and Pakistan that would bear the brunt of violence if a war occurred. I cannot imagine the violence of Pahalgam multiplied and repeated many times over as justice.
Maybe choking Pakistan’s arterial rivers will quieten India’s internal turmoil? But you can’t kill ghosts, especially those you have a hand in creating.
The media froths at the mouth: vengeance, war, terrorists, wipe them out, incinerate the threat, the government is the people and the people are the government, infiltrate the borders– wait, they infiltrated our borders- border- whose border? Who started it? Started what? This is an example of ideological state apparatus at work.
The real water wars begin now, over the rivers shared between Pakistan and India. The rivers that flow into Pakistan (Ravi, Jhelum, Chenab, Sutlej) originate in India and the Indus, birther of civilizations, yawns open its lake-mouth in Tibet and gains its full might in the plains of Sindh. It is hard to imagine Pakistan and India as separate when the geography, history, and people are meshed. I imagine a tapestry pulled apart, held by the threads of the rivers. The metaphor of conjoined twins is popular for a reason, echoed from political commentary to Salman Rushdie’s magical realism to Yusra Amjad’s poetry:
“In the absence of a flag, a faith, a language
we would come to share poison instead”
Amjed’s verses talk about the choking winter smog that moves between Delhi and Lahore, and harkens to other contagions: nationalism, pseudo-democracies, neo-colonialism, collective punishment and a post-colonial caesarean scar that severs not just topography but also land stewardship.
When I began to read the newspapers a decade ago, there was a headline that branded itself into my consciousness: Pakistan expected to be in drought by 2025.
I told this to my father. Abbu had agricultural lands to irrigate. He listened seriously, the worry crawling across his face in channels. Abbu had memories of too much water, never too little. In the 80s, the Ravi had turned course and flooded his ancestral village.
The river destroyed everything that it had once nurtured: the crops, the trees, the mud-brick houses and havelis. The population of Thatta scattered and rebuilt a new village, and I grew up with elders reminiscing about the strange rage of the river. They had resigned themselves to its will.
I have to wonder where the will of the rivers is now, when greedy men fight to siphon, dam, and redirect them. This wish, of course, comes from a woman who would rather grieve nature’s course than the man-made devastation of war.
Diverge as we may, our wellsprings are the same.
To read the entire blog see: Water Politic: reflections on potential Pakistan-India conflict
Aleeha Ali is a PhD student at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology.