Mae Khong and Ma Ganga: The Geopolitics of Sacred Waters

China’s dams on the Mekong mirror its grip on the Brahmaputra, forcing India into a battle of waters.

Mekong is the mighty river that rises in Tibet, flows through the Mainland South-East Asia (MSEA), and supports the livelihood of 70 million people from the five nations that constitute the sub-region. It is larger than India’s Ganga, around 2000 kms longer, and ranks as the third largest of Asia, Ganga being the eleventh. The difference lies also in the fact that Mekong has been a transnational river throughout, whereas Ganga acquired her transnational character only in 1947, through the accident of the partition of India, crossing into today’s Bangladesh. This notwithstanding, both these rivers have traditionally been considered as the lifelines in their respective territories.

Rivers have traditionally been referred to as mothers in India, and Ganga especially has acquired a divine status with a place in the scriptures, leading many to refer to her as ‘Ma (mother) Ganga’ in normal parlance. It’s interesting to know that even Mekong derives her name from Thai and Lao words ‘Mae Khong’ meaning ‘Mother River’; the proximity between ‘Ma’ and ‘Mae’, in terms of their similar sound and same meaning, may well be stemming from the common Indic heritage of both the lands across the Bay of Bengal.

Strategic Chokepoints

Since Tibet’s annexation by China in 1950s, former’s rivers like the one flowing in India as Brahmaputra and another in MSEA as Mekong, are under the latter’s control. Brahmaputra has recently been under threat thanks to China’s building a massive dam upstream, installed with the highest hydropower capacity in the world, certified by foreign experts as potential choke-point for India’s economy.  Similarly, Mekong has been under serious threat for around last quarter century or so, from various angles emanating from the same root cause of China’s dam-building programme, undertaken since the 1980s. This threat entails consistently declining downstream flow of the water over the years, causing the worst drought in the living memory of people in 2016, apart from causing lesser agricultural produce and drastically reduced fish-catch. The worst about Mekong was however reported last year – poisonous water pollution, caused by China-backed unsafe rare-earths mining in eastern Myanmar.  

Being the immediate neighbour in the north of four out of the five MSEA nations, China has been spreading its wings southwards consistently over last three decades, in various ways. While China’s aggression in the South China Sea is well known and extensively discussed globally, its similar moves in the Mekong-river and its vicinity are lesser discussed. But the result is just the same – effectively silencing the criticism and the local resistance by ‘winning over’ the concerned gradually. It has been doing so by pulling various strings – chiefly though coercive economic maneuvers, infrastructural infusion, self-initiated joint patrols etc., supported ably on ground not only by the diaspora well-settled for centuries but also by the ever-expanding network of Chinese nationals of various hues, entering MSEA either legally or illegally and settling happily thereafter. These points of Chinese strength combine effectively with a conducive situation obtaining locally – pathetically fragile and disorganized state of Myanmar; one of the poorest of the world, and thus the weakest state of Laos; openly pro-China Cambodia, even at the cost of the regional or national interests; heavy and defining inroads made by people of Chinese ancestry in the socio-political power structures of Thailand. The sole potential for resistance lies with Vietnam, but who, pitted singularly, is not able to impact anything meaningfully.

Support System

This scenario leaves out a vacuum which needs to be filled in by a good support system. Then the question arises - who could that be? Can that be the ASEAN, a collective of the same five MSEA states plus the other five of the maritime sub-region, along with the recent weaker entrant Timor Leste? That’s simply out of question, as the hopelessness about the abilities of ASEAN to create a deterrence has long been laid bare in the context of the South China Sea and its disputes. The whole situation has turned even more precarious in the light of the recently minted strategy of the US to focus on own backyard of Latin America, thus apparently ceding the concerns of the Southeast Asian region to China’s ‘care’.

In that case, it will have to be India, undoubtedly. Vajpayee government, perhaps gauging this situation, established Mekong-Ganga Cooperation (MGC) initiative in 2000, which eventually encompassed within its ambit India’s cooperation with all the five MSEA nations in sectors, from agriculture to culture and from tourism to technology, which was a step in the right direction. Living up to its name, it did include water-resource management too, as one of the focused sectors of cooperation. The accomplishments so far may probably need a critical attention. During the total 25 years of its existence, MGC has had only 12 ministerial meetings in place of the supposedly at least 24, making an exception for 2020 for the pandemic outbreak. If this could be taken as an indicator about the overall progress, India would certainly need to accelerate its pace to be able to match at least a few of the Chinese.

India has recently launched dam-building on Brahmaputra in Arunachal Pradesh, to counter the potentially dangerous impact of China’s dam-building upstream. Can India then do something similar, though not exactly like that, or better, to help Mekong too? It can then certainly rest assured for being blessed by both the mothers – Ma Ganga as well as Mae Khong!

(The writer is a research scholar in international relations. Views personal.)