A WATERSHED ON THE MAHAKALI

When Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee and his Nepali counterpart, Prakash Chandra Lohani, put their signature on a treaty for the integrated development of the Mahakali river, which runs along Nepal´s western border, it seemed that two unexpected advances had taken place, one relating to Nepal´s domestic politics, and the other on resource sharing between two South Asians.

Firstly, there was the unbelievable unanimity among the major political parties in Nepal, those in the ruling coalition as well as the main communist opposition, that this was the right thing to do. It came as a welcome departure for a country where India-bashing on river projects has for decades been the feeding trough on which the political opposition has fattened, with the communists having been the best at it.

An agreement as far-reaching as this, dealing with the entire flow of the mighty Mahakali, was packaged and delivered within a few hours of negotiation. That the Left Opposition held a National Executive meeting the next day to "welcome" the accord rather than condemn it for populist mileage, must mean that political evolution since the dawn of democracy in 1990 has been much faster than one had been led to believe from the bellicosity of the national political scene just a few months before.

Secondly, with the Cauvery dispute still making the headlines from India´s south, and Narmada and Tehri questioned by outraged activists, it seemed a wonder that Nepal and India could, like responsible adults, agree on the joint development of a river to the benefit of both. When it seemed that you could not utter the words "high dam" without having all sorts of insults and projectiles hurled at you nationally and internationally, here was an agreement signed and delivered to build the highest rock-filled dam in the Himalaya, and the third-highest on earth.

Was a new era of infrastructure-building on behalf of South Asia´s poor finally beginning? Were bilateral agreements on water possible, after all? Had the Indian Government found a formula to appease industrialising Uttar Pradesh´s runaway thirst for electrical power? And had those uncompromising wild-eyed activists of Tehri finally been sidelined, simply by doing a deal with a neighbour?

In Nepal, the questions that should have been asked were swept away by media hype in which all partisan tabloids partook. Mahakali, said Nepal´s water resources minister, was a "watershed" in Nepal´s internal affairs and in its dealings with India.

The two sides are committed to complete the Detailed Project Report within six months after the treaty comes into effect, arrange financing within the subsequent year, and complete construction of the 315 m high dam, to supply energy (from an installed capacity of 6480 megawatts) to the grid of the two countries by 2003. The last Indo-Nepal cooperative venture in power generation was the Devighat project on the Trisuli, which produces only 14 megawatts.

What seems to have happened across the negotiating table at Shital Niwas, the seat of Kathmandu´s Foreign Ministry, was that India managed to persuade Nepal to accept an "integrated" package that linked the minor Tanakpur project that lies downstream with the gigantic Pancheswar project upstream. The Nepali strategy had been to delink the two, in order to gain maximum advantage from the Pancheswar project. With India very keen to have the project, Nepal had been in a position to parlay it for diplomatic advantage elsewhere, which it has now lost.

What Mr Mukherjee did was to be seen to have magnanimously more than doubled Nepal´s largesse from Tanakpur (which has been a major irritant in domestic Nepali politics since 1991), providing 70 million units of electricity and 300 cusecs of water. While doing so, however, he managed to rope in an agreement for the development of a project that is incomparably larger in comparison. In essence, Mr Mukherjee exploited a political lapse among Nepali parties which had made a nationalistic mountain out of a molehill of a project (Tanakpur), and made away with a much greater prize.

Nepal´s intelligentsia and media, which might have questioned the deal, did not because they are not given to reading the fine print. The Left Opposition, incredibly (from its past performance), saw fit to keep shut. The main reason seems to have been that, during its period in government, the communist leaders realised that there could be no politics in Nepal without a minimum level of understanding with the powers-that-be in New Delhi. Given that the Indian government wanted the Pancheswar agreement so badly (to provide electricity for the industrialising Hindi heartland of Uttar Pradesh, and, perhaps, employment in the agitated hills of Uttarakhand), the Left of Nepal seems to have decided to fall in line with the coalition government of Prime Minister Deuba.

It will now be absorbing to see how the opponents of the Tehri project in Uttarakhand countenance this new project. The Pancheswar dam site is on the Kumaon-Darchula frontier, 200 km from the site of the Tehri dam on the Bhagirathi, which will be a 260-m high rock-fill dam producing 2000 megawatts.

Nepal has never gone in for high dams before, and the World Bank-proposed Arun-3 project, which was shot down by activists on economic grounds, was a run-of-river scheme that had no significant high dam or reservoir. Pancheswar will have both, and large.