July 27, 2025 ☼ The Intersection ☼ geopolitics ☼ foreign policy ☼ national security
China's imperious conduct over dam construction leaves India with little choice but to hold hardline positions where it has leverage.
This is an unedited version of The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint.
China is moving ahead with its plans to build a hydroelectric project on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet. India should be concerned. But appropriately. Worries that Beijing will use water is a tool of coercion or weapon of war are likely overblown. What ought to concern us more are the environmental consequences in the short term, disaster risks over the longer term and what it tells us about how a more powerful China will conduct itself in the present and future.
This month, China’s top leaders announced the formation of the Yajiang Group, a new state enterprise charged with the construction of the project in Medog county, just north of the boundary with India’s Arunachal, at an estimated cost of $167 billion. Comprising of five dams, the Yajiang-Yaxia project will divert some of the water flow from the gorge where the Yarlung does a u-bend into a system of tunnels, to generate 60 GW of power, supplying electricity to 300 million people and creating 100,000 jobs for Han migrants into the Tibetan region. According to official Chinese reports, the project is “an important measure to implement the overall national security concept, the new energy security strategy and the Party’s strategy of governing Xizang (sic) in the new era.” While Beijing has advertised that the project is intended to sell electricity to external markets, it is revealing that national security is the first of the stated objectives.
After the Yarlung flows into Indian territory it is joined by other tributaries and becomes the mighty Brahmaputra. That is why many in India and Bangladesh where alarmed when talk about this project began around a decade ago. Since then several studies have shown that the Brahmaputra is really an Indian river, as it gathers most of its water after it enters Indian territory. Many of these studies are based on data that is a couple of decades old, but even so, it is sufficient to reassure us that China cannot choke the water supply and livelihoods of Northeastern India and Bangladesh. At worst it has the power to manipulate some of the water flow, but this is well within India’s capacity to manage and adapt to. Similarly, while water flow can be controlled in service of military objectives, battlefield scenarios where this can be employed along the Medog-Arunachal region are contrived and limited.
This does not mean India should ignore the threat. Rather, it means that New Delhi must strengthen the risk management approach that is already in play in the border regions. India’s response should be to build a system of dams, buffers and channels that can serve both economic and security functions. The timetable for this should be calibrated to observe Chinese actions and designed to manage the risks from them. Since Beijing has no interest in performing its customary duty under international law — affirmed by the International Court of Justice in its climate change verdict last week — to build in cooperation with its lower riparian neighbour, India’s infrastructure response must come from observation and analysis. The Indian government, especially the national security establishment, must invest in geospatial intelligence and analytical capacity to be able to do that well. The homegrown space and geospatial industries have an important role to play in this effort.
Even if the Chinese companies execute the project at the advertised quality and safety levels, it is inevitable that the construction phase will pollute the river and ecology of the region. We should expect higher levels of debris and sediment that could have long term consequences for the population of Arunachal Pradesh and other states downstream. This is the part Indian diplomacy should focus on: to get China to cooperate in a way that minimises permanent environmental damage and allows populations time and space to adapt to the changes. Beijing’s track record on sharing information is terrible. In the Mekong Valley arrangement in South East Asia, it shares basic hydrological information at a grand total of two times a year. Even so, considering the global climate situation and the fact that both Chinese and Indian people are vulnerable, it is worthwhile for diplomacy to pursue this angle. So too for disaster management.
The worst damage China is doing is to its own reputation and long-term geopolitical interests. It is well within its rights to build dams in its territory. But doing so without informing its neighbour is deliberate imperious behaviour. New Delhi cannot stop Beijing from building the dam, but where India has room — on the resolution of the Tibetan question, Taiwan, global trade and relations with the United States — it is bound to act in ways that respond to Beijing’s high-handedness. It will make a grand rapprochement between the two Asian giants that much harder. In the meantime, the Indian people and leaders will see the Yarlung dam as yet another unfriendly if not hostile act, and this will colour both popular perceptions and foreign policy. Unfortunate, but true.
Tailpiece: A senior member of Delhi’s strategic establishment once told me, “It is the Weak who protest loudly. The Strong do something about it.”
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