Water as Weapon

A scene from Kerala

The theme chosen for their monthly blog hop by friends Manali Desai and Sukaina Majeed is water, particularly because March 22 is World Water Day. It is of vital importance to discuss the global water crisis because as the motto of Delhi Jal Board says: Jal hi Jeevan hai, Water is Life.

The crisis is only going to become more and more acute as we move on. With a global population clocking 8.5 billion by 2030, the demand for fresh water will rise sharply, especially in urban areas. The climate change, particularly rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, and erratic rainfall patterns, will add significantly to the problem. Ground water is getting depleted in many countries.

Consequently, water is likely to be a strategic asset in the near future. Powerful individuals, corporations, and nations may use it as a weapon in several ways. Rivers can be blocked with dams and water supply to neighbouring nations can be manipulated. Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam on the Nile has heightened tensions between Egypt and Sudan. The Indus Water Treaty between India and Pakistan remains fragile, with both sides occasionally threatening to alter water flow. How will the new dam proposed to be built in China across the Brahmaputra affect India and Bangladesh, particularly when a conflict arises between the concerned nations?

Large corporations and powerful individuals may acquire water rights, turning access to clean water into a privilege rather than a basic right. Given the natural human greed and selfishness, the poor and the marginalised may be left to die without water and the rich and the powerful will make some new ideology to justify the situation.

Our own governments may use water as a weapon against us. Water supplies may be cut off to suppress dissent. Right now, India has a government which arrests people, blocks websites, and raids offices to eliminate critics, cartoonists, and even stand-up comics.  Imagine water becoming a weapon in the hands of such a government. Indians have every reason to be scared of their PM’s plan to connect all major rivers through a network of canals and reservoirs. Syria and Yemen are already using water as a weapon against their people. 

The stream that borders our ancestral land after a rain

Have you ever experienced the use of water as a weapon personally? I have. On two occasions. 

The first was when I was in Shillong, the only time when I was important enough to be hated by a large number of people, to borrow Orwell’s famous line. I had certain personal idiosyncrasies which some Catholic missionary decided to set right. I was on the way to hell, he diagnosed. My soul stood in dire need of redemption. He got almost the whole town of Shillong to treat me like a clown in a gigantic circus. Only the motley was missing. One of their chief strategies was to cut off my water supply. I carried water from a long distance, along the rugged mountain trails, for about five years. For more details, you may read my memoir: Autumn Shadows.

Water was their best weapon against me. Later in Delhi, a colleague of mine, by sheer slip of tongue, referred to that missionary as my ‘godfather.’ Slip of tongue, because I wasn’t ever supposed to get to know anything about the whole game. But truth has a way of getting out of its prison once in a while.  I liked that epithet anyway: godfather. Like Vito Corleone in a white cassock.

But I didn’t surrender. I have compared myself to Sisyphus in my memoir. Sisyphus rolled his rock uphill with an indomitable spirit which was my inspiration though my muscles were flagging. Let them destroy me, but I won’t let them defeat me: I told myself every time I was tempted to put down the two buckets of water on my way from the public water source to my kitchen.

Finally, I had no choice but leave Shillong. Defeated by water!

If Shillong used water as a weapon against me personally, Delhi used it against a whole community. It was in Sawan Public School, a residential school that housed some 600 people including the entire staff from principal to gardener and the waiter to the doctor. The school was handed over by its senile and devout founder to a religious organisation called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB], which was known for encroaching forest lands and even private lands illegally. The old man was seeking eternal redemption for his soul this way.

RSSB employed a pair of the shrewdest women on earth to get the school shut down permanently so that they could convert the 20-odd acres of land into parking lot for the thousands of devotees who came to attend quarterly spiritual gatherings called Satsang. They used all strategies that the most perverted feminine imaginations could conjure up and succeeded in the end to get everyone out of the school. One of their final strategies was to cut off the water supply to the last lingering few inmates. My memoir, again, has the details.

Water as weapon. Since I was a target of that weapon for a long period of my life, I know the power of that weapon. Now I live in a village in Kerala where godfathers haven’t reached. It won’t be easy for them to reach either. But my personal access to water is not the issue here. It is the world’s access to clean water that matters and that deserves grave attention. 

With a friend on the bank of the river through my village

PS. This post is a part of ‘H2OhSnap Blog Hop’ hosted by Manali Desai and Sukaina Majeed under #EveryConversationMatters