China's Escalating Water War

On top of other asymmetric tactics, Brahmaputra mega-project is a new threat India faces

- Brahma Chellaney

China’s multi-pronged unconventional war against India has ranged from cyberattacks on critical infrastructure and furtive territorial encroachments to strategic information warfare and an ongoing village building drive to populate uninhabited but disputed borderlands. Water wars are a key component of such warfare because they allow China to leverage its upstream Tibet-centred power over the most essential natural resource.

China knows its troops cannot fight and win decisively against the battle-hardened Indian military on a force-on-force basis, as the Galwan valley clashes underscored. So, to contain India, it has been applying asymmetric warfare techniques to attack India’s weak points, in keeping with what Sun Tzu said: “All warfare is based on deception.”

India, instead of looking at China’s new face of war in totality and devising a comprehensive and proactive counterstrategy, has brought its security under increasing pressure through a disjointed and fragmented approach. Such is the absence of long-term strategic thinking and planning that, each time China opens a new front or pressure point, India searches for a stopgap or, worse still, seeks to paper over its weak spot.

China’s newly approved Brahmaputra mega-project, which will dwarf its Three Gorges Dam by generating almost three times more electricity, should shake India out of its ad hoc, compartmentalized approach to Chinese aggression. The project is to harness the force of a nearly 3,000 meter drop in the Brahmaputra’s height when the river, just before entering India, takes a U-turn around the Himalayas to form the world’s longest and steepest canyon. By setting out to dam the Brahmaputra there, China is seeking to effectively weaponize water against India.