The initialling of the treaty, the circumstances that preceded, attended and followed it, its ratification followed by nearly immediate descent into disgrace and the limbo it has since lapsed into are part of a larger saga that has its roots in history. This saga spans several regime changes in Nepal, beginning with the Rana dispensation, followed by the brief democratic interlude that gave way to monarchic control through the Panchayat institutions and culminating eventually in multi-party democracy. It has ramifications that extend beyond hydraulic technicalities. It embraces political economy, diplomatic relations between India and Nepal, as well as larger questions of governance in South Asia. It concerns a riparian border and is therefore enmeshed as much in the skewed 'bilateral geo-politics' of India and Nepal as it is in the calculus of the hydro-technological establishments of both countries.
This being so, the ratification process of the Mahakali Treaty inevitably raises questions about the sociology of political and technical decision-making. It touches on the paradigms of development that dominate in both countries. It also points to the infirmities of the political arena, the subversion of stated principles and instituted protocols. In the case of Nepal, it draws attention to the gap between Parliament as the putative repository and guardian of the sovereign will, and Parliament as the venue for the final surrender of the sovereign will, through a forced consensus achieved by institutionalised corruption. It is above all a saga of gross dereliction by those invested with responsible office and a capitulation to the pressures of a more powerful neighbour.
Because of its multiple implications, a forensic scrutiny of the Mahakali episode will yield lessons of import not just to India and Nepal, but to South Asia and indeed to the entire developing world that has been subjected to 'maldevelopment' behind the smokescreen of 'development'. These lessons can be usefully applied to settling resource sharing disputes, to critiquing growth and development choices that unleash distortionary effects, to evolving appropriate principles of co-operative bilateralism and multilateralism, to deepening the basis of democracy in the interest of greater transparency in matters that impinge on the lives of large numbers of people, and to the exercise of reducing the institutional and economic imbalances that enable an oligarchy of interests to seize a nation and its assets. This narration of the events that went into the making of the impasse is intended to spur such forensic studies.
Chronology of events
The story begins with a border river. In 1816, by the Sugauli Treaty with which the British brought Nepal literally down to size following the 1814-16 war, the Mahakali River (called Sarada in India) was fixed as the western boundary between Nepal and British India. But the braided southern reaches of the river as it debouches onto the plains do not lend themselves to such neat demarcations. Neither the thalweg (the line of maximum depth in a meandering flow) nor the centre-line (the line of equidistance from both banks) principle could be satisfactorily used to define the boundary. Eventually the mid-stream of the river was taken as the boundary with reference pillars on either side. The shifting nature of the river's course led to a realignment of the boundary in 1912.
A border constituted by a commonly shared resource is one whose use must necessarily be based on bilateral agreement. But bilateralism by itself does not ensure an equitable arrangement. The Sarada Barrage, irrigating the western United Provinces (today's Uttar Pradesh), was based on the 1920 Sarada Treaty between the Rana regime and the British India government. This treaty transferred 4000 acres on the eastern bank of the Mahakali to India to build the Sarada Barrage in exchange for 4000 acres of forested land in areas further to the east as well as Rs. 50,000 compensation for Nepal. Furthermore, the treaty allowed Nepal to withdraw 4.25 cumecs (cubic metres per second) of water in the dry season and 13 cumecs in the wet season; the wet season flow could be increased to 28.34 cumecs if water were available. What India could withdraw out of the approximately 650 cumecs average annual flow of the Mahakali was not specified. In effect, it was limited only by the scale of the technology it was able to employ. Quite apart from the under-valuation of the Sarada Barrage's left (Nepali) bank, the question of where exactly the 4000 acres of land received from the British were located has not been satisfactorily answered at the public level in Nepal.