 Fel dda, ddoddi nhw. Fel ddoddi nhw. Rydyn ni'n oedden nhw, Felidwch yn ddim yn ddoddi'n ddechrau i'w'r hyn yn fawr i'r ymddangosol. Rydyn ni'n oedden nhw. Rydyn ni'n oedden nhw'n ddoddi nhw, Felidwch yn ddoddi nhw, o'r bobl yn y hwnnw, yn y ddau'r hyn ymddangosol, ac mae'n gweithio ddoddi'n ddoddi'n ddoddi nhw'n ddoddi nhw, dwi'n ddoddi nhw'n ddoddi nhw, ac yn gallu i'r bydd ymlaes i'r hyn. I rydyn nhw'n credu ym mwyn i'r cynnwys hwn ymlaes i'r hyn o'r cyflog. Rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r bethau yn ei wneud hynny, ac mae'n ddweud i'r byddol yn ei wneud yn cael ei ystyried i'r bydd o'n cyddoedd. Ond mae'n dweud i'r bydd o'r cyflog i'r bydd yn ymlaes i'r bydd. I'm going to talk a little bit about the topic of my second book, but mainly I'll leave this to Marjad. I'm going to talk more about the topic of my first book, which was about barrage irrigation in Sindh, in southern Pakistan. Particularly about the connections between the colonial state as an irrigating hydraulic power and the post-colonial state. I'm thinking about how much actually changed in 1947 with what was ostensibly decolonisation through partition. And just to begin with my conclusions in case I run out of time, because I'm really going to try and cap myself for 15 minutes. So here they are in case we get a bit lost later. So the first thing I want to suggest is that the very idea of natural resources is colonial. Seeing nature as a resource as Heidegger's Standing Reserve implies an attempt to extract value to manipulate landscapes in environmental systems. And as we will see in this context, in the imperial context, very much also about manipulating people. So what we're looking at here is not just extracting value, but also changing social and environmental systems. I'll also suggest, with very little evidence, because I'm not actually going to talk about small-scale stuff at all, but it's just a thought to have out there. That I think the lesson of tracing the way that major infrastructure projects developed between the colonial and post-colonial states in Pakistan, and you can do the same for India, demonstrates that it's almost impossible to dissociate these kinds of big dam projects, or big barrage projects, from those kinds of power imbalances and reshapings of society and environment that colonial hydrology was all about. So just to start with a very brief definition, I'm putting this up for convenience sake. Colonial hydrology is a phrase coined by Rohan D'Souza, the famous Indian environmental historian, in about 2006, I think this article came out, which summed up the approach of various scholars to what water governance meant under the colonial British in India in South Asia. D'Souza argued that although there were some continuity of traditional irrigation systems, and also I point out that the British canal systems in places, especially like Sind, built on their predecessors canal systems, the ambition, the scope, the scale and the impacts of colonial irrigation was profound enough and different enough to deserve its own term, colonial hydrology. So we're looking at a combination of technology which is even new or solid as new, market-oriented cropping, so this is really important. It's also a capitalist endeavour. Efforts towards increased social control over irrigators and over agriculturalists and the institutional reforming of governance. So particularly a shift from the revenue department in colonial Indian terms towards the technical departments, the public works department, and that's mainly drawn from ideas by David Gilmartin from the early 90s. And although this work is now pretty old and well-established, I still think it's a useful starting point for thinking because I don't think anyone, any of the many people who work on water history in South Asia today have really seriously challenged this framework. I'm going to talk very briefly, you'll be pleased to hear, about three barajdans which were constructed in Sind in southern Pakistan, what is now southern Pakistan, between the 1930s and the 1960s. The first of these was completed in 1932 and was a straightforwardly colonial project several years before partition and decolonisation. The second two, the Ghulam Ahmad barajd down towards the delta and the Guddu barajd up there at the top, were built and completed during the post-colonial period but based on colonial plans. All of these projects I argued in my first book and would continue to stand by the argument today were at least partly responses to a crisis of legitimacy that the late colonial and early post-colonial states faced. So this was in the face of increasing nationalism calls for representative government. The state fell back on the claim to logistic expertise and the ability to manipulate environmental flows such as water resources as a stand-in for meaningful participatory governance. So let's take this first barajd, the Saka barajd. The political aim of this was to effectively stabilise the agricultural classes in Sind and particularly to support the zamindarts who the British were worried were being undermined by Hindu moneylenders bundlers. And the commissioner in Sind stated this very clearly in 1920 when he was writing in support of the barajd project up to London to try and get it authorised by the Secretary of State for India, which took about a decade. So as usual, government works very slowly. Even Brexit has taken rather longer than the current Prime Minister thought it might. I won't read this out here because I'm sure you can read it yourself, but effectively the idea here was that development was taking place across India. Sind needed to be included in order for the British to maintain the loyalty of their key collaborators in the province. But the barajd was also intended to have sweeping effects on the landscape and on the social systems of Sind as well. Sind was thought of as basically a wasteland, a sparsely populated desert which only needed the introduction of regular water supplies and also of some good work discipline in order to be one of the bread baskets of India to be a productive agricultural zone. And this is just one example from reams and reams of colonial discourse which put forward this idea that the barajd was going to be transformative in Sind. It would transform the people and it would transform the landscape. Another wonderful quote which I didn't quite include was that the dam will address the traditional problem in Sind which is the agriculturalist is only interested in working so long as it is required to keep his hooker filled with tobacco. Fast-forward a couple of decades after independence and two new barajd dams were constructed at Khotri, the Gula Mohamed barajd in a gudu up in North Sind. Both of these were a little smaller than the Saka barajd but they were accompanied by remarkably similar rhetoric. Only now it was framed as a question of nation building, of demonstrating the worth and validity of the Pakistani nation rather than as an imperialist project. So Iskandar Mirza, the president in 1957 shortly before he launched a coup which resulted in the first military takeover of Pakistan, argued for the importance of engineers as nation builders. In other words constructing state power would be an act in concrete as well as an act of bringing together different communities, writing the constitution which had also just been passed by 1957. By the way I'm assuming that people in this room have quite a lot of background knowledge about modern South Asian history but please give me a wave if I'm skipping over things that need to be covered. All of these barajd dams had significant effects on the demography of Sind as well. One of the concerns that the colonial government had in Sind and which was maintained by the post-colonial government was that the province was underpopulated, that there was not a sufficient labour force to work the new agricultural opportunities that the dams would open up. I keep saying dams, technically they're barajers so please forgive me for that. This meant that they looked outside the province to bring in cultivators, particularly to Punjab which in the case of the Sakhar baraj was a very open policy. The colonial administrators were explicit about the fact that they thought Punjabis were loyal, hard working and overall ready for modernity unlike the Sindis who were supposedly backwards, fickle and lazy. So they imported Punjabis en masse to settle the baraj irrigation zone. It's been much more difficult to get proper figures out of the post-colonial government and there was certainly a bit more tact around the way it was phrased but it seems that a lot of the land was allocated to retired army personnel which is likely to mean Punjabis and Pashtuns so probably not Sindis. Really annoyingly an online PhD fieldwork in Sindas I was unable to find anyone who could point to any Punjabis in Sind and say right this is where the people who came over to do the baraj cultivation work so either they left again or they kind of integrated and lost that separate identity. So the continuity between in the rhetoric, the aims and the methods of colonial and post-colonial irrigation projects is one way that colonial hydrology remained alive in Pakistan after independence. But I also want to put forward what may be a slightly more controversial point which is to see Pakistan's major dam project in Azad Kashmir in the 1950s and 60s as an exercise in colonial power. As you all probably know Kashmir was contested between India and Pakistan after independence. Pakistan did not formally claim sovereignty over Kashmir merely that Kashmir should be an independent country with Pakistani support. In practice the ministry of Kashmir affairs based in Karachi later in Islamabad played a major role in staffing the civil service in Azad Kashmir and tended to intervene quite heavily in politics. One of the projects that the West Pakistan authorities worked at the Water and Power Development Authority executed was this dam, the Mangladam in Mirpur just on the border between Punjab and Kashmir. This prompted quite a lot of discontent among the inhabitants of Mirpur town. Roughly 90,000 people in the end were displaced by this project and there was a series of protest meetings through the late 1950s which were eventually successfully suppressed by the authorities, the Azad Kashmir and Pakistan authorities. This construction of the dam, which was going to be a really important part of the new Pakistani water supply system, which was designed to meet the apparent threat coming down from India in the context of the Indus dispute, which Mangladam will fill you in on, was framed again as a question of nation building, as a way of literally joining Azad Kashmir to West Pakistan through the irrigation system. And again, just as one example of the voluminous rhetoric that surrounded this project, the chief engineer of the Mangladam paid glowing tribute to the people of Azad Kashmir who had sacrificed everything for the good of the nation. And this kind of language continues right through the 60s and even into the 70s when under Zulfikar Ali Buto, the cabinet was still discussing the question of properly compensating the displaced Mirpuris in recognition of their sacrifice for the good of the nation. But being an environmental historian, I don't want to give the impression that colonial hydrology and post-colonial hydrology was merely an exercise in the state exerting total power and simply manipulating the people or the natural environment. These complex systems could not really be overwhelmed and simply put to use in the way that water planners might have wanted. And actually, I wouldn't suggest that water development in South Asia has ever been that kind of attempt to really entirely capture a landscape people and an ecosystem that James Scott famously described in his work on high modernism in saying like a state. Games were always much more limited. But even in the context of an attempt merely to intervene in the water supply system in order to reward some collaborators and produce more and more profitable cash crops, nature fought back, if you will. So by the mid-1960s, coming back downstream to Sins, at the same time that the Gudubarat was being completed, waterlogging, drainage and salinity became the key agricultural problem in southern Pakistan and in large parts of Punjab as well. And President Ayub Khan, who declared himself president after launching his military coup in 1958, by the 60s was describing the war on salinity and on soil degradation as a battle for survival. So, again, framing this kind of humans versus nature and particularly the state versus nature in exactly the same kinds of militaristic terms that the colonial and post-colonial state had used for irrigation. But inverting the relationship between humans and a beneficent nature that just needed a bit of water and a bit of work to yield its bounty and a threatening nature that was in the business of putting humans out of business. And this is why, in a nutshell, I'm arguing that decolonial resources governments would need to be small in scale. The logic, the rhetoric and the aims of these kinds of very large infrastructure projects tend to cause a power imbalance, partly because they're located in specific places and I suspect Marjad might talk about that a little bit more, but I'd be happy to chat about it in the Q&A at the end. And partly because the ways of thinking that dominated the water bureaucracy in Pakistan, and you could say the same for India after independence, remained rooted in these colonial models of what irrigation development was supposed to be doing and why it was necessary and valuable. I'll leave it there. Over to Marjad. I don't have slides, but I'll just talk and hopefully that will be enough to keep you interested. So, first of all, thanks for the invitation to speak and thank you for the very kind introduction as well to Dan. It's been great having someone to talk to over the years working on something very related. So, I will say I'm very happy to see such a big turnout. I think I was going by King's standards, so there wouldn't have been that many people if I were at King's, but it'll teach me to underestimate the engagement of SOAS in the future. So, very nice to see you all here. Okay, so much of what I'm going to mention here will be a review for many of you in the room, I imagine. But what I'm going to try to do is to tease out some of the larger themes and maybe end up with a bit of a discussion or a bit of a question on what we even mean when we say decolonizing. Because I'm sure you've noticed this concept has spread like wildfire. Universities are stumbling over themselves to fund projects, to be colonial in front of it, which should make us wary. So, I want to sort of situate our own intellectual moment a bit at the end and say why this word has kind of been picked up, not only from bottom up, but increasingly from top down as well. So, I think that something, for those of us who see some radical potential in this idea of decolonizing, it's important I think to be aware of the moment we're in where this word is being used a lot. And I say this as someone who just got funding to do something on decolonizing political economy myself. So, the old academics trick of being reflexive. So, I'll begin upstream from where Dan took us and send, which is to the province of Punjab. And for those of you may be familiar with Pakistani history and politics, you know that Punjab is historically the dominant province. And this one story would have it, that this begins with the canal colonization and the railroadization of Punjab under the British Empire in the late 19th century. And it's actually Imran Ali's classic book on this topic that was kind of my introduction to this field of agrarian history of Punjab. And if you haven't read it, it's the place to begin, I would say, in this area. And one of the themes that I want to draw through, because I'm going to talk about canal colonization in Punjab, the geopolitical context of the Indus Water Treaty. And in my opinion, more importantly, the Indus Basin project, which was the suite of infrastructural projects that were funded alongside the Indus Water Treaty. A little bit about the colonial present on the Indus, so relationships between states and nominally citizens that look like colonialism. A little bit about the dispossessed in the sense of colonial present again and how this relates to environment and water. This has to do with livelihood struggles and the people in the room who can speak to that much better than I can, but I'll just gesture at these concerns. And then finally end up on a little bit about what it means to decolonize natural resource governance. And maybe I'll throw out a couple of polemical points there about small scale and state power and attitudes towards the state. And the theme that I want to kind of string through this all is that of technocracy. So I think in standard, critical at least, box on the history and social science, the two major sources of power are often landlord power and military power. And those are really important points of analysis and stories to tell, but I'm going to bring in a third strand here, which we saw a lot of evidence in dance talk as well, all the quotes of the engineers, which is the power of technocracy. The legitimacy to rule based on superior knowledge or better knowledge. So along with the canal colonization of the Punjab, which was an agricultural settling and which was a freezing and assigning of private property rights, which whenever you assign property rights, you're dispossessing as well. So there was a mass dispossession of the, if you like, indigenous people who lived in this area before the pastoral tribes, and many migrants coming from, again, migration of Punjabis, coming from East Punjab at the time, which was described as overcrowded. So these new colonies were formed. And actually my family was a part of that migration as well in the early 20th centuries, moving from Jolander to Okara. So it's kind of a story that's in my family. And the power, what I want to emphasize, not only the dispossession and the freezing of property rights, which is very clearly a colonial activity, but also the power of irrigation officials in these canal colonies. The irrigation and drainage act of 1867 has been amended various times, most lately in 2016. But what this act does is it actually gives a lot of power to the irrigation and canal officers. To the point where there was, if you had a dispute concerning canal water, you wouldn't take it to a civil court, you would take it to the canal irrigation officer, and they had magisterial powers to which there was no appeal. So if you can imagine a system of law which is rooted somehow in British common law tradition, but then it takes the authoritarian turn in the colonial context, and a lot of power is actually vested in the irrigation canal officers, and this influence lasts up to the current day, right? And this is also, Talbad has called this the Punjab School of Administration, very top-down, very authoritarian, and I mean that's colonial rule in general, but in Punjab this was especially marked. And this resulted in the legacies of which we are still living with, a military agrarian nexus to which I would add technocratic nexus, military agrarian technocratic nexus, which assumes power and superior knowledge and the right to intervene in nature and in society in order to modernize or develop the country. And basically in my articles I argue that this has an extremely misguided approach to governance and it has resulted in just problem after problem for the ruling elite in Pakistan and which has resulted in a lot of conflict and contradictions in the method of governing in the country. So fast forward from the late 19th to the middle of the 20th when you have partition and basically the Indus River which basically spans Punjab, transregional Punjab, which was a domestic river beforehand, it was also in some princely states, but by and large administered as an integrated unit by the British, this becomes an international river by the stroke of the pen with Radcliffe's line. And all of a sudden you have this conflict between upstream and downstream geopolitical entities that are governed differently. So upstream downstream is not to get too deep into the weeds here, but upstream on a river basin tends to have more power than downstream because you can divert waters, but the downstream can't do that to the upstream, right? So there's basically nested upstream downstream relations between Punjab and Sindh on the national scale and then between Pakistan and India on the international scale. So the Indus Water Treaty was the result of a decade of negotiations. Actually you can take the negotiations back to the 1930s when talking about Sutlej Valley project and the debates between the provinces go back before then, but basically it looks like this problem is not going to be solved. So what happens, the problem becomes internationalized and what is enrolled is basically international expertise. So again this theme of expertise as a means to deep politicize and resolve problems that are at their roots are inherently political. By political I mean you're dealing with uneven power relations and the refusal to confront uneven power relations is kind of the fiction that technocracy allows, right? Technocracy says here's a problem, there's an optimal solution, why are we even talking about politics or religion or anything else really when there's an optimal solution of the engineer from crunch. And basically David Lilienthal, who headed up the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s US and who later got fame as the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, he wrote, he did a tour, he was a celebrity in the decolonizing world at this time. He was visiting Southeast Asia, South Asia, Kwame Nukrama and Ghana was calling for him. Basically all these decolonizing elites were saying do what you did in Tennessee, let's do that here for us, right? This is our golden ticket. And Nehru famously was very much kind of a fan of these sorts of large hydro projects. So Lilienthal got brought in and to make a long story short, the Indus Water Treaty and the Indus Basin Plan which brought in in today's money about 30 billion US dollars and which was at the time the largest integrated civil engineering program in the world. It was conducted in the Indus Valley at this time. It was enabled basically by the Cold War context about this fear that if we don't, we being the international community, which means America and its allies and kind of the emerging world order, that if we don't do something to diffuse tensions, we're going to lose India and we're going to lose Pakistan. So who are we going to lose it to is communism or to socialism because of the threat of China around the corner. And this is explicit. This is not kind of a my own kind of reading into it. It's in the archives. These concerns are very, very explicit. David Lilienthal wrote an article calling for something like the Indus Water Treaty in which he said, are we going to lose India like we lost Korea, right? So it's all kind of a Cold War calculation. And basically the money also came from rich Commonwealth countries in the U.S. to fund these large dams and replacement works. So that is the geopolitical enabling context. It's relying on international expertise, as supposedly depoliticized expertise, and also on the domestic scale, it's teaming up with a Yukon dictatorship, right? And especially the formation of one unit, which again pretended that because the Indus Basin has a natural unity, this should be mirrored in an administrative unity. And these Sindhis and other people who have provincial identities, they're living in the past. They should join this new future in which it's one Pakistan, or at least in the West one Pakistan, revolving around the unity of the Indus Basin. The fact that much of Balochistan is not in the Indus Basin is another story. But basically it was authoritarianism at home and Cold War calculations abroad that enabled the Indus Water Treaty and the Indus Basin plan. And the strand of technocracy that runs through this and military dictatorship is a continuation of patterns that were set in the colonization of Punjab. So moving on from the Indus Water Treaty and Indus Basin plan of which Mangladam was one of the dams and Therbeiladam was the other. These were the two big projects that came out of that funding and sitting in the UK, many of you might know that actually this is kind of a global connected history that many of the people who were displaced by Mangladam in Mirpur ended up coming to become the working classes in the Midlands in the UK through a visa voucher scheme. And I think some people have written about this but not enough really because this is a very interesting story about dams, displacement, development across borders and kind of a post-colonial relationship between working class in Pakistan and development of dams in the country. So moving on to the colonial present sticking to the Indus Water Treaty those relations that were cemented in the text of the Indus Water Treaty continue to shape relations between Pakistan and India today. And you can see this very clearly in two of the recent cases that went up for international arbitration under the guideline set out by the Indus Water Treaty. These are the Bagliardam which went up for arbitration or adjudication I should say in 2005 and the Kishingandadam which went up in 2010. So the reason I say that this is continuing to the colonial tradition of technocracy is because the guidelines of the Indus Water Treaty are very clear that if you have a... I won't go into the details, I have an article I recently published about this and Environment and Planning E but basically the dispute resolution mechanisms that the lower tier is very much diverted to technocracy. So basically you find the parties have to agree on a prominent engineer to arbitrate the case. So already you can see the problems and the person who ended up arbitrating it Raymond Bafit was a Swiss civil engineer who had no expertise in South Asia and no knowledge of the background, nothing what was going on. So I think in the minds of some people similar with Radcliffe, the idea was outsider, expert, therefore objective. So it's a very... it's trying to wish away the underlying fundamental politics of the situation. And then the Kishongunga arbitration was also composed of various experts but there was a bit more leeway there to introduce kind of jurisprudential thinking or kind of juristical thinking, more flexibility to acknowledge basically the rights of the downstream. So we can talk more about what the Kishongunga people are interested but basically I think because Kishongunga allowed more recognition of the political protection of downstream actors it was ultimately a bit of a let's say more honest reckoning of what's going on, although to call it that is a bit of a stretch but relative to Bugliar at least. So I think that really shows the way that technocracy, colonial technocracy continues on in the way the state is governed today especially in relation to the Indus Water Treaty. The continuation of the Irrigation and Canal Drainage Act and then basically the continued power also of landlords and waterlords. Obviously a lot has changed there are new power factions as well landlord power and industrial power, military power the lines are blurry, new classes have also emerged but you can see within all this the foundations of that colonial project of producing a militarily agrarian stable region in South Asia and this is kind of the legacy that Pakistani Federation has suffered from ever since I would say. To turn a little bit now to the dispossessed in contemporary Pakistan so I want to kind of challenge this category of colonial or not challenge but kind of expand it a bit to not only talk about something in the past something that Europeans did to Africans and Asians you know it's not that simple actually when we think about colonial power we might want to think of it as economic or the way that I'm beginning to think of it as economic exploitation without political inclusion or subordinated political inclusion so in other words your labour your resources are being exploited but you're not being brought in to the political system on people footing so with this broader definition it doesn't have to be one state invading another you can have a phenomena called internal colonialism which a lot of black Americans have written very eloquently about based on their own history and also Puerto Rican Americans this idea of an internal colony that your labour is exploited your resources are exploited but you're not brought in in a fully franchised sort of work and this sort of relationship continues in Pakistan and you can see this sticking just to kind of water related issues you can see it in seawater intrusion in the Indus Delta which has destroyed the livelihoods of many fisherfolk in the region and there are people here who can talk more about that and the kind of this has been done by kind of over interventions upstream where the seawater has been coming in the kind of estuary ecosystem is very fragile you have to have certain what are called environmental flows that maintain the balance between sea and freshwater so that balance has been disturbed to the detriment of many of the poorest people you can think about what's on the books right now the North Indus Cascade so this is kind of a shadowy fantasy fever dream of the Pakistani state that there's going to be a string of dams in Gilgit Bautistan that will basically be the new linchpin of hydropower in Pakistan funded in large part through CPEC is the idea but again we hit across the colonial nature of this development intervention because Gilgit Bautistan is not an equal footing with the rest of Pakistan right it's not constitutionally it's not it's ethnic minority as well it's a kind of colonial power relations going on there and these dams are going to flood areas they're going to cross problems downstream but of course none of that is being taken into account it's more the experts are saying it's okay so let's just carry on and everyone else can kind of get on board afterwards and then finally the issue of glacier melt right so this is going to be a big issue in the next couple of decades in Pakistan if you look at different kind of interpretations of glacier melt you'll find a little variation some people say that in the western Karakoram glaciers are actually growing a little bit you'll find little controversies like this but overall the glaciers are melting which means there might be in the short run more flow but in the long run less flow because glaciers are basically storage they store up water in the winter and then release it slowly over the summer so it's kind of a natural built-in buffer smoother flows so glacier melt due to global climate change is going to really change the game not only in the Indus basin but on all the rivers that stem out of the Tibetan Plateau on which about 50% of the world's population rely for subsistence in China, Southeast Asia India and Pakistan so this is not something small villages somewhere this is half the world's population can be impacted by this glacier melt in the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau more generally ok so just I've gone a little bit over I just want to finish up a little bit on decolonizing natural resources on the one hand I do think that I think often when we talk about decolonizing in universities what we're talking about is epistemic hierarchy some ways of knowing are better than other ways of knowing so that might be something like modernist, developmentalist, etc scientific people know better how to understand nature and develop it then let's say traditional livelihood users who have been using that fishing area or grazing land or whatever it may be there's an epistemic hierarchy some ways of knowing are better than others I think that's great I think that's a really powerful critique but I don't actually think it stops there I don't think that is enough I think I prefer rather than decolonization anti anti-colonial activity just more broadly because to me and we can talk about this, decolonization has a bit of wiping the slate clean and going back to something which I'm pretty uncomfortable with actually so I would prefer and maybe people who use the word don't mean it that way but I think it's kind of built into the syntax and I think I gravitate more towards just anti-colonialism because that way it's not something consigned to the past that way there's no imagined pure beginning to go back to what you're thinking about rather is concerns of democratic inclusion ending economic exploitation and basically these are struggles that can happen in many contexts so I think I prefer that framing maybe I'm missing something about the decolonial but maybe we can talk more about that as well also decolonial has multiple trajectories there's South African trajectory there's Native American trajectory there's UK universities, people in different parts of the world are using this word differently and then the role of the state and I'll end here because the call that we received was kind of talking about kind of resisting the state as the manager and developer of natural resources and kind of developing local scale responses instead I don't think it's actually that easy I think we live in a world where states, capital and nation are kind of interlocked together I don't think any of these can be transcended just by an act of will I think state power is a terrain for struggle just as nationalism itself so when we talk about anti-colonial activity I think we have to rethink state relations instead of ignoring it or trying to act without attracting its attention and for me this involves something of an internationalist sort of strategy so you have to delink political community from the administrative apparatus of the state itself and a concrete example that I think would be interesting is to look at the state of tail enders in both Indian and Pakistani Punjab tail enders are those farmers who are at the end of a canal so on the scale of the canal they're downstream, they're at the very end of the canal and so they often get very unreliable water supplies and they also tend to be not completely but they do tend to be smaller and poorer farmers but not in every case so I think actually tail enders in Indian Punjab and Pakistani Punjab have more in common with each other than actually a large farmer in Punjab, than they would with a large farmer in either of their places so there is a livelihood class commonality of interest there that is transcending the inbred ingrained sort of anti-state narrative so that's just one I mean this is completely speculative I'm not involved in any of this organising but that's an example of something that you might turn to to have an international coordinated pressure on the state I think that is something of a more interesting trajectory than perhaps just avoiding the state or ignoring it so I'll leave it there Do I know the speakers? It's a comment actually to say and you'll write about these various definitions and uses of decolonising and and I'd like to say that actually they all have their validity number one and number two I don't see a reason why you can't have both decolonising as well as anti-colonising What would you see the difference? OK the decolonising is actually looking backwards and actually trying to unravel some of the stuff that's gone before that actually has a continuing impact OK and decolonising is actually challenging the new forms that are growing up now some of the new forms growing up have their genesis in the past but actually there are also new ones coming up that are new so I think it's I'm at the age where I can live with different things and they all have their validity that would combine with perspective Yes I agree the short answer is I agree but for the sake of I guess it's a bit of a polemic argument that I'm making for the sake of trying to figure out what is it about this moment which makes decolonising such an attractive proposition to students and the oppressed and subordinated but also to people in power I'm speaking of our universities That's for me I mean I think the word decolonisation is overused I think exploitation to me coming out of a Marxist tradition it has a very economic sort of understanding where you're taking use of someone's labour without paying them for it fully so I think of it as an economic category when I say exploitation the political side of that might be something like domination I mean that they're always kind of related and then decolonising to me it's that's what I'm trying to figure out myself actually I mean I understand that it's a politicising term which is good but Can I ask are there any other historians in the room only historians that's quite interesting because in history decolonisation means something pretty specific which is the end of formal European power in Africa and Asia between the sort of oh and I suppose depending on your approach if you want to include the white colonies of Oceania from roughly 1920 through to about 1970 and so we don't really have these debates about decolonising the mind or really thinking through the kind of embeddedness of continued colonial structures of power and knowledge in post-colonial settings and until very recently decolonisation history was really a kind of international or diplomatic history by another name and I've seen quite recently that we've begun working out the culture of decolonisation, the social histories of decolonisation and so on so it was until pretty recently heavily about white dudes sitting around in conference rooms making decisions it's quite refreshing to hear about the disciplines but we may have an argument about how descriptors can actually that arise in one range of thought then get transmitted and used in another one it isn't just about economics although economics is a big thing about it but it encompasses a whole range of thought behind how different people were described different people were seen even different people who were allowed in certain spaces to be I had an interesting discussion yesterday with someone who was doing military history and even the business of military history and who was in the military and who wasn't is about who was admitted so there's an issue about who was admitted in the military but also who was recognised when you're looking at military history so again the beauty about my position is I'm not I don't see it sitting in these little silos I can see the interconnectedness across and yes but thank you it's been a very interesting discussion and I'm actually here because what you're talking about has implications with so many other deltas around including the parts of Africa that are really interesting I'm a lot of sorrow here really but I'm studying a study of military history and especially the week in Egypt some of the weeks around in Egypt and they started to explore the fine deltas and some respect for why you're wrong but the story you were telling us was actually reminiscent of the phenomena but my question is in this phenomenon in ancient history there's been two things that happened in the week in Egypt which creates academic debate the first one is to what extent was this exploitation of natural resource of colonisation which is so much in history of colonisation too was it deliberate or not I mean on the slide and the quotes it seems to be very very deliberate but there is a debate I don't mention history was it deliberate women and higher normalisation so my question is my first question and the second thing what happened in week in Egypt is that there also been an integration of the people people came to work on the industry and then there's a debate about how to what level this society became something different from traditional energy by national or by cultural society so those two phenomenons is that something which could be related to what I think the one of the really weird things about colonial India is how few British people were there so I can't remember exactly the figure on the top of my head some north white north something of the population whatever European as a white in India and so this kind of question of the relationship between the reservation of power to this tiny elite who were all basically white and then everybody else prevented kinds of integration that I think were much more common in other imperial settings including elsewhere in the British Empire like South Africa even Kenya had a substantial population although there wasn't a sense of demographic replacement in the same way as in the Americas in Australasia so I actually find talking about Indian history increasingly difficult to find analogies with other imperial contexts and I've learned this because I now get time to teach imperial history broadly to global history students at Bristol and so I have to think about other contexts Question for Dr Haynes here when you said at the start that natural resources are a colloenial concept and you just allowed me to think about it Yeah, so I think very much picking up on what Margell has pointed out as if you look at the natural environment as one of the arenas of a conflict between political interests exploiting natural resource thinking about nature as an exploitable resource rather than as just part of the local world that makes sense requires that kind of power of balance and so the classic and much maligned for a lot of good reasons work on water and political power in Asia is called Whitfordville's oriental despotism a book which I've only read because when I studied my PhD on water and sin the only thing anyone would ever say is isn't that that book by Colbert Fochell called Oriental Despotism is that what your works about and so I had to read it and it's mostly nonsense but it does contain as in its bad history it's not any use and it's explicitly geared towards explaining totalitarianism in 1950s when the USSR in China through ancient history which is an approach not when I encouraged my students to take it which very powerfully makes the point that controlling a resource controlling something like water flows gives people enormous amounts of power and actually this idea has been much more subtly updated and I think more useful for the environmental historians and perhaps for others by the US historian Donald Worcester who wrote a book called Rivers of Empire in the 1980s or 90s I forget which basically arguing that the image we have of the American West being a land of cowboys and freedom is completely mistaken because the expansion of white settler power in the American West so thinking about California, Utah Arizona, dry states like that was based on corporatism as in capitalist corporations strong state authority which was designed to construct new irrigation systems and actually this wasn't the land of freedom and cowboys but actually of pretty strong state control which instituted a colonial relationship between the densely populated wealthy eastern seaboard where all the capital was and the west where the label was and also where all the natural resources were and so it's this kind of modernist and basically capitalist exploitation of nature I think is fundamental to the way we think about resources and again I need to credit Marger because he always pointed out that I don't think enough about capitalism when I talk about international water disputes and actually a lot of it comes down to money and also global circuits of finance which are necessary for this kind of very large scale exploitation of the natural environment Yeah and I think the example of natural resources also shows the tight linkages between capital and colonialism as well I think in history and in theory actually increasingly it's being recognized that these two logics are intertwined If you read Black Marxism is an excellent book and that actually lays out the history of how colonialism within Europe was always at the heart of capitalism from the beginning and racialization and the same argument can be extended to natural resources as well First I'm a third year IR student so it's really interesting that you mention the dual political context and you address India but I feel like we need to address the Afghanistan issue as well because would I be right in saying that India applying to quite a lot of dams in Afghanistan? Wouldn't that impact considering that the Kabul River will flow into the Indus? Would that not impact the western Pakistan which is you know Yes yes Actually the Kabul River which falls into the Indus from the west is not covered in the Indus border treaty It's a major tributary that's not part of the Indus border treaty So it is a big factor I mean in general kind of in the mind of a paranoid Pakistani state official India is doing a pincer movement coming from both sides But I think Yeah it's a complicated question I mean I don't know the answer except to kind of confirm that it is a growing issue and this is just speculation but it also kind of explains one of the reasons why Pakistan wants to have some semblance of control over what happens in Afghanistan I mean there's lots of reasons for that but the material reason of water flows is often not mentioned a lot and same goes for Kashmir as well actually I mean Kashmir is often boiled down to an emotional, religious or historical or something like that but it's actually quite concrete The Indus, much of the Indus waters flow through Kashmir and the Indus water treaty was very careful as Dan's written about in his book to suspend or the question of Kashmir to solve the water stuff So this is a quite incredible feat to take a river and the valley it's in and separate and on paper so you can do this agreement but that's exactly the fiction that everyone went along with that as well It's not only Afghanistan to what I think about for China too the Indus main stem rises up to that Do any of the other western rivers rising to that? I think only Rabi and Sutlej from India and the rest are from India So the great irony of David Lillian Tull's plan for Indus Basin, which Marjad just talked about is that he was advocating for integrated development because the whole Indus Basin the Indus water treaty is not integrated development it's partitioned development so the whole point was that India and Pakistan engineers would have to talk to each other as little as humanly possible to make it work but it also completely ignored two out of the four riparian states on the Indus Basin So that I guess is a great example of that process of simplification of why does the Pakistanis in some sense that you could say it is following up on that but why is it like you don't see dialogue between Pakistan and Afghanistan on the water issue I mean if I had to guess I would say that Afghanistanis don't trust Pakistan for very good reasons and you can say the same about Sind and Punjab There is Irsa Indus River system authority that allocates water between the provinces and they brought in water meters they brought in all sorts of technical quick fixes but you still have disputes and it's because the fundamental political issues have not been resolved so you can put as much technology and measurement on top of it but if there is not underlying feeling of mutual interest then these disputes will continue It is also worth mentioning that Pakistan's approach has generally been reactive rather than proactive so the dispute started in 1948 because Indian engineers shut off supplies in 29 they got a kick up the backside of the early 50s because India announced it was going to build the Bakra dam in what is now Himachal Pradesh and so on and so forth so I think until Afghanistan actually builds down Pakistan the policy makers have plenty of us to worry about Thank you for your talk Just a few quick questions The first one is how has thinking or rethinking about cloning or after lighting in this place and maybe rethinking the relationship between empire state and post-cloyalty Second question to what extent do you see similarities and differences in the kind of technocratic projects of both the British and the American modernisation infrastructure that takes place in Pakistan in the 50s and 60s so fascinating to hear your points about the canal dam coordinators and the leverage that they were able to pursue that reminded me of the next wave after that of the US global school economists that come in and start re-planning the situation so the kind of shift from the British and the European towards this kind of US technocracy and its impact in this kind of agricultural industrial state society contingency how that kind of Anglo-American transition takes place and to what extent do Pakistanis have a leverage in navigating that geopolitical choice and thirdly my last question when you were talking about kind of decolonial and anti-colonial it makes me think that when I think about decolonisation in the academy it's either this kind of very recent trend within universities to talk about decolonising our minds or it's a historical focus on certain specific temporal frames where conferences happen and decolonisation is sorted on a geopolitical level but Pakistan is an example where that decolonisation happens way before this kind of 50-60s high point of decolonial activity so it makes me think that decolonisation and its kind of anti-colonial this anti-colonial thing to me sounds more assertive you know we're going to make changes in ways in our disciplines but we also need to think about how decolonisation is a term that we use maybe as diaspora in a different context but how is that concept understood about Pakistanis living there? Great questions, I'll answer them as concisely as I can first on empire, state and nation I think it has really changed the way that I think about these categories and I'm really influenced by a Chinese scholar Wang Wei I'm probably not pronouncing that right but W-A-N-G then the last name is H-U-I he's a very prominent leftist thinker in China historian of literary critic and he's basically argued in the case of China that you can't even think of it as a nation state in the same way that we think of somewhere like France or Belgium where you know these types of things he's basically saying this is still an imperial entity but it's taken on the trappings of statehood and nationhood but it functions in this relationships to its peripheries and relationships to its ethnic minorities in many ways the way that power and history work in China, Wang Wei argues it's more of a empire still, that's the way it is and I would say that that probably accounts for many of the things that we like to call so-called nation states I mean first of all the idea of nation is that's something that I think we do need to decolonize our minds on because the nation is not the state the nation is a political imagined political community because it's imagined doesn't make it any less important but nevertheless it's a political sort of thing whereas the state is a fiscal and military apparatus so the state tries to capture monopolize nationalism and it does that by stamping out alternative narratives especially for minorities so I think to me when we talk about imperial power it is important to talk about internal colonies and to speak of existing nation states as actually still acting as empires but to me the line has become very blurry there's no empires where then nation states are now I think I'm less convinced on the technocratic projects that's a brilliant point I think there's a lot to be written especially about the Harvard school experts who came in the Revelle report I think it's called was a massive three-volume report on groundwater resources done by Harvard and USAID a real critical history of that the sources are there the secondary material is there that's a really nice project waiting for someone and something similar I would say just while I have your attention some of you might be looking for projects is the SCARP tube wells the salinity control and reclamation project tube wells in Pakistan which came in the 70s and were privatized by the late 80s I think no one has written about these in a critical substantial way there's a story there about a public response to environmental degradation and then the hollowing out of that response that I think someone could write about and then finally on decolonization and what it means I mean I'm not anti the term I just find it interesting to think through and to situate a bit to me what the term adds over other academic terms is praxis basically is that there is an impetus towards action in it and especially in the North American strand of decolonize it's not only about epistemic hierarchies it's about land rights it's about economic sovereignty it's about original inhabitants so if we take that sort of thinking into universities the question then becomes who works here whose labor makes this place run and what natural resources and land make it run and how do we equalize and be inclusive in those relations so it's not just theorizing it's also what makes this actual physical space run and you don't have to look very hard to see that it's a lot of underpaid racialized labor that makes it run Question right at the back Oh yeah, mine was just about a book that I think Dr Abiyne has mentioned were you mentioning a book about the American West in Capolaesan or did I miss Rivers of Empire by Donald Worcester Okay, sorry is it up again? Rivers of Empire Okay, Rivers Thank you So guys, can I sort of take your brain a bit about sort of the present colonial moment and nature so what if the story is this high modernism of the colonial state and wanting to control water and control land and land specifically is sort of as an agricultural sort of land a resource that produces crops rather than land for pastoral use for instance How about the possibility now that that's evolving into a situation where other parts of the colony which were viewed as could not be irrigated could not be made into arable land could not be made productive are now actually the primary sites of extraction of resources so dry mountainous regions which are being cut down and mineral resources this is now the game which is not an old school that's colonized this place and irrigated site so how do you see that in terms of the long duray history of the story that you're telling I mean this is not about water it's actually beyond water it's about thinking about the fact that this is largely a semi-arid area that we're talking about so now the colonization of nature is taking on perhaps because of technology because of capitalism's evolving forms and the fact that you can take big machines and cut down dry mountains and get marbled in granite and bauxite and iron wars is there a way that you couldn't before it yeah I mean certainly if you look at the logistart and the exploitation of sweet gas over the last several decades there's a pretty clear colloquial relationship between where the capital where the finance, the military power and the users of that resource are located which is on the plains in the Indus plains and where that resource comes from which as you pointed out is the mountainous region which is not suitable for irrigation I don't know about the chronology of this I suppose it's basically because the tradition of using water to irrigate dry fertile land and create wealth or at least create subsistence is about as old as human civilization whereas we've only had this spur to go off and look under the blocks in other ways quite in hostile mountain ranges since we got into that combustion engine and so I say this is also about technology and technological development just to follow up on that I think natural resources from a geography point of view critical geography point of view are not fixed they depend on the technological frontier so natural resources are contextually defined as such I mean you can look at Tarsans in Alberta those weren't feasible natural resources before the price for oil hit 160 a barrel but once they did become that it enters into the feasible kind of calculations so thinking of natural resources as a flexible sort of range which becomes feasible or unfeasible given certain conditions and I think the other side of that is another concept from geographies to spatial fix is that basically capital seeks spatial resolutions to its contradictions and one of these is the basically extension of commodity frontiers is you move into new untapped areas or you move into tapped areas and tap them in a different way but basically you have to keep some pattern of accumulation going and when there's not enough kind of viable opportunities within the existing system you expand the frontier now the question is is it possible for this to happen endlessly and then from an ecological perspective you would say no there are thresholds which you cannot cross but if you come from the opposite kind of radical technological determinism perspective you might say there's always going to be a rich and a poor the poor will just get screwed and they will innovate their way out of whatever is going on but I mean I guess it's this it's the old thing can you imagine the end of the world easier than you can imagine the end of capitalism I think a lot of it depends on this idea of absolute thresholds where I think ecological marxits are making very interesting arguments I mean fracking is sort of an example someone saying we'll find new we'll extend the realm of what is possible via technology and you can see it in all areas I mean like a surrogacy for birth I mean that's like a colonisation of bodies in a way so I mean it can go in many different directions a question for Margie how do you see anti-colonial movement against the state taking form is it through environment do they have an environmental department because as far as I know there's only the world-world that's conducting research in that area environmental department within the government of Pakistan a working one well that's a difficult qualifier there is a ministry of environment there is I think minister of climate change as well there is an EPA as well and there are many environmentally conscious movements and livelihood movements with ecological concerns that are on the ground and that are kind of fighting the good fight and you can think of Sungi there are many organisations working on these issues I think part of the reason and as I'm not really an organiser this is speculation on my part or just kind of basis of observation is that a lot of them the smaller place-based issue-based struggles are not coordinated in a unified front that might be one of the reasons in domestically and that also the international linkages have not been as strong so if you look across the border to India you can see that many of the environmental movements in India have met with some success however limited met with more success than in Pakistan and a lot of that is strategic leveraging of international pressure and international linkages as well so I think in these two sorts of areas I think resistance is ongoing and it's almost knee-jerk people will resist, people will defend their interests, they will defend their ecologies but the question of coordinating and synchronising that opposition so it poses a challenge to one of the largest militaries in the world which is not afraid to use violence that's a different sort of question I think it's worth it's worth also thinking about the relationship between environment, environmentalism and resistance and livelihoods Martin has earlier some while ago I think 10-15 years ago I think very powerfully set out the idea that southern environmentalism is different from northern environmentalism because it's not about protecting the abstract concept of the environment or protecting landscapes from their aesthetic value or because of all these traditions as their livelihoods environmental justice rather than environmentalism in the northern sense and I'd say environmentalism is really decolonial in any meaningful way having all anti-colonial or whichever term we're going to use and some of the current criticism of extinction of rebellion is that it would be really expensive and that would be bad for poor people and for the extinction of rebellion activists so all the middle class people who are worried about poor people so yeah, there are lots of tensions Yes, so I think you've answered a bit of what I was going to ask already so I'm an anthropology student and something I'm interested in looking at from my PhD is how conservation efforts could be used to justify projects that would be colonial and would be marginalising I haven't really looked much at rivers before so is that something that can be an issue with river development I know I've heard things about hydroelectric dams being justified as this is going to be green energy and local communities have had different opinions about that is that something that could become something that could be an issue in rural management projects justified as conservation would turn out to be exploitative so I noticed how you were talking about in the river, in the industry but you were talking about how these projects were often justified as being good for agriculture so yeah I'll just make a very quick comment on that is that the Pakistani government has been asking thirsting for large dams for over 70 years in 2015 there was a kind of coordinated set of publications that said we want dams because it's good for the environment so it's kind of like the environmentalist trappings but the agenda is still the same so I think that's kind of gesturing towards what you're getting at is the discourse of environmentalism being used to carry out dispossession but it seems palatable to donor agencies it looks nice on a brochure so it's a bit of greenwashing is a term that's often used my question is related to future I guess in light of the climate change policy making the way we I mean the way that we see natural resources are changing and I was wondering how do you think this transition especially energy transition the way we see natural resources in light of climate change related issues affects or changes the way we envision colonial power depends it depends who we are I think the international debate about climate change the way that the IPCC functions I don't think attempts to pose any serious challenge to the existing international order and because climate change is such a big like an overwhelmingly big issue and again quite an abstract issue with very very concrete effects but we're not talking about a particular particular place seeking an action that is easily attainable or resolvable so I'm not sure I see that much likelihood of climate change being reached to decolonial agendas while the terms of climate change remain what they are which is about getting governments to agree to use emissions and keep temperature rise within a certain amount by a certain time I would agree there's a great book out by Jeff Mann and Joe Wainwright called Climate Leviathan which takes the unpopular premise as it's starting point that there won't be effective action against climate change it's not going to happen we've actually known the facts for about 30 years and we still it's not a new emergency but the future of climate disaster is actually our present in many parts of the world it's already happening the delta I mentioned is just one of those sorts of examples so he kind of does a speculative experiment on what future forms of government might look like and three of the options there are four options three of them are very dystopian just to kind of give away the plotline but I think if we're going to talk about a kind of effective action it's stuff that people are afraid to talk about which is mass redistribution mass redistribution on the international level and in the domestic level mass redistribution of wealth and also protection you know like it's the storm is already coming and it doesn't look like we're doing anything so my cynical pessimistic view is that the action that can be taken right now is to protect the weakest on every scale like it's too late to stop the steamroller no one is making any convincing noises so maybe that and again this is a bit of a polemical point that maybe our energies are best spent on insulating on protecting the most vulnerable and then trying to think of a project from there but in terms of getting the capitalists and the militarists who run the world to wantarily give up power I don't think that's going to happen I think the world will end before that happens My question is related with the major part of your lecture even the last question that was in the discussion there's an attitude going on in Pakistan in a few recent years that it could have a quarter or five or ten and so on and there have been so many new campaigns for making damps like the Amir Basha and Mohammed damps in the political Pakistan and many of the people like in Punjab and Sindh are very happy with the initiative but again there are so many debates inside and outside the country about the decision so how would you like how relevant it is with the idea of colonisation I think the idea of running out of water doesn't match up very well with why damps are being built now because the damps that are being built are mainly for power generation not for water supply and as Majo does a geographer will probably tell you as soon as I shut up the problem is not absolute scarcity of water but a mismatch between supply and demand I have a book chapter that actually tries its best to crunch the numbers on there's no physical water scarcity in Pakistan the numbers are just they don't add up but the Indus is a massive river the problems are of access of infrastructure of management it's a Malthusian discourse that there's not enough to go around and in Pakistan you hear this all the time too many people, too many mouths it's nonsense it doesn't match the numbers we've never produced more food in Pakistan and globally than we are right now it's not a question of supply it's a question of distribution there might be localised cases of absolute scarcity but those are solvable by distribution type things and as far as the Omer Basha dam goes I mean we've all seen what happened to the chief justice dam fund I think last time he came to England he couldn't get enough people to give a talk so I think that was a publicity stunt that has been shown as such and there are other types of solutions other than mega dams for example the Indo-Gangetic Plains sits on one of the largest natural underground water storages in the world California, Arizona they store a lot of the water underground and then pump it up so there's something spectacular about a large dam that has captured the imagination for over a hundred years and I think that explains what's going on more so than any sort of optimal engineering maybe we should take your last set of few questions because I think maybe one and two or three of four what was the name of this country? Climate Leviathan yeah and he'll be coming to the historical materialism conference here in a couple of weeks so you can see and speak about yourself first of all thank you I enjoyed both of your presentations a lot but it did make me think that this entire conversation has been around water and agriculture and as I see it sort of the newly emerging side of water politics is actually the cities and particularly the suburbs and the sort of booming housing real estate markets which are sort of mushrooming all across Pakistan and not only does that I think it generates a very different kind of what politics are on water as well because you know it's much more intimate we're talking about neighbourhood to neighbourhood look at Karachi as an example for instance like the new Belliatown sort of monstrosity that is coming up right on the outskirts of the current boundaries of Karachi is going to take away a very significant chunk of the water that is actually present for the city at the moment which is already an extremely scarce and contested water so I think it's just, yeah, I just want to bring up that so the politics around water is also happening a very sort of turbulent in urban sites and it's probably going to become to intensify as time goes on Yeah and completely agree it's a whole new scene and new types of politics and resistances will emerge out of that also something else related quality is something we didn't mention either which is a big thing in urban water supply you might be drinking water but it's killing you you know, so that's another thing that is kind of a slow death rather than absolute water scarcity which we didn't touch on and which is not covered in this water PD either by the way in fact municipal water supply is one of the blind spots in the treaty because it specifies municipal all uses are allowed but that's a visiting very light uses You talked about Mangladam Yeah It's clear that, you know, water scarcity isn't a problem at all so why was it constructed and why were so many people displaced and could you touch upon the whole use of a voucher because you said there wasn't enough food Yeah, just very quickly because we're running out of time the Mangladam and the Thirbylla Dam were both created as replacement works which means basically or maybe one was they tried to get their bail if you consider development as well but basically the three eastern tributaries went to India the three western states with Pakistan Pakistan said if we're going to give these three rivers away we need to dam these other rivers so we can get replacement waters because the Silk Bridge and Ravi were watering fields in eastern south of Pakistan so that was the main reason plus everyone in the world was crazy about dams at that time they were seen as solving every problem you know Adam Curtis has a great documentary on YouTube called Black Power which is about Kwame Nakruma's dam to build the Volta River and then what was your other question Oh, check out the work of Roger Ballard he's written on the visa scheme for Mirpuris and I think I've read that Mirpuris constitutes something like 60-70% of Asian Pakistani breaths actually so it's a large part of the Pakistani breath community last question so this idea of colonizing national resources is still a brand today how has this affected how deeply rooted is it in ethno-nationalism in Pakistan has it heightened it even further like the divide between the north and the south and the condolpies in the same and we could just touch upon that a little bit a lot a lot basically so my intervention you can read the industrial justice dispute all the way back to the 1930s which was the Anderson Commission which attempted to get the government of Bombay and the government of Punjab to agree on water allocations and they never agreed and this is one of the reasons that the international dispute got so heated later on within Pakistan the Sindhis were always complaining about that interests weren't being properly represented in the international negotiations interesting being India Punjab fell met doubt and claimed that the central government was sending engineers who were looking after India with Punjab's interests and although India with Punjab is upstream of the other major riparians which were basically in modern times Haryana and Rajasthan there was a very tense relationship between India and India between Punjab and these other these other units so again scene of ethnic nationalist insurgents in the 1970s Indus has called Duryay Sindh in Pakistan so the Sindhis have an organic claim to it and it has been at the centre of ethnic regionalist or ethnic nationalist things I think that makes sense if you are an ethno regionalised minority and you see your natural wealth being sucked away and using to enrich the core regions which we might call central Punjab and Karachi then I think this sort of feeling it would be surprising if it weren't there basically although India is also named after the Indus aha yes that's true so maybe Pakistan is a claim to all of India then that's the way it is that's the way it is ok on this applause