Recently, wide-ranging claims have been made about the relationship between the environmental change in the Himalaya and Indian national security, providing space for a broader debate concerning the concept and practice of environmental security. It has been claimed in the environmental security discourse that the climate change and resource scarcity in Himalaya threaten national security of India and can possibly lead to violent conflict in the Indian subcontinent region. Such causal assumptions have profound implications in which the Himalaya and its environmental issues are likely to be understood and addressed in the future. The dominance of this discourse and the concomitant neglect of important social and political factors, which embody any environmental change in the Himalaya, make it crucial that the environment security paradigm be critically examined.
Although rooted in the Global North’s security agenda, the emerging literature on environmental security in India is keenly addressed by academia, policy-making institutions, and think tanks who make a clear link between the Himalayan environment and the potential for India to have an armed conflict with its neighboring countries (see Homer-Dixon 1999 for the conceptual insights on the environment–conflict linkage; Pai 2008; Gautam 2012). Apocalyptic pronouncements, such as “the precious water reserves of the Himalaya might well form the prelude to a new era of hostility” or the potential of “water wars,” are found common in such scholarship (Holslag 2011). The central argument in this discourse is that the water scarcity triggered by climate change in the Himalaya will be a contributing factor to an armed conflict between Asia’s two juggernauts—that is, India and China (Pai 2008; Holslag 2011; O’Lear 2013). The Himalayan rivers, flowing over their respective militarized disputed borders, are not only assumed to be depleting due to steadily shrinking upstream glaciers but are also dismally declared to instigate the border military conflicts1 between them. Characterized by the argument that environmental problems are so important that they should be viewed as threats to national securities, such security policy analysis has in fact endorsed bolstering of the militaries in Himalaya (Pai 2008; Gautam 2010).
In this literature, by focusing on the potential for environmental problems to create conflict, the attention is diverted more toward the symptoms than the causes of climate change in the Himalaya. Not denying the potential for environmental problems that exists in Himalaya, but environmental security discourse moves us away from dealing with the source of these problems themselves. Importantly, with such a conceptualization of the environment, Himalaya turns out to be seen as a geopolitical source of environmental insecurity rather than its victims. Not surprising, such politically charged research, as also pointed by a few scholars, tends to ignore discussing any of the human ingenuity or adaptation of institutions to address environmental scarcity in breaking the causal relationship between the environmental change and the violent conflicts.
One of the ways the environment-conflict thesis becomes legitimized is by conceptually seeing the environment as an external entity, thus allowing a possibility to link it directly to a national or global conception of ecopolitics (Dolby 1998). This idea of nature, with a need to be dominated and controlled, according to Dolby, is a crucial ontological move, coupled with “positivist epistemologies and the contemporary policy discourses based on the ‘technocratic’ pursuit of knowledge and control” carry a powerful ideological power (295). The science of climate change discourse that also separates humanity from the environment thus sits well and in recent times has speculated incalculable damages to the Indian ecology and economy through environmental deterioration of the Himalaya (Lemke et al. 2007).
Through dismayed projection such as causing devastating floods downstream, mechanistic science believes that the glacier melt, vegetation cover change, and permafrost degradation, along with unsustainable exploitation of the high altitude wetland ecosystem of Himalaya, would lead to a “negative knock-on” effect or severe drought conditions (Chatterjee et al. 2010). Such observations, for instance, have also fiercely criticized the pastoral land use in the Trans-Himalaya and how it can negatively impact the high altitude wetlands. However, the ways in which the discourses of overgrazing and land degradation are constructed and made plausible by sciences are not only flawed by its fundamental approach that romanticizes the Himalayan pastoralism—to have always been in harmony with the pristine Himalayan environment—but sciences also forsake the environmental impact of militarization on the Indian Trans-Himalaya region. Therefore, by externalizing the environment, the environment-conflict framework has not only increased the probability of portraying Himalayan pastoralism as the problem for the environment but has also dismissed how Himalayan pastoralism had been a victim of the environmental insecurity in first place.
McDonald (2010) has suggested that the environment-conflict thesis portrays the environment not so much in terms of assets to be sustained for human benefit but rather in terms of threats against which human well-being should be safeguarded—because what is particularly noticeable is the extent to which military has been brought to the forefront as an institution equipped to safeguard and resolve the conflict, triggered by any environmental change in Himalaya. This has given a reason to many scholars to think optimistically about the environment-conflict link and justify on the account that such assumptions have for the first time in the history provided India with a knowledge of the cause of a potential war and therefore possibility to strategize the creative solutions (Gautam 2012). Creative solutions such as enhancing the military’s role as “early warning sensors” reporting environmental problems and building military-to-military cooperation for “ecological confidence building” are thought to be the role militaries can play to safeguard the environmental insecurities (36). Nowhere in this literature, however, do scholars note the role of militaries in creating environmental problems or their direct association with the economic development of India and other countries such as China.
Though the role of military in environmental protection, or “military environmentalism,” might sound internally inconsistent, perhaps even oxymoronic, it actually has now alluded to a range of celebrated stories of successful environmental projects in India. With this perspective, the argument for military environmentalism has attained a greater degree of persuasion with “environmental restoration and protection” being offered as the Indian military’s fifth dimension to the existing four dimensions of “defending the country’s borders,” “ensuring internal peace,” “ensuring international peace,” and “disaster relief” (D’Souza 2005). The possibility that environmental protection and militarization “might reside in quite fundamental opposed moral orders is in this way denied and removed from the debate” (Woodward 2001: 209). However, on the grounds, there are enough reasons for examining the military environmentalist discourse not just due to an increased visibility of military activities in places like the Indian Trans-Himalaya region in the recent times but also how it is prompted by changing patterns of local land use (Sabharwal n.d.). Occupation of the local pasturelands, the de-notification of a Wildlife Sanctuary in 2009 for military use, and a proposal of a National Border Infrastructure Bill exempting all military projects within 50 kilometers of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Himalaya from all of the relevant acts relating to the forest or environment are only some of the instances that provide enough reason to raise questions on the naturalization of the military’s environmental role in India.
Ronnie Lipschutz’s (1997) suggestion that the efforts to link the environment-conflict thesis can be seen as “discursive power plays that fall back on naturalized concepts in order to protect privilege” seems to resonate true in the case of Himalaya as well. As one observes, no attention is given in this correlation to understand how geopolitics and militarization affect the sustainable development in the Himalaya and, more important, how nationalistic pride and consumerism influence the heavy militarization of the Himalaya in first place. It is not surprising that focus on the environment’s role in causing conflict has been more popular with policy makers than the wider reasons of conflicts. The history of military conflict between India and its neighbor is more territorial in nature and less resource driven as even history avows when, after China seized the border region Aksai Chin from India, Jawaharlal Nehru famously stated, “Not even a blade of grass grows here [India–China border].” On the other hand, ongoing mounted tensions on the India–China border in recent times have fueled assumptions about its link with the shared trans-border water resources (Guha and Spegele 2013) and therefore the need of bolstering the ecological habitats of Himalaya with more military and allied infrastructure.
Emphasis on the causal link between environment and armed conflict also ignores the fact that the interstate cooperation—for example, the Indus Water Treaty between India and Pakistan—has mostly led to joint exploitation of resources and a network of common interests. Not only does this environmental focus not require serious thinking, but policy makers can appear attentive to environmental problems without profoundly addressing their causes, thus avoiding the political problems of asking the citizens to make “economic or social sacrifices” (See McDonald 2010). The National Border Infrastructure Bill that is being surfaced at the same time as the rise in environmental security debate in India not only presents a contradiction but also demonstrates that policy makers can describe environmental problems as security threats without making significant sacrifices to reduce carbon emissions contributed by the militarization itself. Therefore, the underlying problem with the environmental-conflict thesis, as McDonald (2010) also argues, is “a self-conscious understanding of the ways in which the conclusions serve to reify the sources of both environmental degradation and insecurity.”
In this respect, the environmental security literature that has been produced to target Himalaya focuses on symptoms of environmental insecurity rather than its underlying causes, and this serves to provide sanction, in part to those responsible for environmental degradation. It is clear that the power of the environment-conflict framework is in naturalizing Malthusian assumptions about places like Himalaya and unavoidable scarcity, and enabling the environment to be seen as a threat as an “other” from which we may need protection (Lipschutz 1997; McDonald 2010). The power of this imagery also lends itself the practical benefits for policy makers, precisely because it serves to free border militaries of environmental responsibility and allows attention toward other environmental insecurities.
It seems clear in the light of the above discussion that despite new ideas and resources that are put in place to shape the environmental security discourse in India, there exists a need to denaturalize various assumptions inherent in this discourse. Himalaya, which has become central to the environmental security debate in India and faces new forms of scrutiny, provides one such instance to unfold the underpinnings of social and political forces that otherwise remain/made silent in the environmental security debate at large.
Alka Sabharwal is a PhD candidate with the Discipline Group of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Western Australia and is expected to receive her doctoral degree in 2015. Her research thesis titled “Barren Frontiers, Pristine Myths: The Cultural Politics of the Wildlife Conservation in the Trans-Himalayan Region of India,” uses the cultural politics lens to examine the complex environmental contestations that surround a recently notified protected area on the India–China border.
Note
1. Himalaya consists of a bundle of political boundaries between different countries, predominant being India, Nepal, China, Pakistan, and Bhutan.
References
Chatterjee, A., E. Blom, B. Gujja, R. Jacimovic, L. Beevers, J. O’Keeffe, M. Beland, and T. Briggs. 2010. “WWF Initiatives to Study the Impact of Climate Change on Himalayan High Altitude Wetlands (HAWs).” Mountain Research and Development 30, no. 1: 42–52.
Gautam, P.K. 2010. Environmental Security: New Challenges and Role of Military. Delhi: Shipra Publications.
Gautam, P.K. 2012. “Climate Change and Conflict in South Asia.” Strategic Analysis 36, no. 1: 32–40.
Guha, R. and B. Spegele. 2013. “China–India Border Tensions Rise,” Wall Street Journal , 26 April.
Holslag, J. 2011. “Assessing the Sino-Indian Water Dispute.” Journal of International Affairs 64, no. 2: 19–35.
Lemke, P. et al. 2007. “Observations: Changes in Snow, Ice and Frozen Ground.” Pp. 337–383 in Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis – Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. eds. S. Solomon et al., Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Lipschutz, R. 1997. “Environmental Conflict and Environmental Determinism: The Relative Importance of Social and Natural Factors.” P. 47 in Conflict and the Environment, ed. N. Gleditsch. Dodrecht: Kluwer.
McDonald, M. 2010. “Review Article – Making Waves? The Environment and Security as a Contracting Discourse.” International Journal of Human Rights 5, no. 3: 111–126.
O’Lear, S., C.M. Briggs, and M. Denning. 2013. “Environmental Security, Military Planning and Civilian Research: The Case of Water.” Environment Magazine 55, no. 5: 3–12.
Pai, N. 2008. “Climate Change and National Security: Preparing India for New Conflict Scenarios.” Indian National Interest Policy Brief 1: 1–9.
Sabharwal, A. “Barren Frontiers, Pristine Myths: The Cultural Politics of the Wildlife Conservation in the Trans-Himalayan Region of India.” PhD thesis, University of Western Australia.
Woodward, R. 2001. “Khaki Conservation: An Examination of Military Environmentalist Discourses in the British Army.” Journal of Rural Studies 17: 201–217.
Cite as: Sabharwal, Alka. 2015. “The Environment and Military Conflict: A Critical Review of the Environmental Security Discourse in the Himalaya.” EnviroSociety. 5 June. www.envirosociety.com/2015/06/the-environment-and-military-conflict.