Plans by Pakistan to push ahead with the controversial $6 billion Kalabagh Dam project have stirred up ethnic differences between Punjab and the country’s three other provinces, which see disadvantage in impounding the waters of the Indus river.

“Kalabagh Dam will destroy the federation of Pakistan and trigger the world’s first war over water,” warned Said Alam Mehsud, a spokesman for the ethnic Pushtoon, Pukhtoonkhwa Milli Awami Party (PMAP) in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). Mehsud was reacting to an announcement made by President Musharraf that there could be no compromise on building the Kalabagh Dam as it was in the ‘’national interest.’’ Last Tuesday, the army’s top brass, following a briefing by Musharraf, endorsed his plans.

Analysts view the confrontational political climate in the country as reflective of a Punjab-dominated state having lost credibility as a neutral umpire over disputes relating to the division of national resources among the four ethnically and linguistically distinct federal units. Punjab, which has 56 per cent of Pakistan’s 140 million people, overwhelms in many respects the NWFP, western Balochistan and southern Sindh provinces as well as the federally-administered territories called the Northern Areas and Azad Jammu and Kashmir.

Kalabagh Dam, capable of generating 3,600 megawatts of electricity, is proposed to be built in the underdeveloped Mianwali district of Punjab, a three-hour drive southwest of the capital Islamabad. Slated for completion in 2011, the dam project has been a source of friction among the four provinces ever since the late military dictator Gen. Zia-ul-Haq first floated the idea in the early 1980s. The provincial assemblies of Sindh, the NWFP and Balochistan have all rejected the dam unanimously during the 1990s, saying no to what is seen as an attempt to increase Punjab’s hegemony over the country and its lifeline, the Indus.

The Awami National Party mobilised more than 20,000 people in the last week of December for an anti-dam rally in Jehangira, almost two hours drive north of Islamabad, in its effort to show that its opposition is well grounded in people’s opinion. Experts believe that the Kalabagh Dam could submerge the fertile Peshawar valley which is the backbone of the NWFP’s agricultural and industrial economy. Fear and anger are even greater in the province of Sindh, where anti-dam protests and public rallies have become routine since the government reopened what it calls “consensus-building effort” over the controversial dam.

Facing opposition from nationalist forces and mainstream opposition political parties and haunted by divisions within its ranks over the dam project plans, the government maintains that big dams are necessary to tackle future water scarcity. Pakistan’s storage capacity, at nine per cent of the total annual water inflows, is small compared to neighbouring India’s 33 per cent. With increasing population, the per capita water availability has come down from more than 5,000 cubic metres per person in 1947 to 1,200 cubic metres at present. By the year 2010, it is likely to further reduce to 1,000 cubic metres. But big dams are not a solution to the looming water scarcity that could turn into a social and environmental catastrophe, according to environmentalists. — IPS