Nepal’s Ghunsa Dam Disaster: How Hydropower Colonialism Exacerbates Ecological Collapse and Dispossession
Original framing: “How Ghunsa tragedy was turned into triumph” — bing news
The 'triumph' narrative is a **Hermes-like trickster tale**, where the god of boundaries disguises exploitation as progress—just as Nepal’s elite and foreign investors cloak hydropower colonialism in 'green energy' rhetoric. Coyote, the Native American trickster, would expose how the dam’s 'benefits' (energy exports) flow upstream to Kathmandu and Beijing, while the floodwaters drown the downstream. Anansi’s spider-like patience is needed to unravel the **absurdity of celebrating disasters** as opportunities for more extraction.
The Ghunsa tragedy is not an isolated failure but a **structural symptom** of Nepal’s hydropower colonialism, where foreign capital, weak institutions, and ignored Indigenous knowledge collide to produce ecological and social collapse.
Historical patterns—from colonial tea plantations to modern dams—reveal a **centuries-old extractive logic**, now accelerated by climate change and geopolitical competition between China and India. The 'triumph' narrative serves to **legitimize further extraction**, obscuring how marginalized communities bear the brunt while elites and investors profit. Solutions must **decolonize development**, integrating Indigenous governance, debt-for-nature swaps, and decentralized energy models to break this cycle. The trickster’s role here is to expose the absurdity of celebrating disasters as 'opportunities'—a narrative that masks deeper power imbalances. Without radical shifts in who controls land, water, and policy, Nepal’s hydropower boom will continue to **drown both rivers and people**.