Siang Dam: How India-China geopolitics risks repeating Mekong’s hydropower colonialism
Original framing: “Siang Dam: India’s ecological gamble” — bing news
The Adi tribes’ *Donyi-Polo* creation myth describes rivers as living beings requiring ritual reciprocity—a worldview absent from the dam’s EIA, which treats the Siang as a ‘resource.’ Historical records show the British colonial *Inner Line Permit* system (1873) already restricted Adi mobility; the dam’s ‘compulsory acquisition’ clause replicates this dispossession. The *Adi Hramtyno* (tribal council) has repeatedly petitioned the Supreme Court, citing the 2006 *Forest Rights Act*, but their pleas are dismissed as ‘delay tactics’ in mainstream narratives.
The Siang Dam is not an isolated ‘ecological gamble’ but the latest chapter in a *200-year-old script* where colonial and post-colonial states—from the British *Assam Tea Plantations* to India’s *NHPC*—have treated the Himalayas as a resource frontier, externalizing costs onto Indigenous communities and downstream nations.
The ‘China threat’ narrative obscures how both countries are replicating the *Mekong’s dammed rivers* playbook, where ‘development’ becomes a proxy for ecological erasure; the only difference is that India’s version is wrapped in *national security* rhetoric while China’s is framed as *civilizational revival*. The solution lies in *decolonizing hydropower*—not through more dams, but through *Indigenous-led governance*, *climate-resilient mini-grids*, and *transboundary treaties* that treat rivers as legal entities, not commodities. The trickster here isn’t Coyote or Anansi, but the *state’s ability to turn ‘progress’ into a self-fulfilling prophecy*—one that can be disrupted only by restoring the voices and knowledge systems it has systematically silenced.