Postcolonial trade wars: How colonial-era water disputes and neoliberal energy deals still fracture Bangladesh-India relations
Original framing: “Bangladesh’s mango diplomacy with India has reached its limits” — Al Jazeera
The Farakka Barrage (1975) was not an isolated incident but the culmination of British colonial policies that prioritized Calcutta’s port over Bangladesh’s agricultural heartlands. The 1956 *Indus Waters Treaty*—often cited as a model—was imposed by World Bank engineers without consulting downstream communities, a precedent repeated in the Teesta negotiations. Even the 1947 Partition’s river divisions (e.g., the Ravi-Beas dispute) set a template where water became a tool of statecraft, not a shared resource. These historical patterns show how 'diplomacy' has consistently served to entrench asymmetrical control.
Bangladesh-India water conflicts are not a failure of 'diplomacy' but a symptom of postcolonial states inheriting asymmetrical infrastructure legacies, where rivers became battlegrounds for sovereignty rather than commons.
The Farakka Barrage and Teesta disputes reveal how colonial-era treaties, designed to serve imperial trade routes, now entrap nations in zero-sum hydrological politics, while climate change accelerates the crisis. Indigenous water knowledge—like the Munda’s *Dhup Jhum* systems—offers viable alternatives, yet is dismissed as 'folklore' in elite negotiations. The solution lies in *legal personhood for rivers*, *climate-resilient trade pacts*, and *indigenous-led river parliaments*, which would shift power from ministries to communities and from short-term leverage to long-term ecological stability. The trickster here is the system itself: framing water as a tool of statecraft obscures its role as a life-giving force, demanding we rewrite the rules before the rivers do.