For years, analysts and observers have warned about the dangers of China’s relentless infrastructure push in Tibet, particularly its dam-building ambitions on the Brahmaputra River, known in China as the Yarlung Tsangpo.
Beijing has repeatedly waved away such concerns, insisting it has conducted feasibility studies and environmental impact assessments. But its actions on the ground in the Himalayas have told a different story.
For India, the concern is not merely that it sits downstream. Rather, it is the sheer scale of infrastructure being built in one of the world’s most ecologically fragile and sensitive regions.
The Himalayas were never meant to be another frontier for construction, development and militarization. India has long understood that disrupting such a delicate ecosystem can have devastating consequences downstream. That warning can no longer be dismissed as hypothetical.
On August 26, flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border thrust the ecological consequences of China’s Himalayan infrastructure expansion into devastating view. The floods have since claimed thousands of lives across multiple countries, including more than 350 Indians, most of them pilgrims on the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra, a Hindu holy pilgrimage.
The full toll — in lives and economic damage — remains unknown. But the immediate question is whether this can be dismissed as a natural disaster triggered solely by natural causes. The answer is far more complicated than a straightforward yes.
This is not an attempt to politicize a tragedy. It is precisely because lives have been lost that hard questions must be asked. What role did human intervention play? Did infrastructure development alter the landscape or worsen the consequences? And, most importantly, what can be done to prevent similar tragedies?
Is China culpable?
Dismissing the floods, which video reports show crashing dramatically at Tibet’s Gyirong Port, as purely a natural disaster would be a disservice both to those who lost their lives and to the fragile environment of the region. There is little doubt that China should accept some level of accountability.
For years, Beijing has pursued the so-called development and modernization of Tibet through an aggressive infrastructure buildout. Dams, highways, tunnels and railways are rising across Tibet, while similar projects are being pushed into Nepal. One particularly consequential example is the $167 billion hydropower system now under construction in Tibet.
The international community, however, has failed to respond to these developments or adequately assess their consequences. But Tibet is too fragile to be relentlessly reshaped by Chinese military and infrastructure ambitions.
The common official narrative emerging from China, as reflected in the state-run Global Times, is that “today’s natural disasters are chain reactions driven by the superposition of climate change, geological vulnerability, cross-border watershed risks and infrastructure exposure.”
There is also the issue of information control. Reports say Chinese authorities are censoring videos of the floods online, and many accounts on the Chinese internet have cast calls for accountability as information warfare against China.
That is hardly a constructive response. Beijing’s message after the tragedy was “people first, life first” — but such rhetoric means little without transparency and accountability.
What’s the solution?
The straightforward solution is to halt further infrastructure development in Tibet. But this is not an issue confined to Tibet — its consequences extend to every country that shares a border with it.
Treating the floods as a one-off tragedy would be a mistake; they may be only an initial warning of what lies ahead. Once again, Tibet has returned to the world’s attention — a region whose religious and cultural suppression the international community has long chosen to ignore.
But can it afford to ignore the ecological damage that so-called infrastructure development may cause or worsen?
Even if China blames climate change, human activity is known to accelerate climate-driven risks. Addressing disasters of this nature requires collective effort — and collective effort, in turn, requires transparency and respect for the Himalayas and their natural environment.
The lesson here is that some places must be left alone — particularly the ecologically sensitive and fragile Himalayas. When nations refuse to respect nature’s limits, nature eventually responds, sometimes in the form of a disaster that could have been averted.
The still largely unexplained floodwaters that crashed through Tibet’s Gyirong Port and then downstream through Nepal, leaving behind a still unknown number of casualties in their wake, are a warning the world must take seriously.
Rahul Mishra is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Indo-Pacific Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and a Senior Research Fellow at the German–Southeast Asian Center of Excellence for Public Policy and Good Governance, Thammasat University, Thailand. He tweets @rahulmishr_.
Dr Rahul Mishra is Senior Research Fellow at the German-Southeast Asian Center of Excellence for Public Policy and Good Governance, Thammasat University, Thailand, and Associate Professor at the Centre for Indo-Pacific Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He tweets @rahulmishr_
