Understanding the Palestinian roots of intifada, and its context in Kashmir

DRAFTS OF two proposed new laws recently released by the Ministry of Water Resources, along with the report of an expert committee headed by a member of the erstwhile Planning Commission, Mihir Shah, on institutional reforms in the water sector, have proposed radical changes in the way water is used and managed in India.

The laws may or may not be passed in their current form — in any case, water being a state subject, the laws would need to be adopted by states too to become effective. What comes out of the Shah panel’s recommendations also remains uncertain, even though they are said to be backed by both the Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office.

But these documents certainly reveal the central government’s mind on how water resources need to be managed in the future. They lay down the broad principles of water-related policies in a country that is likely to be classified as severely water-stressed in about a decade if current patterns of water usage continue.

A single, composite entity

This is to emphasise that the source of all water available on land is the same — rain or snow. As such, there must be integrated planning on, and governance of, water resources, and groundwater, river water or surface water (such as reservoirs, ponds, lakes) must not be seen as different or separate resources.

Currently, the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) frames policies and guidelines related to the exploitation of ground water, the Central Water Commission (CWC) deals with water in irrigation projects and reservoirs, while the work of river conservation and planning is divided among two Ministries, the Ministry of Water Resources and the Ministry of Environment. Glaciers and snow cover are dealt with by the Ministry of Earth Sciences from the point of view of climate change research. In fact, as many as 11 different Departments or Ministries handle the subject of water in different ways, according to a CWC note.

The idea is to ensure that policies and regulations framed by these different agencies are in sync with each other, and adhere to a broad national water policy.

Water is a finite resource

A common perception is that water shortage is mainly a result of over-use, injudicious exploitation, and wastage. While these have certainly aggravated the situation, water availability per capita has reduced sharply over the last century due to population pressures and lifestyle-induced increases in demand. According to one estimate, water demand has grown 6 times since 1930, while population has grown by slightly more than 3 times. Water availability would, therefore, have gone down even if it had been used in the most efficient manner possible.

As such, all policies must be geared towards the protection, conservation and preservation of water — most importantly, groundwater resources that have been overexploited and are depleting fast, especially in urban areas. One of the steps suggested is to demarcate ‘groundwater protection zones’, in which the extraction of water would be strictly regulated. Groundwater security plans should be prepared for each such zone. Activities like mining in the nearby areas, which tend to pollute groundwater, are also sought to be regulated in these zones.

Water is common property

This is to stress that no water resource can be privately owned — by an individual, community, corporate organisation or even a government agency. Water is a common pool resource, held in public trust by governments at all levels. Water services or management can be entrusted to a private agency, but it would, in no case, lead to the privatisation of water.

An important implication of this understanding would be that owners of land would not have any right over the groundwater beneath, and thus would not be able to indiscriminately pump out water.

Right to Water for Life

There is a certain minimum amount of ‘safe’ water that is necessary for sustaining human life, and every citizen must be entitled to this minimum amount as a matter of right. This amount may differ from region to region, and would be defined by the local government — but it must be sufficient for requirements of drinking, cooking, bathing, sanitation, personal hygiene, “special needs” of women, and for domestic livestock.

While allocating water resources, the right to water for life must take first priority, followed by food security, agriculture, livelihoods and more. Governments must ensure that, ideally, everyone has access to this minimum amount of water free of cost. In any case, no one should be denied this amount because of an inability to pay.

Differential pricing

This principle seeks to recognise that a majority of water uses would eventually have to be priced, in order to economise usage and raise resources for efficient management. Pricing can be graded, with full cost recovery from high-income groups, affordable access for middle income, and a certain amount of free water for the poor. Alternatively, a minimal amount of free water can be provided to everyone. Water charges should be determined on volumetric basis.

River basin as unit of planning

Given the integral link between aquifers, groundwater and river flows, it is important that planning for water management is done at the level of the river basin itself. This is necessary to prevent local over-extraction, and destruction of catchment areas, while ensuring that all water-related activities are in sync with each other.

There should be a River Basin Authority for each basin, and sub-basin authorities for large basins with distinctive sub-basins. The work of these authorities would be to prepare and implement river basin master plans. All water resources related projects must conform to this master plan.

Additionally, there should be minimum interference in the natural flow of rivers, and the natural state of other water bodies and wetlands. In particular, rivers should be protected from construction on flood plains and from sand mining.

Participatory and community management of water

This is to emphasise the role of participatory management of water resources, including irrigation. Local communities must have a decisive role in the allocation and use of water in their areas. Water User Associations need to be established with statutory powers at the gram panchayat level to facilitate decentralised decisionmaking.

Reduction in industrial water footprint

Industries consuming large amounts of water must calculate and declare their water footprint in their annual reports. They must take steps to progressively bring down this footprint every year, and state this progress in their annual reports. They should, ideally, use only recycled water. Use of groundwater for industrial use must be authorised by government. There must be “prohibitive penalties” to prevent profligate usage of water, which may include denial of water supply services beyond a threshold. INTIFADA IS an Arabic word that means to shake off. It came into popular usage in December 1987 when the Palestinians used it to describe their uprising against the Israeli presence in West Bank and Gaza. In a 1989 essay titled Intifada and Independence, Edward Said, the scholar-intellectual who taught at Columbia University, described the intifada as the response of a people pushed to the wall by the “bare-knuckled” Israeli attempt to rob them of their history, land and nationhood.

The trigger for the uprising was a car crash inwhich4palestinianswerekilledbyanisraeli driver at a checkpoint, an incident the Palestinians believed was no accident. Protests spread fast, taking even the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) leadership by surprise, and continued until 1993. This was to be later called the First Intifada, to distinguish it from the Second, the uprising of 2000. The enduring image of both intifadas was of Palestinian youth and pre-teens throwing stones and pieces of concrete on Israeli soldiers in armoured vehicles.

Though throwing stones and Molotov cocktails may not meet everyone’s standards of non-violence, Palestinians did not see the intifada as “armed” resistance. Rather, stones in the hands of children seemed to underline the helplessness of Palestinians.

“[T]he symbols of the intifada — the stone-throwing children — starkly represented the very ground of the Palestinian protest, with stones and an unbentpoliticalwillstanding fearlessly against the rows of well-armed Israeli soldiers, backed up by one of the world’s mightiest defence establishments..., bank-rolled unflinchingly and unquestioningly by the world’s wealthiest nation, supported faithfully and smilingly by a whole apparatus of intellectual lackeys... The time had come to start trying to change realities, from the bottom up,” Said wrote.

In the same essay, he narrated how the November 1988 meeting of the Palestinian National Council, formally called the Intifada Meeting, adopted the resolution to declare the independence of the Arab State of Palestine, marking the transformation of the Palestinian struggle from a “liberation” movement to an “independence” movement, and the acceptance that an Israeli state and a Palestinian state could exist alongside each other.

Speaking at the Palestine Center in Washington DC in 2008, a year after her book, A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance, was published, political scientist Mary Elizabeth King explained how the word intifada had previously been used by Palestinian students in the early 1980s against Israeli military orders that they saw as going against their academic freedom.

“The students chose a deliberately, specifically, linguistically nonviolent word with no connotationsofretaliationorvengeance,”king said. In her book, she argued that the use of ‘intifada’ was a conscious decision by Palestinian intellectualstomoveawayfromtheaimof“liberation”and“revolution”,towardsnegotiation with the enemy — in the realisation that the clock could not be turned back to before 1948, and that Israel was there to stay.

She detailed the civil disobedience aspects of the uprising, including the non-payment of taxes, labour and trader strikes, boycott of Israeli-made goods, protest marches, and resigning of Israeli government jobs. The intifada was spearheaded by local committees under a Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, with Palestinian intellectuals such as Hanan Ashrawi and Murad Awad playing leading roles. The PLO supported the intifada but did not assume its leadership. The intifada also marked the coming out of women in public life.

By the end of 1988, the non-violence of the intifada broke down. UNC leaders were jailed, and Israel responded with force. ■ ■ ■

Kashmiris have used the term intifada for several years to describe their own protests against Indian forces. The new generation of protesters sometimes links it to the 2008 Amarnath land agitation, when stones flew for the first time in Kashmir. But mostly, it is the 2010 unrest, which came to be known as the “stone-pelting agitation”, that they describe as Kashmir’s first intifada.

Some in the national media and public intellectuals too have described the 2010 unrest — and the current uprising — as an intifada.

A Google search throws up at least one reference to the 1990s militancy as ‘intifada’ in a Pakistani journal. But it was the Lahorebased Kashmir Action Committee of Pakistan that perhaps used the word for the first time in 2010 to describe the protests following the Machil fake encounter. It quickly gained currency among Kashmiris, but was still not widely used in Pakistan at the time.

In fact, in 2010, Pakistan seemed to have hardly noticed the 5-month long stonethrowing in Kashmir. As many as 112 young children were killed in firing by the police and CRPF, but it caused hardly a blip on Pakistan’s Kashmir radar. The Pakistani government had problems of its own: massive rainfall had led to the Indus bursting its banks, flooding the plains along its entire route, killing nearly 2,000 people, and rendering some 4 million homeless. Also, Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh and Yusuf Raza Gilani had met at the Thimphu SAARC summit that April, and the post26/11 frost in ties had begun to thaw at the edges. ■ ■ ■

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s use of intifada in his Kashmir-dominated speech at the UN General Assembly last week was the first time that Pakistan used the word officially for any domestic or international audience. Said noted in his 1989 essay that it was “the only Arabic word to enter the vocabulary of 20th century world politics”. Still, it has never been used — other than sporadically for Kashmir — to describe a people’s movement outside the Arab world.

Sharif evidently meant to equate the Israeli state with the Indian state, the Palestinian suffering with the Kashmiri suffering, linking the two in a continuum of repression that the Muslim world in general has to deal with. To refer to the intifada was a way to internationalise Kashmir, to bring to it more global attention than it has received of late, and particularly to rally the Islamic word around it. Sharif may have even thought that using an Arabic word may give Kashmir a new cultural context distinct from its Indic moorings.

And yet, the Palestinian intifada had its own historical context, a secular goal, internal and external circumstances, and specific trajectory of evolution. Palestinians have not claimed proprietary rights over the use of the word, but it is now associated inseparably with their struggle. Also, despite the Hindutva fantasy/aspiration for India to become an ‘Israel’, for the world, the two countries are not in the same category of nation states.

For these reasons, intifada may never become the popular nomenclature for the stone-throwing in Kashmir. The foreign ministers of the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation countries meeting on the sidelines of the UNGA a day after Sharif’s speech backed the Kashmiri “right to self-determination”, but no one used the word intifada.

Nawaz Sharif tried to equate the Israeli state with the Indian state, the Palestinian suffering with Kashmiri suffering. To refer to the intifada was a way to internationalise Kashmir; Sharif may have thought that using an Arabic word may give Kashmir a cultural context distinct from its Indic moorings