Last week, while driving through the Southern Uplands of Scotland, rolling moorlands filled with green glades, meandering sheep and cows, with sparse peppering of bright pink bell heather stretched endlessly in their pristine glory. The car wound up and down the narrow roads and bends, flanked by the River Tweed and tiny crystal clear streams where odd tourists set up their lonely camps or boated in its waters, sometimes in the backdrop of graceful silhouettes of modern windmills, and through robust looking busy towns that had been spared the onslaught of high-rise buildings, massive showrooms and the McDonald culture.
I thought of the mighty mountains of the Himalayan region back home where a ruthless transformation is unfolding before us. It is not just climate change, the repetitively disasters striking are hastened by reckless development. In recent years, major expressways have been tunneled through the mountains that can ill afford its weight and there’s aggressive push for tourism, pilgrimages and unsustainable adventure tourism that brings handsome returns for some but monumental miseries for many.
Collectively, we have been left to deal with the reckless and wanton destruction caused in the name of modernisation, denudation of forests, construction of roads and jungles of concrete in high seismic activity zones where the slopes have begun to slide enormously, threatening lives and livelihoods.
As if my thoughts were read: while returning from Scotland, the news of devastation in Jammu arrived – heaviest ever rainfall, collapsing of bridges, floods, landslides, people swept away. This hasn’t come like a bolt from the blue. The warnings have been there. Climate change coupled with a violent disruption of the fragile Himalayan ecosystem with reckless development models that don’t fit.
Dams have been built, expressways have sprouted up even where they are not required. Jammu and Srinagar are being turned into smart cities with a siege of concrete around them but no scientific sewerage or garbage disposal system, and ornamental landscapes in the name of green belts.
Jammu’s Transformation
Till a few decades ago, the old Jammu city had a natural sewerage system with cobbled by-lanes and sloping drains, flanked by old havelis. Heavy rains meant that the city would be washed clean. My childhood memory of floods is not of waterlogged streets of the main city (that was rare, if at all) but the few unplanned settlements around the River Tawi and along the Circular Road where choppers would be pressed into service to airlift the few hundreds who got stranded.
Over the years, as the city expanded, new colonies sprouted. Planned or unplanned, they defied the old wisdom of a city set up in cascading landscape with sloping drainage.
Even the old city lost its sheen. The cobbled pathways were torn down to lay down monstrous motorable routes of concrete, allowing a gradual shift in which old architecture was replaced by a reckless onslaught of multistoried and tiled ugly structures erupted, heralding the decay of the old charm. The modernizing of the sewerage system, unfortunately, involved a laborious process of straightening the incline of the drains, making the by-lanes and streets more vulnerable to flooding and water logging.
The city grew enormously and speedily, bursting at the seams, informed neither by ancient wisdom of the land, nor by modern sustainability methods. In gleeful neglect, Jammuites happily embraced a modernization exemplified by flyovers, high rise buildings and showrooms. Jammu’s rapid transformation has been in the making since the 1990s but the pace of unsustainable modernization has exacerbated in the last decade or so – with dense green hills around the city flattened and turned into jungles of concrete.
The disaster was waiting to happen. Town after town, region after region, the story is the same – one of unsustainable development.
Lessons from the Tragedies
In the last few weeks, unprecedented cloudbursts, rains and flash floods played havoc in the Himalayas and the adjoining Hindukush ranges towards the west – a mountainous region stretching from Afghanistan to Myanmar. About 500 lives have been lost, villages wiped off the maps and tens of thousands of people are fully or partially homeless. The Himalayas and adjoining Hindukush range form a rich but increasingly fragile ecosystem, now strained by climate change and unsustainable development models.
This August's floods across South Asia—killing hundreds on both Indian and Pakistani sides—present both a threat and an opportunity. The same storms, same mountains, same tragedy could foster cooperation instead of conflict. Yet while the land literally washes away, India and Pakistan continue pointing guns at each other.
These tragedies offer lessons that necessitate immediate actions - stop unsustainable tourism models, taking cue from the ancient wisdom or other modern sustainable models like Scotland, and establish robust climate change mechanisms through regional cooperation while drawing lessons from existing global climate diplomacy examples.
Climate Change Diplomacy
In the summer of 1999, historic rivals – Greece and Turkey - with complex relations fostered by festering conflicts, embarked in what became the historic earthquake diplomacy, following successive earthquakes in each country. When hit by seismic jolts, they helped each other with aid, supplies and rescue teams, leading to a thaw in relations.
What followed was cooperation on disaster prevention and broader diplomatic talks, including confidence-building measures that were anchored in the reciprocal gestures. Though the core border disputes persist between the two countries, the diplomacy necessitated by disasters reduced hostilities and improved bilateral ties.
Similarly, the devastating 2005 Kashmir earthquake created an unprecedented window for lasting peace through similar diplomacy that sparked some confidence building measures and demilitarization talks. But the bonhomie was too short lived. Both countries failed to transform this moment of shared humanity into enduring conflict resolution even as it happened when India-Pakistan relations were at their best during the peak peace process years.
Like the wind, flowing rivers and the wildlife, natural disasters do not recognize man-made borders. They strike with brutality and throw lives, properties, flora and fauna into complete disarray.
Earlier this month, a quick and shocking succession of cloudbursts, including the one in Paddar, triggering floods that swept away homes, devoured hundreds of people, and turned the verdant hills into blobs of silt, dust and boulders, in the Himalayas and its adjoining Hindukush ranges once again demonstrates this.
South Asia’s leaders, caught in the tangling web of egos and history of mutual suspicions, have turned their backs to these warnings for long. Can their leaders, particularly India and Pakistan, whose schoolboy like endless brawls have held rest of South Asia hostage, script a new future by discarding brinkmanship and transforming conflicts through dialogues and co-operative mechanisms to meet the challenges of climate change and the disasters they unleash?
It is not a question or an option, but an imperative. While politicians argue about lines on maps, the mountains are literally collapsing. The biggest threat to South Asia isn't war - it's the climate.
The gains of the Greece-Turkey diplomacy were limited and temporary. South Asia can go beyond that to maintain a sustained process of diplomacy, dialogue, resolution of all disputes and co-operation, setting an example for rest of the world. Do we have the imagination to do so?
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