In December 2020, reports of China’s plan to construct the world’s largest hydroelectric dam in Medog, just 30 kilometres from the Indian border, triggered a familiar pattern in New Delhi: alarm, media soundbites, and hurried statements of concern.
The dam, slated to generate an unprecedented 60 GW of power on the Yarlung Tsangpo (which becomes the Siang and eventually the Brahmaputra), is now widely seen as a potential tool of coercion capable of manipulating flow, causing flash floods downstream, or even being used as a “water bomb.”
India’s anxieties aren’t misplaced. As Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu warned, the Medog dam poses both environmental and geopolitical risks. The Northeast, already vulnerable to climate shocks and state neglect, could find itself on the frontline of a new kind of warfare.
But while India rightly flags China’s upstream leverage as dangerous, its own record downstream tells a different story. Over the past few years, New Delhi has resorted to using the Indus Waters Treaty as political leverage against Pakistan. It has repeatedly threatened to “maximise” its use of western rivers, delayed release of flow data, and in 2023 abruptly cut off water from the Chenab and Ravi as a show of strategic assertiveness.
These acts, framed as strength by nationalist media, may offer momentary political satisfaction. But they come at a long-term cost both ethical and strategic.
If India believes weaponising water is illegitimate when China does it, it cannot justify the same tactics against Pakistan. To do so is not only hypocritical, it also erodes India’s moral ground to challenge China’s conduct on the Brahmaputra. Worse, it signals that water can be used as a lever in geopolitical rivalries, an idea Beijing would be more than happy to embrace.
Ecological Collateral: The Cost of Short-Term Strategy
In the name of national interest, India has pressed ahead with large-scale hydro projects in Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, the 2,000 MW Lower Subansiri, the controversial Dibang multipurpose dam, and upwards of forty others under the Brahmaputra Basin plan. These projects are pitched as necessary counterweights to China’s Medog dam. But for people in the Northeast, they offer little protection and significant peril.
Since May 2024, Assam has been battered by severe monsoon flooding, with over 200,000 people displaced, 37 deaths, and 11 affected districts reported in a June Reuters update. Villagers downstream of Lower Subansiri have described sudden surges and washed-out embankments following reservoir releases of water that come not with rain, but with a push from the dam, often without warning or consultation.
The dam itself has become a source of disaster. In May 2025, excessive discharge from the Ranganadi reservoir caused flash floods in Lakhimpur district: 243 villages were inundated, multiple fatalities and large-scale crop and infrastructure damage were reported. Meanwhile, construction phases have triggered repeated landslides, most tragically in June 2024, when Lower Subansiri, one such slip, claimed a worker’s life and again in October 2023, with structural damage to diversion tunnels.
These ecological shocks are driving local resistance. In June 2025, the Asom Jatiyatabadi Yuva Chatra Parishad (AJYCP) launched sit-in protests across Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, Dhemaji, Lakhimpur, and Majuli, demanding a halt to mega‑dams like Lower Subansiri, citing flood threats and erosion.
In Arunachal, youth organisations opposing the 11,000 MW Siang Upper Project have staged non-violent sit-ins, warning that centralisation is hollow without local consent. Over 300 central armed police have been deployed during surveys, prompting further protests.
This dissonance is stark. Its infrastructural ambitions are weakening the areas India claims to safeguard from hydrological threats. Impact assessments are perfunctory; Environmental Impact Assessment consultations are rushed or bypassed; riparian rights are optional. When the Siang protests demand “ecological sanity” instead of blanket development, they are not anti-progress; they are calls for responsible governance.
India’s dam spree in the Northeast echoes the centralised, top-down logic it criticises in China. It treats water as a strategic asset, ignoring that its misuse, whether by Beijing or New Delhi, leaves riparian landscapes in peril. This strategic blunder has serious ecological and human consequences, not just hypocrisy.
The Missing Multilateralism: Where is the Treaty?
New Delhi's silence on formal multilateral frameworks is a liability rather than just an omission if it genuinely views the Brahmaputra-Siang basin as a strategic frontier. Despite decades of anxieties over upstream Chinese infrastructure, India has failed to pursue a binding water-sharing agreement with Beijing.
What exists is a seasonal data-sharing arrangement, limited to monsoon months and vulnerable to diplomatic whim. When relations sour, the river falls silent.
Worse still, Bangladesh, the third and final riparian in the Brahmaputra’s arc, remains excluded from any structured trilateral forum. Beijing, meanwhile, has calibrated overtures to Dhaka, offering flood control partnerships, hydrological data, and financing for river management projects.
India, by contrast, has yet to anchor Bangladesh into a cooperative basin framework, even though any major upstream manipulation, whether at Medog or Siang, would strike Dhaka as acutely as Dibrugarh.
This is a missed opportunity and a strategic myopia. In the world of transboundary rivers, strength does not lie in unilateral assertion but in institutional architecture. Multilateralism, often dismissed in Delhi as soft diplomacy, may be the sharpest shield India can wield.
A joint river commission, a standing ecological monitoring group, and a region-wide hydrological early warning system are not abstract ideas; they are overdue necessities.
India’s warnings about the Medog dam would resonate louder if they weren’t undercut by its own theatrics on the Indus. Blocking or releasing flows into Pakistan to score points in a different geopolitical theatre sets a dangerous precedent. What India practices on its western frontier, treating water as leverage, gives China every excuse to replicate on the eastern one.
Consistency is not a diplomatic nicety. It is the foundation of credibility. A government that claims to uphold riparian rights cannot selectively weaponise rivers while asking others to show restraint. The Siang is not just a strategic river but a litmus test for whether India’s foreign policy can evolve beyond muscular gestures into a doctrine of ecological responsibility. What this exposes is not just a diplomatic void, but a deeper absence of a guiding philosophy that treats rivers as shared lifelines rather than strategic levers. And that is the failure India must confront next.
Towards Ecological Statecraft
If national security is the stated goal, then the path forward cannot lie in mimicry. China’s mega-dam in Medog is both a geopolitical provocation and an ecological threat. But India’s credibility in contesting that threat will rest not on its capacity for retaliation but on its willingness to govern differently.
That begins with rejecting the politics of spectacle, the dramatic suspension of Indus waters to Pakistan, the rhetorical threats of upstream control, and the optics-driven gestures designed to appease domestic political bases rather than address strategic vulnerabilities. These moves do not shield the Northeast; they deepen its vulnerability by normalising the very logic they claim to oppose.
India must reimagine water not as a sovereign asset to be weaponised, but as an ecological commons that demands cooperative stewardship.
That requires more than warnings to Beijing. It means climate-resilient infrastructure, decentralised water governance, and a transparent, treaty-based framework for transboundary rivers. It also means shifting investment from high-risk mega-dams to ecologically viable alternatives such as micro-hydro systems, distributed floodplain management, and basin-level planning rooted in Indigenous knowledge. It also means listening to the floodplains.
The warnings from Arunachal and Assam are not symbolic. They are rooted in swollen rivers, sudden releases, and governance systems that fail when the waters rise. To ignore these voices is to build policy on the same fault lines it claims to protect.
If India wants to be taken seriously as a stabilising power in Asia, it must abandon the water-as-weapon doctrine and construct an ecological statecraft one built on restraint, reciprocity, and justice for its most exposed regions. Not to pacify rivals, but to honour its own constitutional promise of federal care. Anything less is performance. And the flood always outlasts the performance.
(Sangmuan Hangsing is a Public Policy student at the Kautilya School of Public Policy. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)