Arunachal Pradesh: India's biggest dam, a geopolitical weapon against China

According to Al Jazeera, indigenous communities in Arunachal Pradesh, in north-eastern India, are protesting against a mega-dam presented as the country's largest. The project is planned to counter the hydroelectric works China is building upstream. The dispatch is brief: at this stage we do not know how many people are threatened with displacement, the timetable for the works, any compensation, or the response of the authorities. What follows is our reading, not an established finding.

The salient point is already there in the official justification. This dam is not conceived first for the valley's inhabitants, but for a rivalry between states. It is about weighing on the river in the face of Beijing, "securing" water, planting a flag in concrete. In this logic, the valley becomes a piece on the chessboard, and those who live there a logistical detail.

We know this tune, and not only in India. The world has long been taught that one could be "behind" and must catch up. Yet, as analyses of dependency remind us, peripheral regions are not simply behind: they have been shaped to supply the centre with raw materials, energy and cheap labour. Here, the centre is New Delhi and Arunachal is the border margin, rich in water, sparsely populated in the eyes of planners. This logic of internal colonisation does not need a foreign empire. It is enough for the inherited state apparatus to keep its extractive reflexes. Fanon and Cabral said it: independence without social transformation changes the flag, not the structure.

Cabral also insisted on a point that is easily forgotten: peoples have their own history, regardless of their "stage" of development. When indigenous communities refuse a dam, they are not opposing progress. They are defending a history, lands, rivers, a way of life that strategic calculation cannot put a figure on.

Finally, there is the climate question, which the dispatch does not address but which the subject calls for. Hydroelectricity is sold as clean energy. But accumulation always demands more energy and materials, and the costs are passed on to ecosystems and to the populations who have contributed least to emissions. Drowning valleys to fuel growth means widening the rift between society and nature that Marx described, with a green certificate thrown in.

The paradox is delicious: Delhi and Beijing are squabbling over a river while trading the same logic, each swearing its dam is a matter of national security. In both cases, those living downstream of power are not consulted first.

What to watch: the fate of the communities concerned, the reality of their consent, and the identity of the beneficiaries, companies, regions or states. The question is not whether India must respond to China, but who pays the bill for that response, and who cashes in.