Drowning Bilaspur: Dams, Debate and National Integration in 1950s India

• In Event: Overcoming Internal Difference: Integrating India’s ‘Peripheries’ after 1947

Abstract

My paper explores the confluence of geography, techno-politics, and regionalism in India during the early 1950s. Bilaspur, an obscure and tiny Princely State in the Himalayan foothills, found itself in the national spotlight as the site of a major dam project, the Bhakra-Nangal complex. As the key node in a water-supply and power-generation network expected to revolutionise agriculture and industry in northwestern India, the complex was critical for developingthe more homogenised national space that the central government sought, while bureaucrats and political leaders in state governments wanted to appropriate the physical control over water flows that the dams represented. The neighbouring states of Punjab, PEPSU and Himachal Pradesh, as well as the central government, all therefore vied to control the dam site. The project also flooded half of Bilaspur’s territory, displacing approximately 25,000 people, sparking debates about resettlement, land allocation, and the state’s political future. The Punjab, PEPSU and Himachal leaderships consequently competed to claim both geographical and historical connections between their states and Bilaspur, demonstrating the multiplicity of spaces and identities that coexisted in postcolonial India. At the same time Bilaspuris vocally demanded a say in their future, articulating rights as national citizens. I thus highlight the tension between regional politics and the creation of a national development space, arguing that provinces/states as well as nations aspire to a form of resource sovereignty.

Author

• Daniel Haines, University of Bristol