Description
The paper argues that the dominant framing of the Brahmaputra as a national security issue has led to a highly centralising narrative that has remained fixated on the strategic geopolitical notion of the river. This has shut out valuable dialogic space and compounded the risk of a misalignment of interests between India’s federal and the local governments on key questions of benefit sharing, risk allocation and trade- offs. One of the gravest consequences of a unidimensional view of the Brahmaputra has been that it has invisibilised a range of critical issues and actors, resulting in a missing river agenda. The paper examines to what extent emerging communities of practice in the borderlands can produce imaginative counterpoints to desecuritise the Brahmaputra.
