State Building, Nation Making and Post-Colonial Hydropolitics in India and Israel: Visible and Hidden Forms of Violence at Multiple Scales

Abstract

This article shows how both state building and nation making processes have intensified the sense of national appropriation of water and how water bodies, landscapes, and infrastructures became an integral part of national identity during the early post-colonial hydropolitics era (1948–67). Drawing on the cases of India and Israel, it shows conceptually, discursively, and empirically how these two distinguishable but interrelated processes lead to conflict and visible and hidden forms of violence at multiple scales. Water bodies, infrastructures, and landscapes are used on the one hand as attempts to homogenise the state space and on the other to downplay other forms of identities. In short, these processes help to understand hydraulic imaginaries, state power, identity politics and infrastructural transformations linked to post-colonial hydropolitics and its associated violence in the histories of the Jordan River and Indus River disputes.