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This chapter explains how the nineteenth century saw the emergence of many ideas related to meaningfully transforming the Brahmaputra to serve the government and the country. Experts toyed with ideas on how to tame the river. If other rivers of the world could serve the cause of the governments of the countries through which they flowed, why should the Brahmaputra not be trained in similar ways? It was only a matter of the appropriate calculations and necessary engineering works. What was called for was a plan for the river’s regulation to achieve the desired goals. The river, despite its erratic temperament, was bound to behave according to the rules thus framed. After two centuries of political, economic, intellectual, and bureaucratic negotiation, the river has become part of India’s national imagination. India’s stake in the Brahmaputra is now firmly established.

This chapter analyzes the confluence of environmental politics, biopolitics, and the cultural role of yoga in India. It begins with an overview of India’s current economic development challenges and shows how the country’s current prime minister has subsumed both yoga bodies and water bodies into biopolitical discourse to support a neoliberal economic boom that will contribute to the proliferation of anthropogenic climate change. The chapter then argues that alternative forms of yoga aimed at nurturing intimacy between the human body and the natural world are helping to prevent unnecessary climate-change-producing development activities in India, including the river-linking project and other massive hydroelectric projects that threaten India’s riparian environments.

Chapter 5 uses the experience of South Asia to illustrate how the Commercial approach leads to conflicts among co-riparian countries. It notes that river basins were fragmented in South Asia by borders that were drawn based on political considerations and not physical geography. While greater cooperation among South Asian countries was necessary to protect the river basins, adoption of the Commercial approach led to more conflicts than cooperation. India, which lies at the center of the region, has borders with most South Asian countries, including Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Pakistan and finds itself in conflict with all of them. The chapter focuses on the most serious and numerous conflicts, which are with Bangladesh, and center on such major water diversionary barrages as the Farakka Barrage and the Gajoldoba Barrage. It notes that India’s proposed River Linking Project is only likely to aggravate these conflicts. The chapter also reviews India’s conflicts with Nepal and Bhutan regarding sharing the costs and benefits of the dams that it has constructed under joint ventures as well as conflicts with Pakistan over sharing the Indus River. Finally, the chapter notes the burgeoning conflicts with China regarding the Brahmaputra River.