The Historical Journal (2021), 1–21

doi:10.1017/S0018246X21000625

A RT I C L E

Development, Citizenship, and the

Bhakra–Nangal Dams in Postcolonial
India, 1948–1952

Daniel Haines
Department of Historical Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
Email: Daniel.Haines@bristol.ac.uk.

Abstract
Historians have done much to unpick the image of development in poor countries after the
Second World War as a technocratic phenomenon driven by centralizing planners and advo-
cates of modernization. Yet scholars have done less to ask how development interacted with
other major aspects of decolonization, notably the transformation of colonial subjecthood to
postcolonial citizenship. Using the case of the Bhakra–Nangal dam complex, constructed in
northern India during the late 1940s to early 1950s, this article argues that a major devel-
opment project impacted not just on economic growth and the extension of state power,
but significantly influenced the integration of postcolonial India’s diverse political territor-
ies. At the same time, ideas about development and citizenship both offered resources that
technocrats and dam-displaced people alike could use to make arguments about the
relationship between people, territory. and the state. Development was not a rarefied
space that escaped politics while extending state power, but was entangled in the broader
processes through which subjects of an empire became citizens of a postcolonial state.

The waves of decolonization that followed the Second World War left newly
independent states in Asia and Africa in search of ways to quickly alleviate
poverty. Many found a path through programmes for agricultural reform,
industrialization, and infrastructure-building. These programmes, which were
often framed in the rhetoric of modernization and national destiny, consti-
tuted what is now commonly called development. Historians have done
much to unpick the image of development as a technocratic phenomenon dri-
ven by centralizing planners and advocates of modernization. They have
shown that politicians, bureaucrats, and foreign donors all used development
projects to push competing and sometimes contradictory agendas.1 Engerman

1
Nick Cullather, The hungry world: America’s Cold War battle against poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA,
and London, 2010); Srirupa Roy, Beyond belief: India and the politics of postcolonial nationalism (Durham,
NC, and London, 2007); Markus Daechsel, Islamabad and the politics of international development in

© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press.

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 2 Daniel Haines

in particular has shifted focus from professed ideologies to actual practices.2

Yet scholars have done less to ask how development interacted with other
major aspects of decolonization, notably the transformation of colonial polit-
ical subjecthood to postcolonial citizenship. How did development intersect
with the emerging politics of decolonizing countries?
Analysis of historical water resources development projects can help to
answer this question because they exemplify the appearance of the top-down
projection of power. In dry regions, scholars have shown that controlling water
flows has enabled states to remodel landscapes and, to an extent, societies. In
the US West, Spain, Egypt, Mexico, and elsewhere, scholars have argued that
hydraulic systems constituted forms of technocratic spatial control, playing
an important part in the establishment of state (and sometimes corporate pri-
vate) power over territory, and that water-managing bureaucracies have been
driven towards large-scale (and usually technocratic) water control by a
‘hydraulic mission’.3 Water control, in these readings, lends itself to centralized
power across different types of political systems, with varying degrees of
democratic or authoritarian governance. In northern South Asia, a region
which has limited rainfall but fertile land which can be intensively farmed
using water from irrigation canals, and where twentieth-century industrializa-
tion generated high demands for hydropower, a boom in dam-building accom-
panied India’s independence from Britain in 1947. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s
first prime minister, was a famous proponent of dams as both symbols of
the nation and as lynchpins of economic development planning. Despite the
country’s much-vaunted democratic constitution, scholars have associated
Indian dams with central power.4 Even attempts to decentralize water provi-
sion in India, and increase local participation, have relied on the conception
that ‘politics is messy…and therefore not conducive for development’, as
Chhotray has argued.5
An alternative look at the political processes and debates surrounding
dam-building in decolonizing India, however, will show that a major develop-
ment project could be profoundly bound up with the politics of citizenship, of
what India’s independence meant for how its people related to the state. In this

Pakistan (Cambridge, 2015); Michael E. Latham, Modernization as ideology: American social science and
‘nation building’ in the Kennedy era (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 2000).
2
David C. Engerman, Price of aid: the economic Cold War in India (Cambridge, MA, 2019).
3
Donald Worster, Rivers of empire: water, aridity, and the growth of the American West (Oxford and
New York, NY, 1992); Erik Swyngedouw, ‘Technonatural revolutions: the scalar politics of Franco’s
hydro-social dream for Spain, 1939–1975’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32 (2007),
pp. 9–28; Terje Tvedt, The River Nile in the age of the British: political ecology and the quest for economic
power (London, 2004); Philippus Wester, ‘Capturing the waters: the hydraulic mission in the Lerma–
Chapala Basin, Mexico (1876–1976)’, Water History, 1 (2009), pp. 9–29.
4
Vandana Shiva, The violence of the green revolution: Third World agriculture, ecology and politics
(London and Penang, 1991); Rohan D’Souza, ‘Supply-side hydrology in India: the last gasp’,
Economic and Political Weekly, 38 (2003), pp. 3785–90; Amita Baviskar, In the belly of the river: tribal
conflicts over development in the Narmada Valley (Delhi, 2015). On democracy: Ramachandra Guha,
India after Gandhi: the history of the world’s largest democracy (London, 2008).
5
Vasudha Chhotray, The anti-politics machine in India: state, decentralization and participatory water-
shed development (London, 2011), p. xv.

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 The Historical Journal 3

Figure 1. The Bhakra Dam and subnational boundaries, c. 1947–55

article, I put forward new empirical research on north India’s Bhakra–Nangal

dam complex and its irrigation canal network, constructed on the River Sutlej
during the 1940s to 1950s, in the former princely state of Bilaspur (now part of
Himachal Pradesh State) (Figure 1).
The article addresses two open questions in current scholarship on the
decolonization of South Asia. First, how significant a break did independence
mark in how the state functioned and related to society? Historians and
historical geographers of South Asian dams have pointed to a high degree of
continuity in the development practices of the late colonial and early post-
colonial states.6 The period between roughly the 1930s and 1960s was also a
distinct, formative period in the history of South Asian citizenship.7 Hindu

6
Rohan D’Souza, ‘Water in British India: the making of a “colonial hydrology”’, History Compass, 4
(2006), pp. 621–8; David Gilmartin, Blood and water: the Indus River Basin in modern history (Berkeley,
CA, 2015); Daniel Haines, Building the empire, building the nation: development, legitimacy, and hydro-
politics in Sind, 1919–1969 (Karachi, 2013); Abdul Aijaz and Majed Akhter, ‘From building dams to
fetching water: scales of politicization in the Indus Basin’, Water, 12 (2020), pp. 1351–67.
7
Taylor C. Sherman, William Gould, and Sarah Ansari, ‘Introduction’, in Taylor C. Sherman,
William Gould, and Sarah Ansari, eds., From subjects to citizens: society and the everyday state in
India and Pakistan, 1947–1970 (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 5–6.

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 4 Daniel Haines

code bills, for example, passed by independent India’s legislature between 1955
and 1956, were part of an evolving response to increasing representative govern-
ment that dated back to colonial political reforms in 1919.8 Others, however,
have emphasized the ideological and practical changes that independence
drove in India, through social responses to the 1950 constitution, the preparation
of electoral rolls, and the work of the planning commission.9
The second question is: what were the implications of the integration of for-
merly semi-autonomous princely states, like Bilaspur, into newly independent
South Asian nation-states? Barring Jammu and Kashmir, which became the site
of successive wars between India and Pakistan from 1948, historians have only
recently begun exploring how the integration process actually worked, and
what it meant for people who lived in the territories. Even then, attention
has focused on examples like Hyderabad in southern India or Kalat in western
Pakistan, characterized by tension and postcolonial violence.10 States like
Bilaspur, and its neighbouring sub-Himalayan ‘hill states’, have been over-
looked. In Bilaspur, a struggle played out between provincial-level govern-
ments, the national leadership in New Delhi, and Bilaspuris themselves. Each
sought to define the meaning of the Bhakra–Nangal project, determine who
bore its costs and accrued its benefits, and decide what it meant for the way
that Bilaspur integrated into postcolonial India. Moreover, each constituency
brought together the languages and practices of both citizenship and develop-
ment. While the Bhakra–Nangal project represented some continuity with late
colonial development, the political context that it took place in – and signifi-
cantly influenced – was changing radically. The centrality of citizenship and
democratic governance to Bilaspuris’ demands showed how strongly, and rap-
idly, a distinctively postcolonial political culture emerged.
The disputes over Bilaspur and the Bhakra–Nangal project were extensively
recorded by the Ministries of States and Home Affairs, now held at the National
Archives of India, New Delhi. The politicians and bureaucrats whose writings
populate the archive spoke about and for Bilaspuris more than they spoke to
them, and there is little direct access to the ‘voices’ of ordinary people.
Fortunately, however, the archive includes copies of several petitions and let-
ters from Bilaspur, making it possible to gain a reasonably balanced (if partial)
impression of events. Material from the Punjab State Archives, Chandigarh,
and the United States National Archives, College Park, Maryland, furnishes

8
Eleanor Newbigin, The Hindu family and the emergence of modern India: law, citizenship and com-
munity (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 231–2.
9
Rohit De, A people’s constitution: the everyday life of law in the Indian Republic (Princeton, NJ, 2018);
Ornit Shani, ‘Making universal franchise and democratic citizenship in the postcolonial moment’,
in Michael Francis Laffan, Nikhil Menon, and Gyan Prakash, eds., The postcolonial moment in South
and Southeast Asia (New York, NY, 2018); Nikhil Menon, ‘“Help the plan – help yourself”: making
Indians plan-conscious’, in Laffan, Menon, and Prakash, eds., The postcolonial moment.
10
Taylor C. Sherman, Muslim belonging in secular India: negotiating citizenship in postcolonial
Hyderabad (New York, NY, 2015); Eric Lewis Beverley, Hyderabad, British India, and the world:
Muslim networks and minor sovereignty, c. 1850–1950 (Cambridge, 2015); Yaqoob Khan Bangash, A
princely affair: the accession and integration of the princely states of Pakistan, 1947–1955 (Karachi, 2015).

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 The Historical Journal 5

additional detail, supplemented by reporting in one of India’s major

English-language daily newspapers, the Times of India.
The article proceeds chronologically, identifying major phases in the battle
for Bilaspur: the transition to postcolonial rule, up to 1949; technocratic argu-
ments over control of the dam project and, by extension, over Bilaspur State
from 1950 to 1951; and eventually interventions by Bilaspuris themselves in
1952. During each phase, various central, regional, and local actors came
into conflict over the practical and moral ownership of the dam project, articu-
lating claims that drew on the overlapping discourses of development, nation-
alism and citizenship.

I
Despite the nationalist rhetoric surrounding Bhakra–Nangal, colonial officials
had first mooted plans for it during the 1930s. The colonial government had
driven the expansion of India’s irrigation network since the mid-nineteenth
century, and by the end of the colonial period, roughly a quarter of all cropped
land in India depended on state-owned irrigation canals.11 Water-control infra-
structure was also central to colonial governance. State-managed irrigation
projects formed the basis of new regimes of landownership, legal codes, and
increased bureaucratic control over agricultural production and the lives of
producers.12 Rather than rejecting a central component of colonial develop-
ment, however, nationalists adopted dams in their own plans for the future.
Meghnad Saha, the independence movement’s foremost proponent of centra-
lized economic planning, built them into his recommendations and influenced
top nationalist leaders, including Jawaharlal Nehru.13 However, a dispute over
water allocation between the provincial governments of Punjab and Sindh held
up Bhakra–Nangal plans.14 Interprovincial negotiations from 1941 to 1942 were
inconclusive, but Punjab pressed ahead with plans for the project unilaterally
and struck an agreement with Bilaspur’s ruler, Raja Anandchand, in 1945.15
When independence came in 1947, dams carried great symbolic weight,
helping the Indian government assert its modernizing credentials at home
and abroad.16 Nehru personally, and the broader approach to governance
that he represented, staked a great deal on India’s ability to quickly overcome
problems of poverty and food supply, helping to drive rapid modernization.17
Food was central to the politics of citizenship and state legitimacy, giving it
11
Elizabeth Whitcombe, ‘Irrigation’, in Dharma Kumar, ed., The Cambridge economic history of
India, II: c. 1757 – c. 1970 (Cambridge, 1983), p. 677.
12
Aditya Ramesh, ‘Indian rivers, “productive works”, and the emergence of large dams in
nineteenth-century Madras’, Historical Journal, 64 (2021), pp. 281–309.
13
David Arnold, ‘Nehruvian science and postcolonial India’, Isis, 104 (2013), pp. 360–70.
14
Note by Department of Labour, 26 Nov. 1938, Political Department, Internal ‘A’ branch, 24
(10)-I.A., 1938(Secret) (A), pp. 8–13, National Archives of India, New Delhi (NAI).
15
J. Thompson to L. C. L. Griffin, 18 Sept. 1945, 21(22)-I, 1945, p. 91, Political Department,
internal branch, NAI.
16
Daniel Klingensmith, One valley and a thousand: dams, nationalism and development (New Delhi
and New York, NY, 2007).
17
Sunil Khilnani, The idea of India (London, 1998), ch. 2.

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 6 Daniel Haines

political as well as economic ramifications.18 The Bhakra–Nangal project, and

other dams, became iconic in Indian imaginations through popular Hindi cin-
ema as well as government-produced public information films and pamphlets,
demonstrating their reach as symbols.19 In practical terms, dams were part of
an attempt to attain self-sufficiency in food production, intended to eliminate
India’s dependence on food imports.20 The agricultural sector was also econom-
ically important, despite the Nehru era’s focus on industrialization (and still
constituted 49 per cent of national gross domestic product by 1960).21 The
Bhakra–Nangal complex was just one among 160 major water-management
projects under construction or being planned by 1948.22
Apart from its place in the spectacle of nationalist development, Bhakra–
Nangal was important to regional politics and economics. The division of
the Indus Basin between India and Pakistan in 1947’s bloody Partition had
cut Indian agriculturists off from the majority of existing canal-irrigated
land. As the Government of East (Indian) Punjab put it, Sikh and Hindu pea-
sants had migrated westwards to colonial-era canal colonies where they
‘laboured and toiled for decades in converting the waste lands into granaries
of India’. When the Partition boundary placed those lands in Pakistan in
1947, ‘this peasant class had to flee from their homes’ and resettle in
India.23 At a December 1948 meeting of neighbouring state governments’
chief engineers, East Punjab’s representative secured agreement that the
scale of the refugee crisis meant it deserved special water rights. The other
states also agreed to reserve a substantial amount of land for the resettlement
of Punjabi refugees.24 East Punjab pushed hard to construct water-control
works and develop new lands, an ambition that was a key driver of India’s bit-
ter water-rights dispute with Pakistan throughout the 1950s.
The national thrust towards development and the practical problems of
refugee settlement in Punjab gave a sense of urgency to Bhakra–Nangal
plans. Actually building the dams and allocating their water and power
resources was a more complicated matter, with two other major processes
of decolonization interrupting. First, Bilaspur State had to be politically and

18
Benjamin Robert Siegel, Hungry nation: food, famine, and the making of modern India (Cambridge,
2018).
19
Sunil S. Amrith, Unruly waters: how mountain rivers and monsoons have shaped South Asia’s history
(London, 2018), pp. 193–210.
20
Ramaswamy R. Iyer, ‘Bhakra Nangal and the green revolution’, Economic and Political Weekly, 41
(2006), pp. 79–80.
21
John Adams, ‘India: much achieved, much to achieve’, in Selig S. Harrison, Paul H. Kreisberg,
and Dennis Kux, eds., India and Pakistan: the first fifty years (Washington, DC, and Cambridge, 1999),
p. 116.
22
Elisabeth Corell and Ashok Swain, ‘India: the domestic and international politics of water scar-
city’, in Leif Ohlsson, ed., Hydropolitics: conflicts over water as a development constraint (Dhaka and
London, 1995), p. 124.
23
Government of [East] Punjab, The five year plan (irrigation) (Jullundur, [1953?]), p. 3; DC
Jullunder index list, Sr. 774, Punjab State Archives, Chandigarh (PSA).
24
Meeting on 3–4 Dec. 1948 between chief engineers of East Punjab, Patiala, East Punjab States
Union, and Bikaner, and consulting engineer to the Government of India, 13[?] Dec. 1948, 6/5/50/
PAK III, p. 13, external affairs, Pakistan – III branch, NAI.

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 The Historical Journal 7

administratively integrated into the Indian Dominion. Bilaspur was only 729
km2 in area, about half the size of Greater London today, with a population
of around 130,000.25 The integration process was slow, and Bilaspur did not
join the Indian Union until 1948. By this time, the coming of the Bhakra
Dam already defined Bilaspur’s future. The dam was projected to create a
250 km2 reservoir, which would submerge the state’s major town and 256 vil-
lages, displacing somewhere around 24,000 people.26 A. N. Khosla, a leading
Government of India hydraulic engineer, played a major part in integration
negotiations with Raja Anandchand during summer 1948, highlighting the
enmeshing of Bilaspur’s political integration and development plans.27
Controversy over what integration meant for Bilaspur immediately broke
out. Given that more than half of the mountainous states’ habitable land
was about to disappear underwater, its prospects as an independent adminis-
trative political entity were slight. Elsewhere, the Ministry of States had set
about amalgamating contiguous groups of former princely states into new
units such as Gujarat, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, and the Patiala and East
Punjab States Union (PEPSU). Bilaspur nestled at the intersection between
Himachal Pradesh, PEPSU, and East Punjab. As early as May 1948, the East
Punjab government lobbied to absorb Bilaspur to ease the construction of
the dams.28 The centre ruled this out on the grounds that Punjab would
acquire a dominating voice in the Bhakra–Nangal project, a risk to the interests
of PEPSU and Rajasthan, which both stood to gain water (although Rajasthan
eventually received most of its water from a project on the Beas River instead).
New Delhi preferred to maintain direct control over Bilaspur and hence over
the dam sites.29 For the centre, Bhakra–Nangal was a national project which
would help create unity by distributing water and development benefits
amongst the quarrelling political units of north-west India. It could encourage
state governments to work together, establishing a network of interdepend-
ence on a single irrigation system and thereby integrating their economic
development programmes.30 The Ministry of External Affairs was particularly
concerned that East Punjab’s attempt to assert dominion over Bhakra–Nangal
waters within India would undermine India’s argument, deployed against
Pakistan in the international Indus Basin dispute, that all Indian territory

25
‘Bilaspur as affected by the Bhakra & Nangal Projects’, p. 6, enclosed with Anandchand to
Ministry of States, 23 Mar. 1949, prog. no. 151-P, 1949, states, political branch, NAI.
26
36,000 people were displaced in total, including some outside Bilaspur. My figures are esti-
mated using those in R. Rangachari, Bhakra–Nangal Project: socio-economic and environmental impacts
(New Delhi, 2006).
27
Ministry of States note, 9 Nov. 1951, prog. no. 26(8)-PA, 1951 (Secret), p. 5, states, political – A
branch, NAI.
28
Ministry of Home and Revenue, East Punjab, to Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel, 14 May 1948,
digitized private papers of Sardar Patel, identifier PP_000000005524, NAI Digitized Public Records
(DPR).
29
Minutes of meeting, 13 Dec. 1949, 6/5/50/PAK III: Bhakra project, external affairs, Pakistan –
III branch, pp. 64–6, NAI.
30
Daniel Haines, ‘Disputed rivers: sovereignty, territory and state-making in South Asia, 1948–
1951’, Geopolitics, 19 (2014), pp. 632–55.

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 8 Daniel Haines

had an inherent right to a share in Sutlej waters and that Pakistan had none.31
The centre therefore maintained, for the moment, direct rule of Bilaspur
rather than allocating it to a subnational unit.
The second process was democratization. While New Delhi’s motivation was
centralized control of the dam project, an important result was to deprive the
state of elected local bodies, which other former princely states were acquir-
ing. Princely states had been excluded from the constitutional reforms of
1919 and 1935 which had introduced important elements of representative
and elected government at provincial levels in British India. After independ-
ence, the new amalgamations of former princely states began to acquire demo-
cratic structures in order to catch up. Bilaspur, however, was governed by a
chief commissioner who was directly responsible to the central Ministry of
States, as were the strategically important border states of Manipur, Tripura,
and Kutch.32 They had no form of local popular representation, and were with-
out the political weight of a full state government. Bilaspur did have some
place in national-level democratic structures: Raja Anandchand had managed
to get himself appointed to the Constituent Assembly, which convened to for-
mulate the country’s new constitution, in July 1947.33 Bilaspur was also allotted
part of one joint seat in the council of states, which it shared with neighbour-
ing Himachal Pradesh, though Anandchand complained that the latter’s much
bigger population meant that Bilaspur’s interests would be overlooked.34 Direct
rule from Delhi suited him, and he resisted the idea that the state should be
amalgamated with a neighbouring territory, arguing that Bilaspur should be
administered as a Chief Commissioner’s Province, with himself as the president
of a local advisory council.35
The contradiction between the democratization of post-independence India
and the realities of continued authoritarian rule in Bilaspur was stark. The idea
of India as a representative democracy based on universal adult suffrage was
fundamental to political imaginations in the wake of decolonization, and citi-
zens’ associations successfully insisted upon their right to vote in, for example,
West Bengal.36 More broadly, the ability to articulate and press (if not neces-
sarily receive) rights as citizens was fundamental to popular perceptions of the
relationship between state and people in postcolonial South Asia.37 In fact, for-
mer princely states were slow to acquire representative structures, and it was
not until September 1951 that India’s parliament passed an act which provided

31
Note by Prem Krishen, Ministry of External Affairs, 13 Dec. 1949, 6/5/50/PAK III: Bhakra pro-
ject, external affairs, Pakistan – III branch, p. 1, NAI.
32
B. S. Khanna, ‘The problem of part C states’, Indian Journal of Political Science, 14 (1953), pp. 356–
60, at p. 357.
33
Hakumat Rai Phagwara of Kapurtala State to Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel, 10 Feb. 1948,
digitized private papers of Sardar Patel, identifier PP_000000005335, NAI DPR.
34
Anand Chand to V. P. Menon, secretary to Ministry of States, 13 Oct. 1950, digitized private
papers of Sardar Patel, identifier PP_000000005547, p. 5, NAI DPR.
35
Anandchand to Menon, 23 Mar. 1949.
36
Shani, ‘Making universal franchise’.
37
Sarah Ansari and William Gould, Boundaries of belonging: localities, citizenship and rights in India
and Pakistan (Cambridge, 2019), esp. ch. 4.

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 The Historical Journal 9

amalgamations such as Himachal Pradesh with limited democratic institu-

tions.38 In Bilaspur, however, it was clear that democratization was strictly sub-
ordinate to development, and that the Ministry of States would only consider
political reform there once the dam question had been settled. The centre’s
decisions on Bilaspur referred to its stake in the Bhakra–Nangal project and
its broader ambition to create a unified, national space of development in
north-west India rather than to the place that Bilaspuris had in the new
country. Decolonization was emerging as a highly uneven process.

II
Meanwhile, reinforcing the extent to which Bilaspur’s future was decided by
the exigencies of the dam project, the state governments of East Punjab,
PEPSU, and Himachal Pradesh mounted a territorial tussle over the dam
sites. ‘Our point of view’, reiterated one Ministry of States official in June
1950, ‘has always been that the Project is essentially an “inter-State Project
for the larger good of the Union as a whole”’, but Punjab continued to be a
worry.39 The ministry was concerned to maintain the centre’s stake in ‘opti-
mizing’ the project, echoing the assumption that central intervention could
best resolve inter-state conflicts and promote efficient planning.40 Since mul-
tiple states shared equities in the project, New Delhi could have legally taken
control through a statutory authority.41 This would have followed the prece-
dent of the Damodar Valley Corporation, incorporated in 1948, which took
charge of hydropower generation in West Bengal, or central intervention
into disagreements between Madras and Travancore-Cochin over the River
Periyar.42 Instead, the centre encouraged the states to jointly set up a control
board to manage the project. After much wrangling, they did so in November
1950. The board took charge of all technical and financial aspects of construc-
tion, including supervising the work done by the chief engineers in each
state.43 On the face of it, New Delhi’s insistence on national development – ‘the
larger good of the Union as a whole’ – had won out.
Rather than trust in the board, however, the state governments attempted
to wrest territorial control of the dam site for themselves. Such control was
important because it would enable governments to extend their authority
38
Holden Furber, ‘The Unification of India, 1947–1951’, Pacific Affairs, 24 (1951), pp. 366–7.
39
Ministry of States note, 27 June 1950, prog. no. 24(24)-Econ, 1950(A), p. 15, states, economic
branch, NAI.
40
Note by Hari Sharma, Ministry of States, 4 July 1950, prog. no. 24(24)-Econ, 1950(A), states,
economic branch, NAI.
41
‘Bhakra–Nangal project: inter-state control board proposed’, Times of India, 18 Sept. 1950.
42
Note by Hari Sharma, Ministry of States, 4 July 1950; US consul general, Madras, to State
Department, 28 Nov. 1955, C.D.F. 891.211/11–2855, Record Group (RG) 59, National Archives and
Records Administration, College Park, Maryland (NARA).
43
Resolution in the Ministry of Works, Mines, and Power, 25 Sept. 1950, prog. no. 24(24)-Econ,
1950(A), p. 95, states, economic branch, NAI. An advisory board complemented the work of the con-
trol board, with a mix of representatives from the centre, Punjab, Rajasthan, PEPSU, and Bilaspur.
See also Aloys Arthur Michel, The Indus rivers: a study of the effects of Partition (New Haven, CT, and
London, 1967), p. 343.

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 10 Daniel Haines

over the project’s water and power resources. While the archive is not clear on
the details, presumably the governments believed that the ability to appoint
engineers and regulate access to the site would yield the ability to influence
the design and management of the dam, ensuring that the state in question
received its ‘fair’ share (or, more likely, as a defensive manoeuvre to prevent
other states from annexing additional water resources).
The struggle to control Bhakra–Nangal was therefore a contest over the
extent to which hydro-development would be a state, regional, or national
concern. Part of the battle was fought in public. Dr Gopichang Bhargava, the
chief minister of East Punjab, laid the foundation stone for the Bhakra Dam
amid much press fanfare in 1951, calling the project a symbol of the new
(Indian) Punjab, which had arisen out of the ashes of the old province.44
Apart from overlooking the project’s location outside Punjab territory, and
other states’ claims on its waters, Bhargava’s reference to ‘old Punjab’ raised
the spectre of partition. His claim was that the new river control system was
helping to rebuild the province.
For the most part, though, the struggle over the dam sites took place through
thick, fast, and increasingly bitter correspondence amongst politicians and bureau-
crats. Sardar Nawab Singh, the East Punjab’s chief official, fired a new salvo in the
summer of 1952. The core of his argument was technocratic. He argued that the
Bhakra–Nangal project made Bilaspur vital to Punjab, a prime beneficiary. His gov-
ernment, he claimed, would have practical difficulties in the construction and
administration of the dams unless it could absorb the territory. The whole of
the Bilaspur State formed the catchment area of the Bhakra Dam, and conservation
of that area was paramount in the dam’s interests. East Punjab needed freedom to
unilaterally carry out soil-conservation and afforestation measures in the catch-
ment area to stop soil from washing into the reservoir and clogging up the mech-
anism. But Singh’s letter also deployed a cultural-historical claim, opening with a
meandering historical justification for Punjab’s annexation of Bilaspur. During the
seventeenth century, he wrote, the Rajas of Bilaspur also ruled over neighbouring
Kulu and Kangra, which had later become parts of Punjab. Given that the history of
people in ‘olden times’ used to be the history of their kings, he wrote, modern
Bilaspuris’ racial and cultural affinity lay with Punjab.45
Though this argument functioned as a veneer over technocratic motiva-
tions, Singh’s inclusion of it showed that cultural factors were a part of the
national conversation on what it meant to belong to both the nation and to
subnational units in postcolonial India. Rivalries between religious-political
(‘communal’) identities had been at the root of Partition; language was the
other key cultural factor in determining subnational senses of belonging in
independent India.46 During the colonial period, the Indian National

44
US embassy, New Delhi, to State Department, 1 May 1951, Central Decimal Files (CDF) 891.211/
5–151, NARA.
45
Sardar Nawab Singh, chief secretary to East Punjab government, to Ministry of States, 26 June
1952, prog. no. 26(8)-PA, 1951 (Secret), p. 95, states, political – A branch, NAI.
46
Asha Sarangi, ‘Introduction’, in Asja Saramgo, ed., Language and politics in India (New Delhi and
Oxford, 2009), pp. 6–7.

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 The Historical Journal 11

Congress had passed a formal resolution in 1920 calling on the government to

reorganize the multilingual provinces of British India to reflect discrete lan-
guage groups. When Nehru became prime minister in 1947, the Congress sus-
pended its interest in linguistic provinces in order to concentrate on general
administration, framing the constitution, and dealing with the Kashmir and
refugee crises. A Linguistic Provinces Commission, appointed in 1948, found
that the interlacing spread of language communities throughout India would
make truly homogeneous provinces impossible.47 But many Indians disagreed,
and in 1953 Potti Sriramalu would starve himself to death to press the cause of
a Telugu-speaking Andhra state, reopening the question and ultimately forcing
the 1956 redrawing of India’s political map along linguistic lines. Singh’s 1952
use of a historical argument about Bilaspur’s affinity with Punjab highlighted
the ways that cultural as well as technocratic arguments could be deployed in
development politics.
Other states similarly drew on both the technocratic and cultural
registers. V. Isvaran, chief secretary to the Government of PEPSU, followed
Singh in suggesting that the Himachal Pradesh government (which the centre
supported as the natural inheritor of Bilaspur) had no interest in soil conser-
vation, and indeed might well deforest large areas for the rehabilitation of dis-
placed people and accelerate the process of silting.48 Himachal Pradesh itself
had designs on Bilaspur, eying the revenues that it could levy by providing
water and power to other states, even though its own steep terrain was unsuit-
able for canal irrigation. Himachal’s chief secretary, K. L. Mehta, wrote to the
Ministry of States to press its case, condemning Punjab’s ‘antiquated’ claim
that Bilaspur’s royal history represented the modern population, but still
argued that the kings in question actually came from Rajputana rather than
Punjab. Shifting focus to the present, Mehta asserted that Bilaspur should
merge with Himachal Pradesh for reasons of ‘geographical continuity, racial
and cultural affinity as also [sic] administrative convenience’, mixing techno-
cratic and cultural justifications. If Punjab’s argument for control over
Bhakra–Nangal’s catchment were ‘carried to its logical conclusion’, he went
on, ‘the whole of [Himachal Pradesh] should be dismembered because it pro-
vides catchment areas for most of the rest of India!!! [sic]’.49 The Ministry of
States agreed that Punjab’s claim to Bilaspur ‘smack[ed] of extra-territoriality
or annexationism simply on the ground that a certain area is important for the
economic development of another area’. 50 This was a sensitive topic in India,
given that Pakistan made the similar argument that its dependence on the
headwaters of the Chenab River gave it a natural right to territorial control

47
Joseph E. Schwartzberg, ‘Factors in the linguistic reorganization of Indian states’, in Paul
Wallace, ed., Region and nation in India (New Delhi, 1985), pp. 155–62.
48
V. Isvaran, chief secretary to PEPSU government, to central Home Ministry, 5 Aug. 1952, prog.
no. 26(8)-PA, 1951 (Secret), p. 87, states, political – A branch, NAI.
49
K. L. Mehta, chief secretary to Himachal Pradesh government, to Ministry of States, 28 July
1952, prog. no. 26(8)-PA, 1951 (Secret), p. 63, states, political – A branch, NAI.
50
Note by V. Shankar, 7 Mar. 1952, prog. no. 26(8)-PA, 1951 (Secret), p. 44, states, political – A
branch, NAI.

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 12 Daniel Haines

of disputed Jammu and Kashmir.51 Singh, Isvaran, and Mehta had tried
hydraulic and cultural arguments, all of which articulated the interests of sub-
national territories and populations rather than national commonality. None
of their arguments appeared to sway central policy-makers, who insisted on
a vision of a unified national development space.

III
In the end, however, it was not the abstract figure of the nation but the practical
problems of rehabilitation for displaced people that came to dominate the ques-
tion of Bilaspur’s future. The Bhakra reservoir flooded, in whole or in part, 375
villages. Of those, 256 were in Bilaspur, accounting for nearly 4,000 rural families,
perhaps approximately 20,000 people. The reservoir also flooded Bilaspur town,
affecting a further 4,000 people.52 The problems connected with displacement
and rehabilitation after dam-building in South Asia since the 1990s are well
known.53 How issues surrounding displacement and rehabilitation played out
in India during earlier periods is not, however, well established.
As work at Bhakra got underway, it quickly became clear that Bilaspur could
not resettle all of the people that the dam’s reservoir was about to displace. By
1950, according to Shrichand Chhabra, Bilaspur’s chief commissioner, the
population had outgrown available cultivable land even before some was lost
to the reservoir. In combination with a decision to increase the height of
the dam, meaning that the reservoir would submerge 63,000 acres (a little
over 250 km2) rather than the previously proposed 18,000, resettling everybody
within Bilaspur was impossible.54 Instead, they would have to go elsewhere,
and the half-flooded state would need to be incorporated into a larger entity.
‘Obviously it cannot continue by itself’, agreed Nehru in April. ‘Indeed a great
part of it will be under water.’55 He insisted, though, that management of the
dam site – including what to do with displaced people – should not be linked to
the political question of the merger.56
51
Daniel Haines, Rivers divided: Indus basin waters in the making of India and Pakistan (London,
2017), ch. 3.
52
Rangachari, Bhakra–Nangal project, pp. 63, 193. A total of 7,209 families had their land acquired
as part of the total project, with 3,333 coming from Kangra district in Punjab (which transferred to
Himachal Pradesh in 1966). Bilaspuris therefore accounted for a little over half of the total affected
people. Bilaspur did however account for the vast majority of land acquired for the project con-
struction purposes, 123 km2 out of 180 km² total. That debate about rehabilitation focused on
Bilaspuris, and not people from Kangra, was perhaps due to the fact that so much of the state
was submerged, and that it was not at all clear where Bilaspuris should go. The figure of 20,000
people displaced from rural Bilaspur is based on Rangachari’s figures equating 7,209 families
with 36,000 people, which gives a mean of five individuals per family.
53
See Alf Gunvald Nilsen, Dispossession and resistance in India: the river and the rage (London and
New York, NY, 2012).
54
Note by Shrichand Chhabra, 15 Sept. 1950, prog. no. 24(24)-Econ, 1950(A), p. 80, states, eco-
nomic branch, NAI.
55
Extract from note by Nehru, 14 Apr. 1952, prog. no. 26(8)-PA, 1951 (Secret), p. 29, states, pol-
itical – A branch, NAI.
56
Note by C. Ganesan, 19 Aug. 1952, prog. no. 26(8)-PA, 1951 (Secret), p. 63, states, political – A
branch, NAI.

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 The Historical Journal 13

Regardless, the governments of surrounding states pressed claims that they

would best be able to rehabilitate displaced Bilaspuris, still seeking to demon-
strate links with the state. This placed the debate firmly on cultural and pol-
itical, rather than technocratic, lines. PEPSU’s bid to take displaced people
claimed that one of its constituent parts, the colonial-era Nalagarh State,
and Bilaspur had previously been one unit. Bilaspuris had more affinity with
Nalagarhis than with people in Punjab or Himachal Pradesh, Isvaran wrote.
Nalagarh was also sparsely populated, unlike the adjoining Kangra district of
Punjab, and thus offered easier means of rehabilitation.57 Similarly, Yashvant
Singh Parmar, a Congress member and soon-to-be chief minister of
Himachal Pradesh, pressed the central government to merge Bilaspur into
his state. He claimed to have received many representations from ‘the people
of Bilaspur’ who were worried about rehabilitation. Parmar lobbied to accom-
modate Bilaspuri displaced people in nearby districts of Himachal Pradesh,
which (he said) shared ethnic, cultural, and linguistic ties with Bilaspur.
Parmar argued this was far preferable to the alternative possibility of reset-
tling Bilaspuris in the desert tracts of Rajasthan, which would soon receive irri-
gation water from the new Rajasthan canal. To send Bilaspuris to Rajasthan,
Parmar wrote, would be unfair as they were ‘hill people’ who could not thrive
in the heat of the plains.58
Parmar’s concern about the climatic predilections of Bilaspuris echoed colo-
nial stereotypes, since colonial officials had also worried about Bilaspuris’
chances in Rajasthan in 1945.59 Around the same time, Mridula Sarabhai, a
New Delhi-based social worker and close associate of Nehru, wrote to the latter
that some Bilaspuris had asked her to plead the case for displaced people to be
resettled in Himachal Pradesh, and not deported to the desert.60 Happily for
Parmar and Sarabhai, Nehru agreed. ‘Hill people should go to a hill state’, he
wrote in one note.61 ‘They will not flourish there [in Rajasthan] at all and
will be exceedingly unhappy’, he concluded in another, sharing in Parmar’s
paternalism.62 Chief Commissioner Chhabra was no less paternalistic.
Bilaspuris, he had told the National Planning Commission in 1951, were illiter-
ate, backward, and dangerously parochial. They needed the administration to
‘provide necessary guidance and enterprise for any progress whether eco-
nomic, social or cultural’. Development in the parts of Bilaspur that remained
above water was inextricable from the rehabilitation of people affected by the

57
V. Isvaran, chief secretary to PEPSU government, to central Home Ministry, 5 Aug. 1952, prog.
no. 26(8)-PA, 1951 (Secret), p. 87, states, political – A branch, NAI.
58
Y. S. Parmar to Ministry of States, 21 Apr. 1952, prog. no. 24(9)-E, 1952, p. 76, states, economic
branch, NAI.
59
J. Thompson to L. C. L. Griffin, 18 Sept. 1945, 21(22)-I, 1945, p. 91, Political Department,
internal branch, NAI.
60
Mridula Sarabhai to Nehru and Gopalaswami Ayyangar, 12 Apr. 1952, prog. no. 24(9)-E, 1952,
p. 72, states, economic branch, NAI.
61
Extract from Nehru’s note, 14 Apr. 1952, prog. no. 26(8)-PA, 1951 (Secret), p. 29, states, polit-
ical – A branch, NAI.
62
Note by Nehru, 26 May 1952, prog. no. 26(8)-PA, 1951 (Secret), p. 38, states, political – A
branch, NAI.

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 14 Daniel Haines

reservoir.63 An engineer employed by the central government similarly wrote

in 1952 that rapid industrialization was the best solution to the problem of
rehabilitation.64 Even though the concern that Nehru, Parmar, and Chhabra
showed was rooted in colonial-era stereotypes and a presumption to know
more about Bilaspuris’ needs than the people themselves, it was not univer-
sally shared amongst policy-makers. One Ministry of States official wrote dis-
missively that the problems of rehabilitation were merely ‘incidental to the
building of large irrigation dams’ and needed little special attention.65 At
least Nehru’s personal oversight of the Bhakra–Nangal question kept
Bilaspuris’ welfare on the agenda.
Bilaspuris themselves, however, were by no means sanguine about their
fate. They vigorously debated rehabilitation and the state’s future. The archive
allows only indirect access to Bilaspuri voices, since only groups with the cap-
acity to transmit their demands to New Delhi are represented, and the extant
paper trail itself depends on bureaucratic acts of selection and translation. Yet
there is enough evidence to show that Bilaspuris were able to draw on the key
nationalist discourses of development and citizenship. Their interventions into
arguments over Bilaspur and the Bhakra–Nangal project showed that they well
understood how the logics of both development and citizenship impacted on
their relationship to the postcolonial state.
During the spring and summer of 1952, as work on the dams proceeded
apace, Bilaspuris held public meetings and sent petitions to politicians in
New Delhi and elsewhere. The convenors of a public meeting at Mandhali,
for example, sent a terse telegram to the Ministry of States in May 1952.
‘5000 people facing watery grave’, it read. ‘Rehabilitation issue paramount.’
Since the reservoir and resettlement needed the direct supervision and assist-
ance of the central government, they ‘Courteously pray[ed] immediate with-
drawal of measures’ to merge Bilaspur into Himachal Pradesh.66 The archive
does not show whether those attending the meeting felt that the dam project
was too far underway to contest, or whether they accepted it in the name of
development. Either way, the meeting linked the damage that the dam
would wreak to a broader coming-to-terms with the political-administrative
meaning of independence in the state. Yet it attempted to intervene only in
the political-administrative question of the merger, not in the cause of the
flood, namely the construction of the dam itself.
In seeking to shape resettlement policy and the state’s constitutional future,
Bilaspuris partly drew on the paternalistic relationship between the develop-
mental state and population that the colonial state had long since established.
63
Srichand Chhabra to National Planning Commission, 25 Feb. 1951, Ministry of Education, G-1
branch, identifier MINISTRY of EDUCATION_G-1_1951_NA_F-62–2_51, pp. 13–19, NAI DPR.
64
Note by S. K. Joglekar, Government of India Public Works Department, enclosed with under
secretary to Ministry of States letter to Chhabra, 2 Aug. 1952, prog. no. 24(9)-E, 1952, p. 102, states,
economic branch, NAI.
65
Central Home Ministry to Ministry of States, 28 Apr. 1952, prog. no. 26(8)-PA, 1951 (Secret),
p. 29, states, political – A branch, NAI.
66
Reluram Madanlal convenors to Ministry of States, 30 May[?] 1952, prog. no. 8(2)-PA, 1952,
p. 6, states, political – A branch, NAI.

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 The Historical Journal 15

In the case of water development, this had often played out through petitions
to courts.67 But Bilaspuris also deployed the newer language of national devel-
opment to frame collective rights to resources and to fuller participation in
India’s expanding democracy. A missive from the Bilaspur Small Town
Committee to the Ministry of States in March, for example, argued that the
special problems of the dam meant that Bilaspur required central assistance
for political and economic growth, invoking the key idea of progress.68 In
July, a petition from a group calling itself ‘Citizens of Bilaspur’, sent to the cen-
tral Minister for States Dr K. N. Katju in July, argued that Bilaspuris deserved
special consideration on account of the new reservoir. ‘We have no qualms
about this impending disaster; on the contrary we feel proud that our sacrifice
will bring light and life to millions of our brethren.’69 The missive showed that
Bilapuris could behave like the kind of development-oriented subjects that the
Indian state sought to produce, and were prepared to adopt the language of the
common good. These communications all drew on the discourse of develop-
ment, which the postcolonial authorities wanted to connect to everyday life
rather than cordon off as a separate realm of high technocracy. As Menon
has recently argued, the Government of India promoted the idea of ‘democratic
planning’, aiming to build a society of productive citizens and in the process
define ‘what Indian citizenship meant’.70 Bilaspuris were able to turn the
Nehruvian discourse of development to their own purposes in order to
make demands on the state.
Some Bilaspur organizations were in favour of merging with Himachal
Pradesh, including the local District Congress Committee, members of which
wrote to senior party members in Himachal Pradesh, as well as to leaders in
New Delhi.71 Others opposed it. The rest of the ‘Citizens of Bilaspur’ petition
revealed a determination to hold onto local identity by objecting to the
Himachal Pradesh merger, which would shift the local administration and
law courts away to Shimla, Himachal Pradesh’s capital. The assumption that
Bilaspuris were culturally and linguistically similar to Himachalis was, the peti-
tion argued, mistaken. Bilaspuri language and culture reflected a long histor-
ical engagement with the regions to the state’s west and south. Moreover,
the petition argued that Bilaspur had historically been an independent unit,
claiming that the Mughal emperors and then the Sikh rulers of Punjab had
done little to interfere with its internal autonomy; even the British, it went

67
Aditya Ramesh, ‘Custom as natural: land, water and law in colonial Madras’, Studies in History,
34 (2018), pp. 1–19.
68
Bilaspur Small Town Committee members to V. Shankar, 29 Mar. 1952, prog. no. 26(8)-PA,
1951 (secret), p. 28, states, political – A branch, NAI.
69
‘Citizens of Bilaspur’ to Dr K. N. Katju, states minister, 1 July 1952, prog. no. 8(2)-PA, 1952, p. 7,
states, political – A branch, NAI. The petition claimed to represent 41,806 signatories out of the
c. 64,000 voters in Bilaspur.
70
Menon, ‘“Help the plan – help yourself”’, p. 222.
71
Y. S. Parmar to Ministry of States, 21 Apr. 1952, prog. no. 24(9)-E, 1952, p. 76, states, economic
branch, NAI. Daulat Ram Sankhyayan, member of Bilaspur District Congress Committee, to Rajendra
Prasad, Jawaharlal Nehru, and K. N. Katju, Sept.[?] 1952, prog. no. 8(2)-PA, 1952, states, political – A
branch, NAI.

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 16 Daniel Haines

on, signed a treaty which had remained in force until they withdrew from
India. The implication was that Bilaspur’s unique history demanded unique
contemporary policy, not simply being rolled into India’s homogenizing
legal space. Bilaspuris, in other words, could articulate membership of the
developmental Indian nation (bringing benefits to ‘our brethren’ downstream)
at the same time as local particularism. Just because the reservoir would sub-
merge Bilaspur’s territory, they reasoned, did not mean that Bilaspuri identity
should also disappear underwater. The petition argued that the Bhakra reser-
voir made the state a special case, requiring continued central assistance and
supervision. Like technocrats in Punjab, PEPSU, and Haryana, Bilaspuris were
able to reconcile the competing postcolonial discourses of development and
political belonging, articulating a case against the homogenization of a
national development space.
Raja Anandchand also proved adept at deploying discourses of development
to oppose the merger, wary of having his influence diluted by loss of access to
local decision-makers. A colonial official had written in 1945 that Anandchand
was ‘a Ruler who has the interests of his subjects so deeply at heart and is
unusually well qualified to protect them’, but he quickly fell out with the post-
independence government. His refusal to attend a conference in 1948 to dis-
cuss the constitutional future of the sub-Himalayan hill states, claiming a
right to special treatment as host of the Bhakra–Nangal project, drew a
sharp rebuke from the Ministry of States.72 Initially appointed as Bilaspur’s
chief commissioner, the centre dislodged him from this position and appointed
a civil servant in his place in 1949. He rallied his supporters to agitate against
this, to no effect.73 In the autumn of 1951, Anandchand stood for election to
the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of parliament, much to the concern of
Parmar, who wrote to Nehru to warn him that the Raja represented an ‘out-
moded outlook and reactionary policies’.74 Nehru himself referred to
Anandchand as ‘a bad hat’, and the Ministry of States was careful not to
encourage Anandchand in his political ambitions.75 Anandchand had his
way, though, and was elected unopposed after three other candidates withdrew
the week before the election.76
In 1952, as state governments and public meetings debated Bilaspur’s
future, Anandchand threw himself into opposing a merger with Himachal
Pradesh.77 In May, a Congress representative, Bhagirathprasad Dixit, cabled

72
Ministry of Commerce to Ministry of States, 9 Mar. 1948, prog. no. 63-P(S), 1948, p. 8, identifier
PR_000001623130, NAI DPR.
73
Ministry of States note, 9 Nov. 1951, prog. no. 26(8)-PA, 1951 (Secret), p. 5, states, political – A
branch, NAI.
74
Y. S. Parmar to Nehru, 11 Sept. 1951, enclosed with Nehru to Gopalaswami Ayyangar, 21 Sept.
1951, prog. no. 26(8)-PA, 1951 (Secret), p. 2, political – A branch, NAI.
75
Nehru to Ayyangar, 21 Sept. 1951, prog. no. 26(8)-PA, 1951 (Secret), p. 2, states, political – A
branch, NAI. Ministry of States note, 24 Sept. 1951, prog. no. 26(8)-PA, 1951 (Secret), p. 1, political –
A branch, NAI.
76
‘Bilaspur raja elected’, Times of India, 1 Nov. 1951.
77
Raja Anandchand to Ayyangar, 20 Feb. 1952, prog. no. 26(8)-PA, 1951 (Secret), p. 24, states,
political – A branch, NAI.

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 The Historical Journal 17

Nehru and the Ministry of States to warn that the Raja’s ‘hirelings’ were com-
ing to Delhi in a ‘bogus deputation’ in order to press ‘false representations’
against the merger. ‘Please don’t be misled’, Dixit finished.78 Dixit need not
have worried. Similar previous representations from the Raja’s supporters to
the ministry had achieved nothing. Bilaspur’s zaildars, landed gentry who
moonlighted as government workers, had also made a similar appeal, with
no more success.79
Nevertheless, the way that Anandchand framed his interventions on the
merger was important. In June, he apparently agreed with the Small Town
Committee of Bilaspur, an organization that overlapped in personnel with
the Congress party, that the existing political set up of Bilaspur did not fit
into ‘free India’. The only solution was to merge with Himachal Pradesh,
since a larger state with a popular ministry and legislature would be better
able not only to ensure general development but to understand and handle
the particular problems of the Bhakra–Nangal project.80 A member of the
Bilaspur District Congress Committee quickly accused Ananchand of reneging
on the agreement and influencing local community organizations to pass reso-
lutions against the merger.81 Whatever really passed between Ananchand and
the local Congress organization, the key point is that the dam and Bilaspur’s
political status appeared as conjoined problems. Whether lobbying for or
against the merger, Anandchand linked the construction of the dam complex
to Bilaspur’s territorial status and to the broader national milieu of develop-
ment, demonstrating the central place that development had come to play
in the political discourse of Nehruvian India. Despite disagreements over spe-
cifics, the Raja, Bilaspuri citizen groups, and technocrats in other states’ gov-
ernments all agreed that economic development was the proper object of state
action. Several of the statements that emerged from Bilaspur explicitly
accepted the construction of the dam as necessary for national development;
making claims for Bilaspur’s own need for development was a way of linking
local claims to a powerful national narrative. Bilaspur’s entry into ‘free
India’ meant running discursive battles over the relationship between the
national good and development in the state.
A final element in popular Bilaspuri representations was a consistent
demand for greater local democracy. The ‘Citizens of Bilaspur’ petition, for
instance, called for political arrangements in which the administration
represented the people. Exactly what the petition was asking for is not
clear: presumably, it referred to the lack of local representative structures,

78
Bhagirathprasad Dixit, All-India Congress Committee, to Nehru and Katju, 20 May 1952, prog.
no. 8(2)-PA, 1952, p.3, states, political – A branch, NAI.
79
Note by V. Shankar, 22 Mar. 1952, prog. no. 26(8)-PA, 1951 (Secret), p. 26, states, political – A
branch, NAI.
80
Sant Ram Kanga, member of All-India Congress Committee and Small Town Committee,
Bilaspur, to Anandchand, 19 June 1952, prog. no. 26(8)-PA, 1951 (Secret), pp. 59–60, states,
political – A branch, NAI.
81
Daulat Ram Sankhyayan, member of Bilaspur District Congress Committee, to Rajendra
Prasad, Jawaharlal Nehru and K. N. Katju, [Sept. 1952?], prog. no. 8(2)-PA, 1952, p. 21, states,
political – A branch, NAI.

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 18 Daniel Haines

since the state had already elected Anandchand to the Lok Sabha. But the peti-
tion, as the collective name of the correspondents suggested, explicitly articu-
lated the interests of citizens. Other Bilaspuri missives to the centre, while
echoing the form of colonial-era petitions, also articulated the democratic
rights of citizens. Representatives of the local branch of the Scheduled
Castes Welfare Association argued that the government must respect public
opinion in a democracy like India, stressing the right of Bilaspuris to partici-
pate in decision-making about local political structures.82
If Bilaspuris believed that a local legislature might protect their interests
better than direct rule from the centre, they might well have been right.
There is no evidence in the available records that central voices argued for
Bilaspuris to have a formal voice in deciding the state’s constitutional future.
On the contrary, an official who worked for the central commission for the
nationwide territorial reorganization of states wrote approvingly in 1954
that the Government of India had not consulted the people of Bilaspur on
the merger with Himachal Pradesh, because ‘when such wishes come into con-
flict with the larger interests of the country [i.e. the Bhakra–Nangal complex],
the latter must prevail’.83 The language of the national interest could be
deployed against Bilaspuri demands for representation, as well as in their
favour. In that context, claims to political representation were doubly import-
ant as an ideological counterweight to big dams’ centralization of state power.
This was not a simple case of a developmental state versus an unwilling
people, but a debate about the distribution of the costs and benefits of devel-
opment in the context of democratization. Whereas the central government
had delayed the introduction of representative structures in Bilaspur in
order to press ahead with the Bhakra–Nangal project, Bilaspuris themselves
put forward the dam’s impact on their state as an imperative towards democ-
racy. In practice, though, instead of engagement through full democratic struc-
tures, and the ability to hold decision-makers to account through legislative
representation, Bilaspuris found only a limited formal voice in resettlement
policy through consultations that the Bhakra Rehabilitation Committee, a sub-
sidiary of the inter-state control board, held in late 1952.84

IV
In August 1952, Nehru and the Ministry of States made final plans to absorb
Bilaspur into Himachal Pradesh once construction on the dam ended, and
let the Himachal Pradesh government handle resettlement.85 Water began to
flow from the project in 1953, bringing some of the promised economic
82
Nathu Ram, president, Scheduled Castes Welfare Association, Bilaspur, to Nehru, 12 Sept.
1952, prog. no. 8(2)-PA, 1952, p. 22, states, political – A branch, NAI.
83
Note, secretariat of the National Planning Commission, 1954, States Reorganization
Commission file 36/11/54-SRC, PR_000005002056, pp. 24–5, NAI DPR.
84
Shrichand Chhabra to Ministry of States, 16 June 1953, prog. no. 24(49)-Econ, 1953, p. 3, states,
economic branch, NAI.
85
Note by C. Ganesan, 19 Aug. 1952, prog. no. 26(8)-PA, 1951 (Secret), p. 63, states, political – A
branch, NAI.

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 The Historical Journal 19

benefits: Hissar district, one of the parched ‘famine districts’ of colonial

Punjab, now drew settlers from outside the area to work newly irrigated tracts
while the waters pushed up land values, and enabled much higher cropping
intensity.86 Meanwhile, Bilaspuris were resettled elsewhere. Good figures for
the resettlement of Bilaspur displaced persons alone are not available. But
for the project as a whole, approximately a third resettled in Himachal
Pradesh, a third took cash compensation and organized their own resettle-
ment, and a third resettled in the project irrigation command.87 People dis-
placed from Bilaspur town perhaps settled in the new town that was built
next to the reservoir. In July 1954, national legislation formally integrated
Bilaspur into Himachal Pradesh, at the same time that India fully opened
the Bhakra–Nangal canals for the first time.88 With Bilaspur merged into
Himachal Pradesh, and the survivors of the flood making their way to other
places, the battle for Bilaspur ended. Bilaspur remained a single constituency
for national elections, and Anandchand continued to represent the territory in
the Lok Sabha. Bilaspuris were also now finally able to elect legislators to a
state assembly. But the Bhakra–Nangal project continued to provide the central
government with both justification and motive for maintaining extraordinary
powers to ensure the ‘proper administration and effective implementation’ of
the dam complex.89 Evidently, the importance of nationalist development
continued to outweigh that of India’s emerging democratic norms.
This was also clear in the rhetoric that emerged from senior leadership dur-
ing the mid-1950s, which studiously erased the complexity of the politics that
had characterized the planning process and integration of Bilaspur, favouring
instead the grand narrative of techno-development for the national good. In
1954, Nehru famously likened dams, ‘these places where human beings labour
for the benefit of humanity’, to ‘the temples of today’ during a speech about
the Bhakra–Nangal project.90 In another speech the following year, he sug-
gested that the authorities should put up a monument to the thousands of
the ‘great unknown’ who would build ‘this inspiring harbinger of prosperity’
to the nation.91 Nothing was said of the fierce inter-state rivalries that had
characterized the planning process, nor of the delay to democracy in
Bilaspur that the project had justified. Yet regional politics did not go away,
and during the 1960s, as subnational territorial boundaries in north-western
India changed several times, the downstream states of Punjab and Haryana

86
Gurdit Singh and Swarn Singh, ‘Effects of Bhakra Dam irrigation on the economy of the barani
villages in the Hissar district 1954–55’, publication no. 65 (Chandigarh: Board of Economic Enquiry,
Punjab (India), 1961), pp. 2–83, DC Jullunder index list, Sr. 184, PSA.
87
Rangachari, Bhakra–Nangal project, p. 64.
88
US embassy, Karachi, to State Department, 7 July 1954, folder 64, Karachi Top Secret General
Records, 1947–55, RG 84, NARA.
89
Copy of Gazette of India, extraordinary, part II, section I, 31 May 1954, Delimitation Commission
of India file 58/19/53, identifier PR_000005014568, p. 53, NAI DPR.
90
Government of India Press Information Bureau, ‘Opening of the Bhakra main canal: prime
minister’s speech’ (in English and Hindi), 13 July 1954, P III/54/2821/2 vol. III, external affairs,
Pakistan – III branch, NAI.
91
‘Foundation of Bhakra Dam laid’, Times of India, 18 Nov. 1955.

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 20 Daniel Haines

began a lasting dispute over ownership of the project. Intensifying the role of
popular dissent in hydropolitics, politicians in both states led mass demonstra-
tions and unleashed bitter rhetoric in elected legislatures. The consensus era
of Nehruvian post-independence politics was over, and debates about develop-
ment had shifted from framing in terms of the ‘national good’ to one that
foregrounded local territorial-political belonging at the expense of national
identity.92

V
Neither the strident centralist rhetoric of dam ceremonies nor the later hos-
tility between Punjab and Haryana should cause us to overlook the complexity
of the ways that the dam project impacted on local politics, or how its material
and symbolic value was deployed in different articulations of what it meant for
Bilaspuris to be citizens of free India. Bilaspuris demanded democracy as the
right of those who not only lived in India, but lost their homes and lands
for the national good, even as the central government denied them represen-
tative government in order to smooth the construction of the same project.
Making claims on the state in relation to water-resources development was
not new to the postcolonial period, but by demanding access to democratic
structures as well as development opportunities, Bilaspuris demanded full par-
ticipation in ‘Free India’. Like the 1950 constitution, which created both motive
and opportunity for everyday debate about the meaning of citizenship, the
Bhakra–Nangal project created a need for Bilaspuris to articulate rights to
rehabilitation and political representation. At the same time, powerful contem-
porary discourses of development and citizenship provided the language on
which they could draw.
Admittedly, the power dynamics were uneven, and local actors with little
leverage could only make requests from a position of supplication. Bilaspuris’
representations for compensation were polite and moderate, and national poli-
ticians and technocrats in New Delhi largely ignored them. This could lend sup-
port to the viewpoint of scholars such as Martinez-Alier who have emphasized
ways that the ‘environmentalism of the poor’ in developing countries has pitted
marginalized local groups in protest against state and corporate power, which
appropriates local space and resources in the name of economic development.93
But we have also seen that Bilaspuris were able to mobilize the ideological
resources of independent statehood in order to support their arguments in a
way that, as I noted above, was central to popular understandings of independ-
ence in early postcolonial South Asia. Development was not a rarefied space that
escaped politics while extending state power. Instead it was entangled in the

92
Birender Singh, Haryana chief minister, to central Home Ministry, 6/8 May 1967, annexure 1,
17/07/1967, p. 66, home affairs, SR branch, NAI. Central Home Ministry note, undated [1967?], 17/
07/1967, p. 151, home affairs, SR branch, NAI.
93
Joan Martinez-Alier, ‘The environmentalism of the poor: its origins and spread’, in John
Robert McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin, eds., A companion to global environmental history
(Oxford, 2012).

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 The Historical Journal 21

broader processes through which subjects of an empire became citizens of a

postcolonial state.
Acknowledgements. I am grateful to this journal’s co-editor Sarah Pearsall and to the anonym-
ous peer reviewers of this journal for their kindness, patience, and constructive feedback. I also
owe thanks to my friends and colleagues Aditya Ramesh, Andrew Flack, Elisabeth Leake, Hannah
Charnock, Sarah Ansari, and Su Lin Lewis for comments on recent drafts, and to numerous confer-
ence audiences and my university department’s ‘dead author’ workshop for comments on earlier
versions.

Cite this article: Haines D (2021). Development, Citizenship, and the Bhakra–Nangal Dams in
Postcolonial India, 1948–1952. The Historical Journal 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/
S0018246X21000625

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