By Ayesha Siddiqi, Assistant Professor, Human Geography, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

In 2022, the unprecedented floods in Pakistan made two facts particularly clear around the colonial logic of disasters. These large-scale floods are the product of (i) material and (ii) epistemic coloniality. The barrages built for water storage and release, by the British Raj, along the Lower Indus Delta (Haines, 2011; 2013) and the largest contiguous canal network in Punjab (Gilmartin, 2020; Ali, 1988) while successful at delivering political patronage for an Imperial regime, have always tended to work against rather than with the natural ‘rythmicity’ of the river (Jackson et al., 2022). These (infra)structures however are not just vestiges of a by-gone colonial past but rather still regularly exacerbate risk during flood years. Assessments of the 2010 super-floods in Pakistan conclude that the worst damage was not from rainwater but from dam and barrage related issues such as backwater effects, sedimentation and aggradation that reduced the water channel capacity to carry water away and multiple failures of irrigation leeves (Syvitski & Brakenridge 2013). Further, the significant drainage related challenges and rising waterlogging and salinity in topsoil because of the extensive irrigation networks are considerable problems even in non-flood years.

Residents living along the Indus Delta however, are equally vulnerable to flooding because of epistemic coloniality that produces these infrastructural realities. By this, I mean the unwavering ideological belief since colonial times that a modernist river engineering paradigm relying on hydrological mega projects for water management more generally, and for flood management more specifically, is a ‘solution’ or panacea for avoiding such disasters. This conviction, in large dams and more engineering along the river as a solution, is as problematic as the actual structures that cause damage. My own research, on the 2010 floods, illustrates the ways in which this thinking causes havoc in people’s lives every flood year. Through engineered projects such as the Left Bank Outfall Drain project (Siddiqi, 2023) that are also at the same time integral to state power. There is a vibrant conversation in the social sciences on ways of working with the ‘rythmicity’ of the river, rather than against it, that does not appear to have reached state planning in Pakistan.

“Disaster!” But who decides?

“The army walay said you can’t live here anymore; we have come to evacuate you because this land is dangerous, it will flood again. We went with them to the (relief) camp but a few days later snuck out without telling them – this is our home after all we will not hand it over without a fight”.

Interviewee from Badin District, Pakistan, May 2012

When talking about some of the worst floods Pakistan had ever experienced in 2010 and 2011, my research interlocutors often spent much longer discussing the trauma of being forced to leave their homes by State authorities. This special issue is especially interested in understanding ‘harm and hardship’ beyond imposed concepts of ‘hazards and vulnerability’. My work in Pakistan has repeatedly illustrated what is considered to be the ‘disaster’ is not universal. For some, it is the State action being taken after the flooding, while for others, the real disaster was not being able to return to a ‘home’. Some of them also pointed out that the biggest and most calamitous disaster was the moral bankruptcy in society unleashing the ‘wrath of the Divine’ through rivers, mountains or from beneath the earth. Acknowledging that disasters are in fact not equal to vulnerability times exposure, but rather what those who experience and live them explain they are, is the first step in exploring postcolonial futures for disaster risk reduction in South Asia.

Is there one postcolonial ‘solution’ to disasters & does it matter where it comes from?

The large-scale floods in Pakistan in 2022 were catastrophic, affecting over 33 million people, and as estimated by the World Bank, the worst affected region was the province of Sindh (The World Bank, 20 Oct 2022). The political entity and landmass of Sindh is also the periphery for the Pakistan’s largest city, and economic capital, Karachi. Supplying the latter with a constant supply of labour and agricultural produce. Every flood year it is this, pejoratively called “interior” of Sindh, that suffers from floods of biblical proportions; while Karachi, its capital city, is not affected the same way. Increasingly, several locally conceptualised flood management methods are being explored through partnerships between practitioners in Karachi and residents who are regularly affected by floods along the Indus River Delta. The most notable example of this is the work being done by Pakistan’s first woman architect, based in Karachi, working with affected communities to build water resistant low-cost bamboo housing, drainage channels around homes and other building design related interventions (Fitz et al., 2023) to reduce the impact of flooding on people’s lives.

This model of self-sustaining residential communities has not emerged from traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) produced by indigenous communities. Although, it acknowledges and seeks ways to work with such a system. Neither has this thinking emerged from those farmers or residents living with these hydraulic systems (Mustafa, 2022). Rather it comes from a partnership between those who work on safe building and those who need to live in safer buildings. Is there a point at which postcolonial scholars on disasters (including me!) can recognise that ‘indigenous knowledge’ on environmental or hydraulic systems doesn’t have to be the same thing, in all places, at all times? Can working towards ‘indigenising’ any form of knowledge available a worthy pursuit if it helps people live safer lives?

Concluding thoughts

In Pakistan, large hydraulic infrastructure projects are considered ‘strategic assets’ of a powerful military. A postcolonial future for flooding disasters can therefore not be imagined without challenging deeply entrenched power structures. The devastating floods of 2022 were not a catalyst for starting this discussion in public discourse but rather were used by power to garner more support for another large hydraulic project (Dawn, 11 September 2022). Yet in my research, I repeatedly encounter people who are fighting to hold on to hope, so we should do better, be better, as critical theorists in not just critiquing this system but engaging tangibly with what this hopeful decolonial future of disaster studies looks like.

Photo caption: Illustrating the enormous and overwhelming nature of infrastructural projects on the River Indus. Photo credit: AP Photo/Anjum Naveed, File. https://thediplomat.com/2021/03/the-cost-of-pakistans-dam-obsession/

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this piece are those of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of AIDMI.