Victor Gao’s veiled warning to India revives old fears over China’s grip on Brahmaputra

New Delhi: Victor Zhikai Gao, the prominent Chinese geopolitical commentator, academic and former interpreter to Deng Xiaoping, delivered a pointed message to New Delhi at a recent seminar on the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) held in Islamabad. It came over India’s decision to keep the treaty in abeyance following the Pahalgam terror attack of April 22, 2025, in Jammu & Kashmir.

Speaking at the high-profile gathering, Gao, the vice-president of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization and a chair professor at Soochow University, invoked an old Confucian proverb: “Don’t do unto others what you don’t want others do unto you.” The remark was aimed at reminding India that it is hardly an “upstream” country, as far as the Indus river is concerned. It was a none-too-subtle reference to India’s own dependence on the China-controlled Brahmaputra.

He argued that by suspending the IWT, India was committing a “crime against humanity”, and demanded that Beijing be given a say in the treaty’s future.

He went on to propose a trilateral arrangement involving China, India and Pakistan to ensure the flow of the Indus is not interrupted and is better managed. He then broadened his argument to the roughly eighteen countries that depend on rivers flowing out of the Tibetan plateau, calling for a common international framework.

This is not the first time Gao has waded into the subject. He had earlier, in an interview to an Indian news channel, hinted that China’s own upstream leverage on the Brahmaputra meant India, as a midstream and downstream state, could find itself facing difficulties of a similar nature should retaliatory logic ever be applied both ways.

His latest remarks, delivered on Pakistani soil and timed to a seminar organized in Islamabad, underline how closely Beijing and Islamabad continue to coordinate their messaging on water. This comes even as concern grows in the two capitals over what further steps India might take against Pakistan’s share of the Indus waters.

The context is significant. New Delhi held the IWT, a 1960 World Bank-brokered agreement, in abeyance as part of a package of punitive measures after the Pahalgam attack, and has since declined to restore it. Islamabad has called any interference with its share of the Indus system “an act of war” and even threatened to go to war with India over it, as RNA Media had reported.

Gao’s intervention, though framed as a call for regional cooperation, was widely read in New Delhi’s strategic community as a reminder of something else. China, sitting astride the Yarlung Tsangpo – the Tibetan name for the river that becomes the Siang and then the Brahmaputra on entering Arunachal Pradesh – holds a comparable card of its own.

Adding to the unease is the fact that China has not shared hydrological data on the Brahmaputra with India since 2022. The governing memorandum of understanding on data-sharing lapsed in June 2025 without renewal.

What if Beijing did squeeze the flow?

China has, in the meantime, pressed ahead with the physical infrastructure that gives such rhetoric its edge. Construction on the Medog, or Motuo, Hydropower Station – a five-station cascade on the lower Yarlung Tsangpo – was approved in December 2024 and formally began on July 19, 2025.

Costing an estimated roughly $170 billion and designed to install around 60 gigawatts of capacity, the project is expected to generate close to 300 terawatt-hours a year once complete in the early-to-mid 2030s. That is nearly triple the output of the Three Gorges Dam.

The scheme involves four 20-kilometre tunnels bored through the Namcha Barwa massif. These are designed to exploit a nearly 2,000-metre drop in the river’s elevation over a 50-kilometre stretch known as the Great Bend.

Should China ever decide to use this infrastructure coercively rather than merely for power generation, the plausible risks fall into three baskets. First, sudden, unannounced releases of water during construction, filling or emergency operation could trigger flash floods downstream in Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, a danger sharpened by the fact that the dam sits in one of the most seismically active stretches of the Himalaya.

Second, trapping of sediment behind the cascade could starve the floodplains of the nutrient-rich silt that sustains agriculture in the Brahmaputra valley, while altering the river’s course over time. Third, and more immediately, Beijing’s continuing refusal to share real-time hydrological data functions as a form of leverage in itself, denying India early warning regardless of what happens at the dam site.

However, the picture is not one of unchecked Chinese control. Chinese officials describe the project as run-of-the-river rather than storage-based, meaning it is not designed to impound and withhold large volumes of water for extended periods.

Scientific assessments suggest that 65 to 70 per cent of the Brahmaputra’s annual discharge is generated within India itself, chiefly through monsoon rainfall and tributaries. Only about a quarter of the total flow originates from snow and glacial melt in Tibet.

The chief minister of Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma, has gone so far as to argue that a reduction in upstream flow might even help ease the state’s chronic monsoon flooding, since the river is overwhelmingly rain-fed rather than China-fed. The genuine threat, most independent hydrologists argue, lies less in China’s ability to “dry out” the northeast and more in dam-safety risk, sediment disruption and the psychological uncertainty created by an opaque, unilateral upstream neighbour.

India’s countermeasures

New Delhi’s response has so far combined structural, diplomatic and technical measures.

The most direct structural answer is the proposed Siang Upper Multipurpose Project (SUMP) in Arunachal Pradesh’s Upper Siang district. Costing an estimated ₹1.13 lakh crore, the project envisages an 11,000 to 11,200 megawatt storage-type dam with a reservoir capacity of nine billion cubic metres.

The dam is designed to buffer against sudden upstream releases while also generating power and strengthening India’s case for “prior-use” rights under customary principles of international water law. Progress has, however, been slow.

The Centre and the Arunachal Pradesh government are running a livelihood and outreach programme to win over the Adi and Galo tribal communities, who remain wary of displacement, ahead of even finalising the dam site.

On the diplomatic front, India has pressed for the resumption and modernisation of hydrological data-sharing through the bilateral expert-level mechanism (ELM) on trans-border rivers, first established in 2006. Analysts have called for new monitoring stations to be established closer to the Great Bend itself – around Mêdog and Gompo Ne – since existing stations further upstream capture only a fraction of the flow relevant to Indian planning.

The scheduling of India’s own BRICS presidency this year, followed by China’s in 2027 and the third UN Water Conference in December 2026, offers a diplomatic window. It could help anchor water cooperation within a wider multilateral process rather than leave it to sporadic bilateral gestures.

The external affairs minister, S Jaishankar, has previously raised the issue directly with his Chinese counterparts, urging both transparency on the dam’s construction and a firm timeline for restoring data-sharing.

Beyond the Brahmaputra basin itself, India has also revived plans to interlink rivers as a buffer against any future upstream disruption. These include the proposed Manas-Sankosh-Teesta-Ganga link and the Jogighopa-Teesta-Farakka link, both intended to diversify the northeast’s water dependence beyond a single transboundary source.

Independent satellite monitoring, through India’s own remote-sensing assets, offers a further hedge, allowing New Delhi to track reservoir levels at the Great Bend even without Chinese cooperation. Finally, coordinating more closely with Bangladesh, which shares India’s downstream vulnerability on the same river system, would give New Delhi a stronger collective voice.

Such coordination could help press Beijing towards a rules-based, transparent basin framework rather than the ad hoc arrangement that has prevailed for two decades.

Gao’s remarks may or may not carry Beijing’s formal blessing. But they serve as a reminder that India’s upstream leverage on the Indus is mirrored, uncomfortably, by its downstream vulnerability on the Brahmaputra – and that closing that gap will take sustained investment in storage, data and diplomacy, not rhetoric alone.