Heat, hate and hegemony

Last summer’s sweltering heat claimed some 500 precious lives in Pakistan. In its seasonal outlook for the hot weather season – April to June – the Indian Meteorological Department has predicted above-normal temperatures for this year.

Similar warnings have come from the Pakistan Meteorological Department. The World Meteorological Organization announced that 2024 was not only the hottest year on record but also the year in which the world warmed above the critical 1.5 C average threshold. Devastating floods, landslides, inundated swathes of land, water scarcity, toxic air and heatwaves are a recurring reality in South Asia, threatening lives, livelihoods and regional stability.

India’s attack on Pakistan must be viewed in the context of our already burning planet. India’s late-night and broad daylight attacks in major cities of Pakistan claimed more than 55 lives. Following a dangerous escalation that included missile and drone attacks on civilian and military bases, US President Donald Trump’s tweet announcing immediate ceasefire between India and Pakistan on Sunday brought much-needed respite.

Each side is claiming victory in this war between nuclear neighbours. The claims and counterclaims will continue, but we must not forget that the military-industrial corporate complex plays a significant role in driving our anthropogenic climate crisis.

This recent headline-grabbing escalation indeed marks a dangerous turning point in South Asia. But a more enduring and often invisible crisis of climate change lies beneath the spectacle of looming full-scale war and counterclaims. While footage of airstrikes dominates the news cycle, the region’s environmental breakdown, resulting in glacial melt, heatwaves and groundwater depletion, is tearing at the social, political and economic fabric in ways our national security lenses fail to grasp.

In the context of a heating planet, driven by hatred for Pakistan, our neighbour with hegemonic ambitions has unilaterally suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, which is a decades-old water sharing agreement vital to Pakistan’s survival. By suspending it, India is threatening the lives of farmers, fisherfolk, the urban poor, and entire ecologies dependent on the Indus River system.

The Indus feeds Pakistan’s irrigated land and hosts multiple species in and around it. Its suspension risks nothing short of a humanitarian disaster. Climate change has already weakened the Indus system. The rapid glacial melt and erratic monsoons have reduced flows, while groundwater overuse has pushed aquifers to the brink. Suspending the treaty not only weaponises water but also threatens an already exploited ecological system.

Ours is not an isolated story. In Bangladesh, last year’s protests against former prime minister Sheikh Hasina have been interpreted by many observers as a rejection not only of authoritarian rule but also of India’s overreach and imperialistic ambitions. India’s perceived dominance in the region, especially its control over another transboundary river, the Teesta, has bred deep resentment in Dhaka. Protests were held in February in Bangladesh over its inequitable distribution, resulting from India’s overexploitation due to its advantageous geographical position. Climate change is making the river flow more erratic, straining livelihoods and feeding political and social unrest.

Bangladesh, like Pakistan, is one of the most climate-impacted countries in the world. Each year, thousands are displaced due to floods, cyclones and sea-level rise. Many end up as informal climate migrants, moving inland or trying to cross into India, where they face increasingly hardened borders and xenophobic politics. India’s fencing of the border and its treatment of undocumented migrants is often framed in security terms, but it is actually the violence of dispossession that climate change intensifies and that the states neglect through policy and silence.

It is not just rivers and refugees. It is the regional model of development itself. South Asian states have long pursued extractive, centralised, fossil-fuel-heavy growth models. The human costs are reflected in dismal development outcomes. Despite rapid GDP growth in parts of the region, human development indicators remain dismal, especially in rural, climate-vulnerable areas. Malnutrition, unsafe drinking water, toxic air, and lack of access to basic health and education services persist. These are not some accidents. These are episodes of slow violence inflicted not with weapons but with budget priorities, elite capture, and a complete failure to plan for people in a rapidly changing climate. These are results of systematic governance failures and policy neglect across South Asia states.

In this context, India, the region’s most powerful state, must act more responsibly and take some cues from the EU’s Green Deal. It has the capacity to lead a regional green transition, but instead, it chooses militarism and hydro-hegemony. It suspends treaties when it should strengthen cooperation. It is investing in border surveillance when it should be investing in the shared resilience of people in the region. The real security threat is not Pakistan or even the militants it allegedly harbours. It is climate collapse and the millions it will displace and impoverish if regional leaders continue to act in their usual zero-sum terms.

A war between India and Pakistan, two nuclear neighbours, in the context of an overly heated planet will be far more devastating. The imminent climate crisis will destabilise the Subcontinent in ways we cannot bomb or strike our way out of. The planet’s breached boundaries are already making recovery from any disaster more difficult. We need to realise that climate change is not merely an environmental issue; it is a conflict and misery multiplier. It deepens inequalities, fuels cross-border tensions and destabilises governments.

Instead of escalating conflict, South Asia’s leaders must invest in their people, build climate resilience and ensure cooperation. As citizens, we must demand the demilitarisation of environmental governance, and our leaders must stop using national security as a cover to evade accountability and strengthen their waning political positions.

The path to peace in South Asia lies in diplomacy and in recognising, prioritising and valuing our shared ecological survival. In a region already burning beyond 1.5 C, the roaring fighter planes and bombs must not silence the warning sirens from a burning planet. We cannot afford another war.

The old guard in South Asia direly needs a new definition of security. We must take a glacial melt in the Himalayas as seriously as a military incursion and recognise that climate diplomacy and ecological justice are central to development and peace in the region. South Asia’s leaders and people must move from vain chest-thumping to cooperation and from conflict escalation to climate adaptation and diplomacy.

The writer teaches at the Department of Government and Global Studies at ITU, Lahore. She tweets/posts @malyhaz