One dam thing after another? Ukraine and reconstruction

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The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Bloor. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. After this week's election upset for Narendra Modi, few people are better placed to predict how he'll react than Avantaka Chilkutti, who has spent months investigating India's prime minister for the Economist's new eight part podcast, the Modi Raj. And where other people saw mounds and wall fragments in the sand, Barry Kemp saw a dream world built by a pharaoh 31 centuries ago. Our obituaries editor remembers an Egyptologist who spent his career digging up Akhenaten's lost city. First up, though, One year ago this week, giant explosions rocked a large swathe of southern Ukraine. The target was the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam. Water cascaded out, submerging dozens of towns and villages. Streets became rivers. Rescue operations began quickly, helping people whose homes and lives were destroyed. The water was up to the ceiling, said this woman. The water pressed the window out. Everything is ruined. Hundreds of people died. Ukraine's President, Volodymyr Zelensky blamed Russia. This was an environmental bomb of mass destruction, he said, proof that Russia was ruled by savages. But from that devastation, conversations about Ukraine's future have been born.

So a year on, we have this really complex web of long term consequences for Ukraine that has emerged. And they are, of course, on the one hand, social and economic, but they're also political and environmental.

Oliver Jones is a news editor at the Economist.

And so what you have from that is firstly, a really vibrant public discussion about what can you actually get from the rubble of the disaster and also how that translates to the broader questions of Ukraine's reconstruction once the war ends. And so in some ways, the consequences of the dam's blast and what's happened since do give us a sort of microcosm of some of the questions that Ukraine will be facing in the future.

Just paint a bit of a picture for me. Remind us what actually happened and the scale of the destruction a year ago.

Yeah. So when you had the blast from the dam, it burst. And behind the dam was a reservoir about the size of Great Salt Lake in Utah. And the flooding housing covered an area roughly the size of Kyiv, Ukraine's capital. We all remember those images of tens of thousands of buildings submerged, or just their roofs, showing people huddling on their roofs waiting to be evacuated. And so we did have that immense destruction, something like $1.5 billion worth of housing effects. So, obviously, when the disaster first happened, there was a great focus on how can we rebuild these buildings. There are international aid workers and local aid workers really working hard in the area. But at the same time, the nature of that reconstruction is very difficult. And I think we're not seeing the same extent of reconstruction there as we might be seeing in other parts of Ukraine today. If you go to Kherson, you see people that have clearly abandoned their homes. Sometimes they leave their phone numbers outside as a marker of ownership. And, of course, it's worth saying that there's still shelling going on across the river, and the people who are living there are still living with that. So it's really these dual effects of both the disaster and its consequences and the ongoing toll of the war, I would say.

That's interesting. So we've seen fast reconstruction elsewhere is the main reason we haven't seen it here. Because of the war close by.

Yeah, of course. I mean, that's a huge factor in this. So there are four oblasts that were particularly badly affected. Those are Kherson, Mykolaiv, Dniprop, Petrovsk and Zaporizhzhia. And all of these are in great proximity to the fighting now. So they're really on the front line. Then, of course, there is just the sheer scale and complexity of what happened. I mean, it touched on so many different areas. You have the agricultural sector, which is so important in the south of Ukraine. Kherson was famous for growing watermelons and aubergines, and they all took their irrigation from the reservoir. So without the reservoir, actually, it's very hard to know how you're going to get that water to support that crucial part of the economy. The UN estimates that up to a million people were left without drinking water after the disaster itself. Particularly badly affected was the region of Dnipropetrovsk. And there the government has been trying to build this really large 250 kilometer pipeline to get drinking water to people. It's reportedly nearly complete, but you still have lots of people, especially in smaller towns and villages, living with daily shortages and having to rely on trucks coming to their villages with drinking water. So I think the complexity of it means that it's not like some of the other parts of reconstruction. It's, it touches on really every aspect of people's daily lives and really changes the long term outlook for that part of the world.

What about the wider environmental toll?

So when obviously the disaster happened, these thousands of animals and birds were killed, and that's not just on land, but that's also in the water. So when the reservoir emptied, all the fish and the mussels and all of these things that lived in the reservoir were just left to rot. The reservoir itself, the reservoir bed, it resembled a desert. And scientists felt that a, this desertification of the land' could continue, so there'd be really terrible long term environmental destruction, or perhaps there would be some sort of growth of vegetation, probably invasive species, and so this would leave a scar on the landscape. But actually what they found was that things were a bit more surprising than that. So this sort of rather intrepid group of scientists went to the lake bed a few months after the disaster itself and they found actually that there was much more of a diverse growth of vegetation and plant life, et cetera, than they were expecting. And that has led to a debate in some circles in Ukraine that actually maybe there's an opportunity here to make something more environmentally sustainable from the disaster itself. And so these are ideas like rewilding the lakebed. And that may sound really odd to be talking about rewilding in other contexts of war. And I think on the one hand it is, but on the other hand, the war is still ongoing. This is the realistic solution to this situation. We can't rebuild the dam right now. And this is a sort of natural experiment taking place the environments, and it may have some environmental benefits, notwithstanding the terror of what's happened.

Presumably it's not just that there's the chance for the ecologists to see what happens, but also it's a lot cheaper to let it just sit.

Yeah, definitely. There is a practical element of it. I mean, if you talk to people in, say, Ukraine's energy sector, they'll say building the dam and rebuilding the hydroelectric plant that was there is absolutely vital for Ukraine's recovery. Obviously its energy sector has been terribly hit, so it will need these new forms of electricity production. But on the Other hand, doing that will be expensive. So rebuilding the hydroelectric power plant itself will cost around $1 billion. And we think that the broader reconstruction cost to build back more generally from the disaster will be about $5 billion. Now, that might not sound like a lot in isolation, but then this is where we think about the broader context. We already know that the World bank is estimating that the reconstruction costs will be several hundred billion. So once the war ends, Ukraine and its partners are going to have to prioritise. They are going to have to think, you know, can we build this sort of infrastructure right now? And that again, is one way in which we see that this quite isolated incident within the war is actually pointing to the broader questions that Ukraine is facing.

So as far as you can see into the future now, what can you tell us from what we've seen of the debates over the dam about what the priorities are likely to be about reconstruction at a later point?

Yeah, I think it's very difficult to say. I think Ukraine will obviously be looking to rebuild its energy infrastructure as quickly as possible. But the Kakhovka Dam and the hydroelectric plant, that isn't the only thing that's been destroyed. And we can see the terrible damage to the broader electric grid up the river. There are other dams that actually have a larger capacity and they are the things that Ukraine will have to build first. I think you're probably going to see the things that can easily be fixed be fixed first, rather than the reconstruction of a huge Soviet era dam. But I think what this disaster also tells us is that Ukraine is somewhere that has developed over recent decades a really strong and vibrant civil society. And there is going to be debate around these questions, public debate, depending on the course of the war. Of course, there is going to be a sense of holding the government to account when it comes to reconstruction. But of course, when we talk about these debates, I think ultimately that's a question for the future and it's going to be a really remarkable day when those are the kind of questions that are actually at the forefront.

Ollie, thank you so much for your time.

Not at all. Thanks for having me.

It's been a very disappointing week for Narendra Modi, and we haven't seen him disappointed or on his back foot for a very, very long time.

Avantika Chilkoti is an international correspondent for the Economist and the host of our new podcast, the Modi Raj.

He is probably back for another five years as Prime Minister, but this time he's leading a coalition. And this is not something Modi has done before. Since he first got into politics over two decades ago, Modi. He has run governments where he has a majority in the assembly or in the Parliament. Trying to figure out how he adapts to what might be his biggest challenge yet requires knowing a bit about the man. Now, fortunately, I've spent the last eight months getting under the skin of Narendra Modi Vantika.

I've listened to a lot of the podcast and it is absolutely brilliant. It's as entertaining as it is informative. So congratulations. I'm interested to know whether you feel after all this time thinking about him, listening to him, talking to people, do you feel like you've really got under his skin?

I think this man's a total enigma. I'm not sure there's anyone in the world who has got under his skin. And I'll tell you why. There's one question in all the reporting that really sticks with me. I was about an hour into a conversation with this personal secretary and he was loosening up and I just asked him. It was totally off script and the producers didn't look thrilled. But I just said, what does the Prime Minister do for fun? And his secretary says, pardon me. And he sort of couldn't believe the question when I asked it again. He comes up with this slightly OD about Modi sometimes telling jokes in Gujarati in meetings. And it gave me the sense that there is no one who is really close to this man. The mask never comes down.

Still, after eight months, you probably know him better than most. Now, what would be your predictions or your thoughts about what we will see him do after the upset that he's experienced?

This question of how does a Narendra Modi like character lead a coalition government? And your first instinct is, well, there's so much ego, there's so much ambition. How is he going to deal with compromise? But I would just urge everyone to think about that again because Modi's skill year after year has been reinventing himself. There were those 2002 Gujarat riots. It was a thousand Muslims were killed. It was essentially an anti Muslim pogrom. And at that time he was labeled the Emperor of Hindu hearts. He was playing this Hindu nationalist card because he was the chief minister of Gujarat at that time. Five, 10 years later, he's reinvented himself as this CEO leader. He's a pro business leader drawing lots and lots of investment to a Western state in India. And I think there is a chance right now at this juncture that this skilled politician will reinvent himself again. We just don't know. And that's what's just so fascinating about this week's result. If there's one thing people around the world know about Modi, until recently, it was the 2002 Gujarat riots. And when I try and think about moments when this man, this skilled politician, this master of PR has been on his back foot is one television interview years and years ago with a very, very famous anchor.

Mr. Modi. Let's start by talking about you.

It was in 2007, when Modi was up for re election in Gujarat that he met Karan Thapar. Thapar is a renowned TV journalist. He's India's Christian Amanpo. I grew up watching Thapar. I always enjoyed the way he made important people squirm. And in true Karan Thapar style, he started his interview with Modi with the hard stuff.

People still call you to your face a mass murderer and they accuse you of being prejudiced against Muslims. Do you have an image problem? I think it's not proper to say that people. There are two or three persons, those who used to talk in this terminology and I always say God bless them. And I suspect it was that phrase mass murderer that he objected to. And I thought about it fairly carefully before I used it.

I met Thapar recently in New Delhi.

I knew that it would upset him. I knew that many would consider it offensive and rude. But I said to myself, the truth is I am putting to him what Muslims think of him. Why can't you say that maybe the government should have done more to protect the Muslim? What I have to say I have said at that time and you can find out my statements. But by not saying it again, by not letting people hear the message repeatedly, you're allowing an image that is contrary to the interest of Gujarat to continue with this.

Modi briefly looks off into the distance. Then he nods to himself. A little more than three minutes into the interview, he's done.

I'll have to rest.

I'll have to rest, Modi says. He asks for water. Thapar points to a glass on the table beside them. But Modi's already getting up to leave.

Then for the next one hour we sat together as he gave me tea, he gave me mithai, he gave me dhoklas, which are those little Gujarati things to eat. And I spent my time persuading him to actually go ahead and finish the interview. But he said no. I think his words were, my mood has changed. I'm no longer in a mood to do an interview. I said, look, if you leave me with two and a half minutes. This will be used by the channel as a news item instead of being shown once as an interview and repeated once and forgotten. It'll be shown in every single news bulletin tomorrow, which is, I think 36 in the day.

Thapar was right. It did lead the news bulletins.

And somewhere towards the evening he rang me up and he said in Hindi, tumne merek kandhom pendukrakki goli Maria, you have placed your gun on my shoulder and fired.

It was a rare PR blunder for Modi. He isn't comfortable speaking in English. He was on his back foot. And as Modi's rise continued, he would learn from the incident. He gradually stopped giving interviews in English. As for Thapar, his career has nosedived as Modi's has taken off.

Whether it really comes from the top, I don't know and it would be presumption on my part to say that it does. But for the last five years, not a single television channel is willing to have me.

Avantika, tell us how we can all listen to the Modi Raj.

The Modi Raj will be available wherever you get your podcasts. So on the Economist app, Apple Spotify, the first episode is free and the rest is especially for subscribers. And we'll also post our first episode on the weekend Intelligence this Saturday.

Avantika, congratulations on the podcast. It's fantastic. Thank you so much for your time.

Thanks for having me, Rosie.

For more than four decades, Barry Kemp was a lecturer and teacher of Egyptology at Cambridge University.

Ann Roe is the Economist's obituaries editor.

But though he appeared to be walking around in the meadows and the college greens, in fact, in his mind he was somewhere else. He was walking through the eastern desert of Egypt and he was looking around a city called Amana, which was more or less buried under the sand, with no sign of it except mounds and fragments of walls. But this was the place that he returned to again and again, for almost as long as he was at Cambridge, trying to find out what life in the city had been like. Amarna was a dream city, and the man who dreamt it up was Akhenaten, the most extraordinary of the pharaohs. He had introduced into Egypt a cult of the Aten, the disc of the sun, as a single God to replace the myriad gods of Egypt. And he claimed that the Aten itself had led him to this site, where the sun rose through a cleft in the cliffs. And he decided he would build his city there. And started about 1344 B.C. temples, administrative buildings, warehouses, worker dwellings, all went up incredibly quickly. It was done in about five years. And then he ordered 20,000 people to go east and colonize it. When they got there, they found they were on a dry bluff above the River Nile, a place where there was very little drinkable water, where crops wouldn't grow well. Nonetheless, they tried to make a go of it, and the city even prospered for a while. But in two decades, it was abandoned. And then the wind, the sand and plunderers gradually took it over. And for 31 centuries, both the name of Amarna and the name of Atman, Nathan, the pharaoh, were lost to history. Barry Kemp had been encouraged or spurred into his love of Egypt by the postcards his father had sent when he was doing military service there in World War II. He then became intrigued by reading books about it and gradually became an expert himself in it. He hoped when he went there to find great buildings underneath, or certainly great artifacts, because quite near there they had found a wonderful and very famous bust of Nefertiti, Akhenaten's wife. But there were also bigger considerations in modern archaeology. You didn't just grab and run from a site. You asked larger questions about how people had lived there. And he especially wanted to know how this city had been organized, whether it was simply for the pharaoh or what the pharaoh himself did for the people, what the interaction was. Akhenaten was a fascinating character to many people because he seemed, with his endorsement of a single God, to be prefiguring Christianity. Professor Kemp hadn't really wanted to investigate this man much. He was much more interested in the society of the city. But all the same, he became fascinated by him, trying to work out what he had really meant to do and what kind of ruler he was. He had declared in a text that was carved into one of the rocks, that he meant to govern according to justice and righteousness and truth. And it just seemed rather odd that he was endorsing these sorts of things when it seemed that he was a very hard ruler. Professor Kemp could never quite decide what he thought about Akhenaten. And he felt in general that Egyptian thinking, and indeed the whole of Egyptian culture and society, was much more impenetrable than people tended to think. Besides, Akhenaten's ideas had never really caught on among the people. And that was clear from the evidence of the coffins in Amarna, where the objects that were buried with people were not ones referring to Aten, but referring to the other homely gods like Tararet. The Hippo God and Anubis the Jackal. These were the gods that people wanted to invoke, the comfort, comfortable gods, to make their lives a bit more bearable. They were not interested in the abstract ideas that Akhenaten had. So in the end, there were many questions that still remained unresolved in Professor Kemp's head. But in imagination, he could freely roam there. And he imagined that he could squeeze between the low houses of the workers, that he could smell the smoke from their foundries and their fires, that he could see conscripts being lined up to do the heavy labour of building, lining up for their names to be checked off a list and carrying bread and onions for their lunches. He could also visit the little gardens and inspect how the wild celery and the coriander were growing to make the garlands for the pharaoh and the courtiers. And he would watch and feel that he had only begun to scratch the surface of the desert. He'd only just begun, truly, after 30 or more years, to clear the sand away and try to restore an unknown but intriguing world.

Ann Ro on Barry Kemp, who has died aged 84. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is John Jo Devlin and our sound designer is Will Rowe. Our senior producers are Rory Galloway and Sarah Larnyuk. Our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Maggie Khadifa and Benji Guy. And our assistant producer is Henrietta McFarlane, with extra production help this week from Sam Westron, Kunal Patel and Jonathan and Day, we'll see you back here tomorrow for the first episode of the Modi Raj.