Secondly, in the absence of any universally or widely accepted intertiol water law or convention – which the often-vaunted 1997 UN Convention on Non-vigation Uses of Intertiol Watercourses is not, given that the two giant Asian stakeholders in the water war, India and Chi, are not its sigtories – it all falls back to the principles of intertiol customary law on transborder water flows such as the Brahmaputra. Under these principles, Chi has a great advantage over India. One of the key principles is the “doctrine of prior appropriation”, which in simple words means that the priority right to the use of a river belongs to the first user of the river, with the first user called “senior appropriator”. In the case of the Brahmaputra, the senior appropriator is obviously Chi from where the river origites – Tibet, now, unfortutely, acknowledged by India not as an “autonomous” region in Chi as was the practice before 2003 but as “part of the territory of the People’s Republic of Chi” over which Chi has absolute sovereignty. Therefore, Chi has greater rights over the Brahmaputra than India has. This is of India’s own making. India is helpless because it is a lower-riparian state and under no intertiol law is Chi, being an upper-riparian state, bound to address the hydro-concerns of the lower riparian. Chellaney writes: “The central legal element in prior approximation is the diversion of water (emphasis added) from a watercourse for ‘beneficial’ applications, including irrigation, industrial or mining purposes, electricity generation, and municipal supply.” Now, given this legal reality, Chi can cite any of those beneficial applications and embark on its gargantuan water diversion task at the Great Bend or, not to defy the laws of physics, shift the diversion point to 3,588-metre-high Shoumatan site towards the west of the Great Bend up the river course as reported in many well-established intertiol jourls. How can India then complain?