On Thursday, Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Asim Iftikhar Ahmad, warned of what he described as a “disturbing trend” in international affairs. While his remarks were prompted by India’s decision to place the Indus Waters Treaty in what New Delhi has termed “abeyance”, their relevance extended beyond a single dispute. Almost simultaneously, Pakistan has found itself under scrutiny for joining the Gaza Board of Peace, a multilateral initiative endorsed under a United Nations Security Council .
India’s announcement that the Indus Waters Treaty is being held in abeyance–something with no recognised standing in international law– followed the 2025 Pahalgam attack, but its implications reach far beyond the incident itself. The 1960 treaty, brokered with World Bank facilitation, was designed precisely to withstand political rupture, conflict, and mutual distrust. By seeking to unilaterally suspend its obligations, New Delhi has moved from registering political grievance into territory that threatens institutional continuity. The Permanent Court of Arbitration, which resumed proceedings despite India’s non-cooperation, has already underlined that no party may place the treaty in suspension at will. Yet data-sharing has been withheld, diversion projects publicly signalled, and senior Indian officials have gone so far as to declare that the treaty will never be restored, with rhetoric that frames water access as a tool of pressure rather than a shared ecological reality.
For six and a half decades, the Indus Waters Treaty has survived wars, diplomatic breakdowns, and regime changes. Undermining it unilaterally risks more than bilateral fallout. It weakens one of the few working models of transboundary water governance in a climate-stressed region, while signalling to other states that long-standing agreements are subject to political whim rather than legal constraint. Such precedents, once normalised, rarely remain confined.
At the same time, criticism of Pakistan’s participation in the Gaza Board of Peace rests on a different, but equally misleading, premise–that engagement in a diplomatic framework necessarily implies military commitment. The Board was announced at the World Economic Forum and subsequently endorsed through a vote at the United Nations Security Council, giving it a legal character distinct from ad hoc coalitions or unilateral interventions.
The government has publicly delineated its position. Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar has stated without ambiguity that Pakistan will not deploy troops to Gaza, nor participate in enforcement or disarmament operations. Rather, Islamabad’s presence within the forum serves to ensure that deliberations are not shaped exclusively by major powers whose interests may diverge from those of smaller or conflict-adjacent states.
New Delhi has chosen silence on the Board of Peace, but its discomfort is visible. The fear is not Gaza. It is precedent. A forum built to support Palestinian reconstruction may one day be cited as a model elsewhere, including on questions India has long sought to wall off from multilateral oversight. *