Pakistan’s formal position is unambiguous: the Indus Waters Treaty remains legally binding, its obligations are not subject to unilateral modification, and India’s 2023 notice of intent to renegotiate has no standing under international law. That position has substantial legal backing. IWT contains no provision permitting unilateral withdrawal or modification. Article XII of the treaty specifies that it can only be modified by a duly ratified treaty between the two governments. The Permanent Court of Arbitration, to which Pakistan referred disputes over the Ratle and Kishenganga projects, has asserted jurisdiction over Pakistani complaints – a finding India has rejected, arguing that the matter falls under the IWT’s own Permanent Indus Commission and Court of Arbitration mechanisms, not the PCA. International water law experts are broadly sceptical of India’s legal position. The 1997 UN Watercourses Convention, customary international law principles of equitable utilisation, and the established jurisprudence of international tribunals on transboundary rivers all tend to support the principle that downstream states retain enforceable rights against upstream developments that cause significant harm. Pakistan has raised the issue at the United Nations. It has sought engagement through the World Bank, the treaty’s original guarantor. It has pursued arbitration. Each avenue has produced a process without resolution, deliberation without consequence. And while the deliberations continue, the construction continues.
The Chenab-Beas tunnel is a test case for the future of international water governance. How the world responds–or fails to respond–will shape whether the hydraulic sovereignty of downstream states remains a protected principle or becomes a discretionary courtesy extended at the pleasure of the powerful.
Pakistani officials, academics, and civil society voices have been uncharacteristically unified in the message they wish to send to New Delhi – and through New Delhi, to the world. The message is this: water is not a safe weapon. History offers no example of a state that deliberately impoverished the agriculture of a nuclear-armed neighbour of 240 million people without generating consequences that ultimately proved costly to itself. The logic of hydraulic coercion assumes controllability – that pressure can be applied, and escalation managed, and that the downstream state will absorb the stress without catastrophic political rupture. That assumption is dangerously naive when applied to Pakistan. A Pakistan whose agricultural economy is destabilised by upstream water manipulation is not a Pakistan that becomes more accommodating or more stable. It is a Pakistan that becomes more desperate, more radicalised in its domestic politics, and more willing to reach for instruments of retaliation that neither side should want deployed. Water stress does not produce surrender. It produces chaos. And chaos on India’s western border – in a nuclear-armed state with a demonstrated history of strategic miscalculation – is a risk that extends far beyond the subcontinent. Former Pakistani Foreign Minister articulated this bluntly in an address to the UN General Assembly: “Water is life. To threaten water is to threaten life itself. And those who threaten life in this region must understand that the consequences will not be confined to the country they target.” India would be wise to listen – not merely out of moral obligation, but out of strategic self-interest. A destabilised Pakistan is not a defeated Pakistan. It is a far more dangerous one.
The international community’s relative silence on the IWT’s unravelling is a failure that deserves to be named plainly. The World Bank, which sponsored and witnessed the original treaty, has retreated behind procedural language when decisive institutional engagement was called for. Western governments, eager to cultivate India as a strategic counterweight to China, have chosen not to raise water rights as a serious bilateral concern. The United Nations has offered a process but no pressure. In aggregate, the message the international community has sent to New Delhi is that the strategic partnership is valued more highly than the rule of law in transboundary water management. That message will be heard – and acted upon – well beyond South Asia. China controls the headwaters of the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Salween, and other rivers critical to the water security of India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam. If the precedent established on the Chenab holds – that a powerful upstream state may exit treaty obligations, construct diversion infrastructure, and face no meaningful international consequence – Beijing will have observed that precedent carefully. The next time India protests Chinese dam construction on the Brahmaputra, it will do so having itself normalised the very behaviour it objects to. The erosion of international water law is not a regional problem. It is a global one. Transboundary rivers are shared by 148 countries. More than two billion people live in river basins that cross international borders. The institutional frameworks that govern those shared waters are imperfect, often unratified, and always dependent on the political willingness of powerful states to observe norms they could technically violate. When those states stop observing those norms, the frameworks do not bend. They break. The Chenab-Beas tunnel is, in this light, a test case for the future of international water governance. How the world responds – or fails to respond – will shape whether the hydraulic sovereignty of downstream states remains a protected principle or becomes a discretionary courtesy extended at the pleasure of the powerful.
In the villages along the Chenab’s banks in Pakistani Punjab, the river still arrives with its seasonal faithfulness. Farmers still read its levels and plan accordingly. Children still swim in its shallows in the summer heat. The rhythms of a civilisation built around this water continue, for now, largely undisturbed. But the engineers are already in the mountains. The tunnelling assessments have been commissioned. The barrage designs have been drawn. The political decisions, at the highest levels of the Indian government, have been taken. The Pir Panjal range has stood for millennia as a natural divide between the Chenab watershed and the rivers that flow eastward toward India’s plains. The tunnel being planned beneath it is not merely a feat of civil engineering. It is a statement – about rights, about power, about what India believes it is now entitled to do with water that an international treaty designated for its neighbour. Pakistan has made its position clear. The law has been invoked. The warnings have been issued. The world has been asked to pay attention. Whether it does so – before a crisis that could have been prevented becomes one that cannot be controlled – is now the central question. The Chenab does not know borders. But the people who depend on it do. And they are afraid. (Concluded)
The writer is a freelance columnist