The most consequential sentence at Islamabad seminar on the Indus Waters Treaty came from Pakistan’s Indus Waters commissioner, who said he had written four times to his Indian counterpart over significant fluctuations in the Chenab since New Delhi placed the treaty in “abeyance.” No answer has come.
Syed Muhammad Mehar Ali Shah described the Chenab fluctuations as a “strategic hazard” and warned that “data-sharing is the line between natural risk and manufactured vulnerability.”
The Indus Waters Treaty has survived wars, military crises and broken dialogue because it was designed to remove water from the furnace of India-Pakistan hostility. It rests on allocation, data, inspection, the Permanent Indus Commission and Article 9 dispute settlement. Once India disables these routines, it does not merely inconvenience Pakistan as it attacks the mechanism that kept the basin governable for more than six decades.
Information Minister Attaullah Tarar’s point that the Treaty cannot be amended, revoked, suspended or held in abeyance unilaterally is therefore not a slogan. It is the legal spine of Pakistan’s position. The doctrine of pacta sunt servanda–treaties must be performed in good faith–is not optional reading for powerful states. India cannot claim lawful rights under the Treaty while rejecting the duties that restrain it.
The commissioner put it even more plainly: the Treaty is “not a favour, but a binding settlement.” Pakistan rebuilt its irrigation economy around that settlement. Its fields, barrages, canals, crop cycles and food system were planned on the assurance that the western rivers would be allowed to flow, subject only to narrowly defined treaty exceptions. India’s attempt to convert those exceptions into opaque upstream control is hydro-coercion by another name.
The human stakes are too large for diplomatic euphemism. More than 240 million Pakistanis live under the shadow of the Indus basin. More than 80 per cent of Pakistan’s arable land depends on these waters.
There is also a cruel irony in New Delhi’s posture. India is itself a lower riparian to China on the Brahmaputra, where Beijing’s Yarlung Tsangpo mega-dam has already stirred Indian anxieties over flow, sediment, transparency and strategic leverage. If China were to place hydrological cooperation with India in “abeyance,” ignore Indian queries and cite sovereignty or security, New Delhi would call it coercion. It cannot demand transparency from Beijing while imposing uncertainty on Islamabad.
India is setting a dangerous precedent for every downstream state. If an upstream power can weaponise uncertainty, every shared river becomes hostage to political blackmail. *