The most dangerous consequence of India placing the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance will probably not be a dry riverbed appearing across Pakistan tomorrow morning. New Delhi lacks the reservoirs, canals and diversion works required to stop the western rivers at will. The nearer danger is the disappearance of predictability: water passing through the territory of a hostile upstream state becomes far more threatening when measurements are withheld, inspections cease, project designs are no longer discussed and abrupt fluctuations arrive without explanation.
Michael Kugelman, a Washington-based South Asia analyst, offered the necessary measure of caution in a recent interview. “India is not China. It can’t build a huge super dam in a few weeks,” he said. Yet he rejected the opposite temptation to dismiss New Delhi’s threats as empty theatre. “The truth often times in these cases lies somewhere in between.” Pakistan is unlikely to run out of water altogether, but greater Indian storage, altered release timings and the breakdown of treaty cooperation could inflict serious damage during seasons when every cusec counts.
India announced on April 23, 2025, that the treaty would remain in abeyance until Pakistan “credibly and irrevocably” abandoned what New Delhi describes as its support for cross-border terrorism. Pakistan denies the allegation, making an irrefutable case in front of the international media by proposing a credible neutral investigation into the Pehelgam attack as well as restraint during the four-day war.
India cannot empty Pakistan’s rivers overnight. Its withdrawal from the Indus Waters Treaty is nevertheless turning upstream geography into strategic leverage at a time when Pakistan cannot afford hydrological surprises.
Its National Security Committee also responded the following day that the treaty contained no provision for unilateral suspension and warned that any attempt to stop or divert Pakistan’s lawful share would be treated as an “Act of War”.
The treaty, signed in Karachi in September 1960 after nine years of World Bank-assisted negotiations, allocated the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej to India. The Indus, Jhelum and Chenab were reserved primarily for Pakistan, while India retained carefully defined rights for domestic use, agriculture and run-of-the-river hydropower generation. Article XII provides for modification or termination through a duly ratified agreement between both governments. It offers no unilateral exit hatch.
International lawyer Ahmer Bilal Soofi has put the legal difficulty plainly: “There is no such provision to ‘hold it in abeyance’ in the treaty.”
India may refuse to cooperate in practice, but its political declaration cannot by itself extinguish the obligations Pakistan says remain in force. The Court of Arbitration reached a related conclusion in its 2025 supplemental award, holding that unilateral abeyance did not deprive the court of its competence under the treaty.
The agreement’s achievement was larger than the division of six rivers. Its Permanent Indus Commission exchanged hydrological information, facilitated inspections and gave engineers a forum in which suspicion could be tested against data. Article IX created a ladder of dispute settlement, beginning with the commission and proceeding, where necessary, to a neutral expert or Court of Arbitration. Pakistan’s Indus Waters Commissioner, Syed Muhammad Mehar Ali Shah, therefore described the treaty at a seminar held in Islamabad last month as a “conflict-prevention system.”
He said he had written four times to his Indian counterpart about fluctuations in the Chenab since April 2025 without receiving a reply. The unanswered letters illustrate the present danger. When the institutional machinery seizes up, an unexplained fall in river flows is interpreted through the logic of military confrontation rather than water management.
India has a case for seeking negotiations on modernisation: the treaty predates contemporary climate science, says little about groundwater depletion and was designed before the basin’s present population, energy demand and glacial stresses could have been imagined. Researchers cited in India have recorded a substantial long-term decline in rainfall over the eastern-river basins, strengthening New Delhi’s claim that the hydrology of 2026 is different from that of 1960. However, a consensual revision process, which is permitted by the treaty and could address climate data, does not allow for abeyance.
New Delhi is meanwhile moving to create facts on the ground. India has begun preparations for an 8.7-kilometre Chenab-Beas link tunnel across the Pir Panjal range in Himachal Pradesh. The proposal includes a 19-metre barrage near Koksar and would transfer water from the Chandra, a headwater tributary expressly included in the Chenab system, into the Beas basin.
Political statements accompanying the project have deepened Islamabad’s suspicions. Former Himachal Pradesh chief minister Jai Ram Thakur said the project would prevent surplus waters from flowing towards Pakistan, while BJP leader Anurag Thakur pointed to “rubbing salt into Pakistan’s wounds”. Prime Minister Narendra Modi directed the Jal Shakti Ministry and Home Affairs to ensure “not a single drop of water reaches Pakistan.”
Perhaps to realise his vision, India has accelerated work after April 2025 on four Chenab hydropower projects with a combined capacity of 3,014 megawatts: the 1,000MW Pakal Dul, 624MW Kiru, 540MW Kwar and 850MW Ratle projects. Reuters reported that New Delhi wanted seven projects totalling around seven gigawatts and costing approximately $4.73 billion to be expedited. India is entitled to build run-of-the-river plants within treaty restrictions. The cumulative control provided by multiple projects, particularly when design data and operating information are withheld, is what alarms Pakistan.
Bhargabi Bharadwaj and Beatrice Mosello of Chatham House warn that India’s suspension “significantly erodes the predictability and stability” the treaty had provided and shows how water can be “instrumentalized as a tool of conflict.”
Pakistan’s vulnerability magnifies every uncertainty. The 2023 census counted 241.49 million people. Agriculture contributes 23.4 per cent of GDP and employs 33.1 per cent of the workforce. More than 80 per cent of the country’s agriculture depends upon the Indus irrigation network, while the basin produces over 90 per cent of national agricultural output. Pakistan is right to pursue legal remedies and raise the issue internationally. Kugelman, however, believes that even as Pakistan has gained credibility in some Western capitals, partly because of its recent regional diplomacy, doubts persist about a transboundary water dispute commanding sustained attention “in a world that’s literally on fire”. Islamabad may win legal arguments and sympathetic statements without assembling enough outside pressure to alter India’s policy.
That reality makes domestic reform inseparable from treaty defence. Kugelman’s advice was direct: Pakistan should “strengthen water security so that the stakes of a suspended Indus Waters Treaty are not as great”. He pointed to flood irrigation, water-intensive crops and the absence of meaningful pricing as vulnerabilities Pakistan can address without waiting for New Delhi.
Environmental analyst Afia Salam makes the same argument: “Channels of communication must remain open,” as she urges conservation, rational use and sustainable storage at home. Pakistan needs additional reservoirs, though concrete alone will not cure its water crisis. Groundwater supplies more than half of agricultural water, and indiscriminate canal lining can reduce aquifer recharge even as it limits seepage. Efficiency must therefore be based on local hydrology: precision irrigation, selective lining, groundwater regulation, improved telemetry and crop incentives suited to water-stressed districts. There is also a geopolitical restraint upon India that receives too little attention. India is upstream from Pakistan on the Indus system but downstream from China on the Brahmaputra. Kugelman argues that China’s ability to build major dams and exert upstream leverage may deter India from establishing an unlimited doctrine of hydro-coercion. A precedent created against Pakistan could one day travel back across the Himalayas.
The Indus Waters Treaty endured because earlier governments understood that water required a boundary around conflict. India is steadily rubbing out that boundary.
The writer is OpEd Editor (Daily Times) and can be reached at durenayab786 @gmail.com. She tweets @DureAkram.