The 80th session of the UN General Assembly, will convene on 9 September 2025 under the theme “Better together: 80 years and more for peace, development, and human rights”. Pakistan prepares to enter the global forum with a voice shaped not by ambition, but by survival, urging the world to confront rising regional aggression, environmental injustice, and the erosion of international norms. For Pakistan, this forum is not about affirming a commitment to peace alone. It is about sounding an urgent alarm on the threats, from water warfare to military aggression that challenge our very survival and the core principles the UN was meant to protect.
This aggression is most clearly embodied in India’s escalating belligerence, a country that consistently chooses confrontation over conversation. Its repeated rejection of dialogue, disdain for international mediation, and unilateral actions continue to push the region to the brink. This dangerous posture was laid bare in May 2025, when tensions surged and full-scale conflict was only averted through U.S. mediation. Yet even then, India refused to acknowledge the ceasefire and lashed out at global leaders, including the U.S. President and the foreign ministers of Turkey and Iran, for urging calm and refusing to endorse its one-sided narrative. This wasn’t just obstinance, it was a blatant rejection of the UN’s founding principle of the peaceful resolution of disputes.
Our survival depends on the world understanding that water cooperation is not just about regional peace; it’s about climate justice for all
Now, India has escalated this aggression by weaponizing water itself, suspending the Indus Waters Treaty and deliberately flooding our lands in a brutal act of environmental warfare. For over six decades, this treaty endured wars and conflicts, proving that even rivals could uphold shared responsibility for life-sustaining resources. India’s decision to abandon this commitment reveals a disturbing willingness to prioritize political coercion over human security. On August 26, it deliberately released massive amounts of water from its dams into Pakistan’s border regions without any warning or coordination. This reckless move has displaced over 200,000 people, claimed 15 lives, and devastated entire communities in Punjab, revealing a disturbing pattern of prioritizing narrow self-interest and asserting regional dominance over cooperation, regardless of the human cost.
The Indus system sustains 23 percent of Pakistan’s agricultural water needs and supports nearly 68 percent of rural livelihoods, making it a lifeline for millions. India’s weaponization of this vital resource not only destabilizes Pakistan but also violates the core principle of equitable resource-sharing that international law is meant to uphold. This moment of global reflection at the UN’s 80th session must serve as a wake-up call.India’s unilateral suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty goes beyond bilateral aggression; it systematically dismantles the very foundations of international cooperation.
This creates a cruel double burden for our nation. While we struggle to survive a climate crisis we did not create, we simultaneously face a neighbor that actively weaponizes the very resources climate change has made increasingly scarce. Pakistan is this injustice embodied. Our nation, responsible for less than 1% of global emissions, is ranked among the top ten most vulnerable to its effects. We are living proof that those who did the least to cause this crisis are paying the highest price. Therefore, dedicated international funding for adaptation, resilience, and loss and damage is not a request for aid; it is a long-overdue global obligation, a bare minimum for justice.
We bear catastrophic consequences, from the 2022 floods that submerged a third of our country and affected 33 million people, to the current monsoon season that has already claimed hundreds more lives. Thousands of our glaciers are melting at alarming rates, threatening both immediate floods and long-term water scarcity for millions who depend on these vital waterways.
This makes India’s suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty particularly devastating. As climate change intensifies water stress across our region, India has chosen to compound this existential threat by manipulating shared rivers as instruments of coercion. Where the UNGA calls for shared responsibility in facing global challenges, we experience the opposite, our neighbor exploits environmental vulnerability as a weapon while the world watches.
This is the cruelest paradox of our time. We are being suffocated by a crisis we did not create, while our neighbor actively tightens the noose. The world offers condolences and aid for climate disasters, aid for which we are grateful, but then stands by as the same crisis is weaponized against us. It feels like being given a bandage while the wound is being salted. Pakistan’s demand is not for charity; it is for justice. It is the demand that the “loss and damage” framework must include protection from such “loss and damage” deliberately inflicted by hostile states. True climate justice is impossible without holding aggressors accountable. The world cannot fund our adaptation with one hand while allowing India to destroy our ability to adapt with the other.
This is not merely a bilateral issue but a fundamental test of global climate justice. If the international community truly believes in “better together,” it must recognize that Pakistan faces a dual assault, from both human aggression and environmental catastrophe.
The assault on Pakistan is not only physical and environmental but also narrative, as we face a sophisticated information war where victimhood is weaponized to undermine our sovereignty and democratic institutions. While the UNGA champions human rights, certain international actors selectively amplify narratives that misrepresent Pakistan’s legal processes as persecution, elevating individuals Like Mahrang Baloch and Gulzar Dost, who traffic in digital theatrics rather than constructive solutions.
We have seen this pattern before, figures like Aung San Suu Kyi, Daniel Ortega, and Robert Mugabe were once romanticized as symbols of resistance, only to later reveal authoritarian tendencies and dismantle the very freedoms they once demanded. This recurring tendency to champion dissidents without understanding local complexities ultimately destabilizes nations and weakens the institutions that safeguard human rights.
This selective outrage becomes particularly hypocritical when contrasted with the world’s deafening silence on gross human rights violations in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir and Palestine. While digital activists gain platforms for manufactured victimhood, millions in Kashmir live under military siege with their fundamental rights suspended, and Palestinian children die waiting for food aid under illegal occupation. The same voices that amplify curated narratives of persecution remain conspicuously silent when journalists are killed in Kashmir and hospitals are bombed in Gaza. This isn’t about human rights, it’s about geopolitical interests masquerading as moral concern. If the UNGA is to have any credibility, it must apply human rights standards consistently. Otherwise, it risks becoming an echo chamber for double standards rather than a forum for justice.
The UNGA must recognize these double standards as contrary to its own aspirations. If global institutions only respond to violations based on geopolitics or media trends, then the promise of “Better Together” becomes hollow.
Pakistan does not come to the 80th UNGA session to plead. It comes to remind the world that peace cannot be declared in New York while ignored in South Asia. Water cannot be weaponized while pledging cooperation. Victimhood cannot be romanticized while real victims drown or starve. Climate injustice cannot be tolerated while entire nations suffer for others’ emissions. And human rights cannot be selective while silence becomes complicity.
If the UNGA seeks to stay relevant, it must stand against aggression, uphold real cooperation, and embrace a standard of justice that applies to all, not just to some. Addressing this dual assault is not a sidebar to the global discussion; it is central to the credibility of all multilateral action. Without justice, there can be no shared responsibility. Our survival depends on the world understanding that water cooperation is not just about regional peace; it’s about climate justice for all.
The writer is MS Research Scholar at IIUI, a freelance content writer and a columnist.