In the spring of 2025, India placed the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) – one of the most successful and enduring water-sharing agreements in the history of international diplomacy – in abeyance. The announcement, delivered without arbitration, without consultation, and without recourse to the treaty’s own dispute-resolution mechanisms, sent a chill through the capitals of every nation that has ever placed its faith in the sanctity of international law. For Pakistan, however, it was not merely a diplomatic affront. It was, in the starkest terms, a declaration of existential war by other means.
The treaty, brokered by the World Bank and signed in 1960, has survived three full-scale wars, decades of diplomatic ice, and countless crises. It survived Kargil. It survived the 2001 alleged Indian Parliament attack. It survived the 2008 alleged Mumbai attacks. That India has now chosen to unilaterally suspend it – citing a terrorist attack in Pahalgam whose links to Pakistan remain contested and unproven – tells us something deeply alarming: that in today’s New Delhi, the rule of law has been subordinated to the rule of ideology.
A Treaty Born of Reason, Killed by Ideology
The Indus Waters Treaty divided six rivers between the two countries, giving India the three eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas, Sutlej) and Pakistan the three western ones (Indus, Jhelum, Chenab). It was, at its core, a rational acknowledgement that geography binds these two nations whether they wish it or not. Water does not observe borders drawn in anger. Glaciers do not melt along ideological lines.
How New Delhi’s Ideologically Driven Repudiation of a 64-Year-Old International Treaty Risks Destabilising a Nuclear-Armed Region and Imperilling Millions
For over six decades, Pakistan’s agricultural heartland – the Punjab and Sindh, home to over 130 million people – has been sustained by these western rivers. Approximately 80 per cent of Pakistan’s irrigated agriculture, the backbone of its food security, depends directly on the Indus River system flows. The treaty was not a favour. It was a legal compact, registered with the United Nations, backed by the World Bank, and binding under international law.
India’s suspension of that compact is not the act of a responsible democracy. It is the act of a state whose governing ideology – Hindutva, as articulated by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – has come to regard legal and institutional restraints as obstacles to the expression of Hindu nationalist supremacy. Under the administration of the Modi regime, Indian foreign policy has been increasingly and dangerously remoulded in the image of that ideology.
The RSS-Hindutva Factor: Ideology Over International Law
The intellectual ancestry of India’s current posture is not difficult to trace. The RSS, founded in 1925 on an explicit and myopic ideology of Hindu racial and misplaced civilisational supremacy, has never accepted the legitimacy of Pakistan’s existence. In the RSS worldview – which is now the governing worldview of the Indian state – Pakistan is not a neighbouring nation with which disputes must be managed. It is an aberration to be reversed, a wound to be cauterised, and its 240 million people are, at best, an afterthought.
Against this backdrop, the weaponisation of water is not an improvised response to the Pahalgam false flag attack. It is the logical culmination of a long-held strategic instinct: that Pakistan’s survival can and should be made conditional on its political compliance. Water, under this framework, becomes a lever of coercion. The IWT becomes an inconvenient legal constraint to be discarded when it is inconvenient.
This is not the behaviour of the world’s largest democracy. It is the behaviour of a state captured by an ethno-nationalist ideology that has abandoned the foundational principles of the post-1945 international order: the inviolability of treaties, the peaceful resolution of disputes, and the prohibition on using civilian populations as instruments of political pressure.
Climate Change: The Multiplier That Makes This Unforgivable
India’s timing could not be more catastrophic. Pakistan is, by virtually every international assessment, among the countries most severely affected by climate change, despite contributing less than one per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The country has witnessed glacial lake outburst floods of unprecedented scale, record-breaking heatwaves that have affected hundreds and thousands, and monsoon flooding in 2022 that submerged one-third of the national territory and displaced over 33 million people.
The Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalayan glacial system, which feeds the Indus and its tributaries, is melting at rates that alarm climate scientists. The short-term effect is increased, unpredictable flooding. The medium-term effect – within the lifetimes of children born today – is catastrophic water scarcity as the glaciers that have fed these rivers for millennia shrink and eventually disappear.
In this context, the Indus Waters Treaty was not merely a legal convenience. It was a lifeline. It guaranteed Pakistan predictable, legally protected access to river flows even as climate change made everything else unpredictable. India’s suspension of that guarantee – precisely when the climate crisis is at its most acute – is not a negotiating tactic. It is an act of compounded cruelty: using a man-made political crisis to remove the one legal buffer protecting a climate-battered nation from complete water insecurity.
The international community must understand what is happening here. India is not merely suspending a treaty. In the context of accelerating climate change, it is potentially engineering a humanitarian catastrophe – one that will be measured in failed harvests, starving children, and mass displacement – for a country of 240 million people. The architects of that catastrophe will not be climate change alone. They will be identifiable, named, and seated in the government of New Delhi.
A Nuclear-Armed Nation Pushed to the Wall: The World’s Most Dangerous Scenario
Let us be precise about what is at stake. Pakistan is a credible nuclear-armed state. It is a country whose military doctrine explicitly frames existential threats – including severe threats to its water and food security – as potential triggers for escalatory responses. Its nuclear posture is not one of assured second strike only; Pakistan has been explicit that threats to national survival warrant consideration of the full spectrum of responses.
When a state of 240 million people faces the prospect of systematic water deprivation – when its agricultural sector collapses, its food production fails, and its population faces mass hunger – the internal political pressures that result do not resolve themselves peacefully. History does not offer a single example of a large nation facing existential resource collapse that has chosen passive acceptance over conflict.
India’s political class appears to be operating under the illusion that Pakistan can be coerced by water deprivation into political submission. This is not merely strategically naive. It is strategically suicidal. A Pakistan driven to the wall – its people hungry, its rivers diminished, its treaty rights violated, its sovereignty openly assaulted – is not a Pakistan that capitulates. It is a Pakistan that radicalises, destabilises, and in the most extreme scenario, escalates in ways that no actor in the region – or beyond – could contain.
The risks are not confined to South Asia. A nuclear exchange on the subcontinent would be a global catastrophe. Nuclear winter models suggest that even a limited South Asian nuclear exchange could reduce global agricultural production by up to 20 per cent for over a decade, killing far more people globally from famine than from the explosions themselves. The children who would starve in the aftermath would be in Africa, in Southeast Asia, in Latin America, Europe, not only in South Asia.
Every world leader who remains silent as India dismantles the Indus Waters Treaty is complicit in rolling that dice.
The Collapse of the Rules-Based Order: A Precedent the World Cannot Afford
There is a broader principle at stake that extends far beyond the subcontinent. The post-1945 international order was built on a foundational premise: that treaties, once signed, are binding; that states cannot unilaterally abrogate agreements that inconvenience them; that might does not make right. This order is imperfect. It has been violated before. But its imperfection does not diminish its necessity.
If India – a permanent aspirant to a UN Security Council seat, a country that positions itself as a pillar of the Global South and a champion of multilateralism – can simply suspend an internationally registered treaty without consequence, then no treaty is safe. If a larger, stronger state can weaponise water against a smaller neighbour without the international community imposing costs, then every upstream nation in the world has just received permission to do the same.
Consider the precedents: Turkey and Iraq over the Euphrates and Tigris. Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan over the Nile. China and the nations of mainland Southeast Asia over the Mekong. In each of these basins, millions of people depend on water-sharing arrangements, formal or informal, that restrain the behaviour of upstream powers. India’s action in the Indus basin sends a signal to every upstream power in the world: legal obligations can be suspended when politically useful. The consequences of that signal will be felt for decades.
The World Must Act: A Call to the International Community
Pakistan has formally and consistently asked for arbitration under the treaty’s own mechanisms. It has approached the World Bank, the treaty’s guarantor. It has raised the matter before the United Nations. These are the actions of a state committed to the rules-based order – a state seeking legal remedy through legal means, even as its adversary abandons legality entirely.
The world’s response has been, to put it charitably, inadequate. Western capitals have been consumed by their own geopolitical preoccupations, treating South Asia’s brewing crisis as a secondary concern. The United Nations has issued cautious statements. The World Bank has expressed procedural concern. None of this is commensurate with the gravity of what is occurring.
The international community must do the following, and it must do it urgently:-
The World Bank must exercise its role as guarantor of the IWT and demand India’s immediate return to the treaty framework. Its silence is not neutrality – it is abdication. The United Nations Security Council must place the India-Pakistan water crisis on its formal agenda. A dispute involving two nuclear-armed states, the systematic violation of an international treaty, and the potential for mass civilian harm is precisely the category of threat the Security Council exists to address.
Major powers – including the United States, the European Union, China, Saudi Arabia, and Turkiye – must make clear to New Delhi that the unilateral suspension of an internationally registered treaty carries diplomatic and economic consequences.
Climate finance institutions must recognise the intersection of climate vulnerability and treaty violation in Pakistan’s case, and provide emergency support for climate adaptation infrastructure that India’s actions are now jeopardising.
International legal bodies, including the International Court of Justice, must be engaged to establish clearly that unilateral treaty suspension of this nature is unlawful under international law.
To India: Stop Playing With Fire
India is a great civilisation. It has produced some of the finest legal and diplomatic minds the world has known. It is the heir to a tradition of statecraft – articulated by Kautilya, refined by Gandhi, institutionalised by Nehru – that understood the difference between strength and recklessness. The current Indian government has abandoned that tradition in favour of a belligerent nationalism that mistakes aggression for resolve and illegality for decisiveness.
The Pahalgam attack was a tragedy. Its perpetrators deserve justice. But justice is not served by punishing 240 million Pakistani civilians for the alleged actions of non-state actors, which have yet to be proven. Justice is not served by dismantling a treaty that protects the water supply of an entire nation. These are not the actions of a state seeking justice. They are the actions of a state seeking domination – and dressing that domination in the language of counter-terrorism.
India must restore the Indus Waters Treaty to full force. It must return to the arbitration mechanisms the treaty provides. It must engage Pakistan through the Permanent Indus Commission as the treaty requires. And it must abandon the dangerous illusion that water can be weaponised against a nuclear-armed neighbour without catastrophic blowback.
The fire India is playing with does not burn only in Islamabad or Lahore. It burns in Mumbai and Delhi too. It burns in Beijing and Washington. It burns wherever human beings live in a world where the climate is already on fire and where the last guardrails of international law are all that stand between managed rivalry and catastrophic conflict. The international community is watching. History is watching. And the rivers – indifferent to borders, indifferent to ideology, indifferent to the calculations of politicians who believe they can control nature itself – are watching too.
The writer is a freelance columnist