Somewhere in the upper reaches of the Chenab, beyond the snowfields of Lahaul-Spiti, engineers are drilling an 8.7-kilometre tunnel through a Himalayan mountain. When completed, it will silently redirect water that has flowed toward Pakistan for millions of years, channelling it instead into India’s Beas River system – away from the fields of Pakistani Punjab, away from the farmers who have depended on it for generations.
No declaration of war accompanies this tunnel. No UN resolution marks the moment. But this is among the most consequential acts of hydraulic statecraft in South Asian history, and Pakistan faces a narrowing window in which to mount an effective response.
The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 stands as one of the great diplomatic achievements of the post-colonial world. Brokered by the World Bank following the partition of British India, it divided a river basin between two newly hostile nations. Pakistan received the three western rivers – Chenab, Jhelum, and Indus – while India received the three eastern ones. For 65 years, through three wars, nuclear standoffs, and generations of mutual antagonism, the treaty held. Water, it seemed, was the one domain where both countries could sustain a working arrangement.
That arrangement was placed under severe stress on 23 April 2025, the day after 26 tourists were killed in Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir. India placed the treaty “in abeyance” – a bureaucratic phrase for a legally unprecedented act. The treaty contains no provision for unilateral suspension. The World Bank President said so explicitly. International legal scholars said so. Pakistan said so. India pressed ahead regardless.
India’s suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty and its accelerating upstream projects on the Chenab are not merely diplomatic manoeuvres. They represent a gathering existential challenge to Pakistan’s food, energy, and long-term stability — one that demands an equally serious and sustained response.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was unambiguous about the strategic intent: India’s water would flow for India’s benefit. The declared objective of “full utilisation” of its share of western rivers – always technically permitted under the IWT but historically unpursued due to resource and legal constraints – was now publicly embraced as policy. Within weeks, two new multi-billion-dollar tunnel projects on the Chenab were announced to divert water to the Beas, a feasibility study was launched for a 113-kilometre canal carrying Chenab and Indus headwaters all the way to Rajasthan, and the Salal Dam desiltation project was initiated with the stated aim of increasing pondage. Home Minister Amit Shah set a three-year target for completion.
For Pakistan, water is not a diplomatic bargaining chip. It is the difference between harvest and hunger, between a functioning state and a fragile one.
Abstract geopolitics becomes very concrete when one stands in the cotton fields of central Punjab in August. The Chenab, together with the canals it feeds, irrigates a vast arc of Pakistani agricultural land. Cotton, rice, sugarcane, wheat – the crops that feed Pakistan’s people and anchor its export economy – all depend on this river. The Upper Chenab Canal, the Lower Chenab Canal, and the Marala-Ravi Link are not merely engineering structures. They are the vascular system of an entire civilisation.
When India exercises control over the quantity of water that flows through that system, every Pakistani farmer lives at the mercy of decisions made upstream by an adversary government. In December 2025, variations in Chenab flow were already being reported by farmers in Punjab, affecting the wheat crop. Pakistan’s Kissan Ittehad described it as “water aggression.” Officials warned of disruptions to the agricultural cycle. And the major diversion infrastructure has not yet even been built.
Consider what India can already do with its existing dams – Salal, Baglihar, the newly commissioned Ratle, alongside the Pakal Dul, Kiru, and Kwar projects – all cleverly framed as run-of-river hydroelectric schemes. India now possesses the operational capability to release sudden surges of water during Pakistan’s sowing season, flooding fields and washing away young crops; and equally, to withhold flows during the growing season, imposing artificial drought. Neither act requires a formal declaration of war. Such interventions cause devastation quietly, deniably, and persistently – damage that a missile strike could never replicate.
Pakistan enters this crisis carrying structural vulnerabilities that have accumulated over decades. Per capita water availability has collapsed from 5,260 cubic metres a year in 1951 to under 1,000 cubic metres today, approaching the international threshold for water scarcity. The country stores only 30 days’ worth of river flow, compared to India’s 120 to 220 days. The irrigation system is ageing and inefficient. An estimated sixty per cent of the water that enters the system is lost before it reaches a field.
The World Food Programme has assessed that 82 per cent of Pakistanis cannot afford a nutritionally adequate diet. Agriculture contributes 23 per cent of GDP and employs nearly half the workforce. One in every five rupees Pakistan earns from exports originates in cotton and textiles – all of it dependent on Chenab water.
When those numbers are understood in full, India’s upstream ambitions begin to resemble not merely a bilateral dispute but a slow-motion economic siege.
The energy dimension compounds the challenge considerably. Pakistan’s hydropower stations generate roughly a third of its electricity – its most affordable source. These stations depend on river flows that India increasingly controls. Reduced flow means reduced generation, more load-shedding, heavier reliance on fuel imports, and higher electricity costs. Farmers who can no longer afford to pump groundwater are compelled to pump it anyway, steadily depleting aquifers that took millennia to fill.
The environmental consequences are already visible. Travel through the Sutlej basin and the old bed of the Beas, and the deterioration is evident – depleted groundwater, disrupted ecological patterns, and irreversibly altered water-use habits across entire communities.
Pakistan has a strategic window of perhaps three to seven years to act before India’s infrastructure creates facts on the ground that diplomacy alone cannot reverse.
The arithmetic of time is unforgiving. The Chenab-Beas tunnel is already in early construction. The 113-kilometre inter-basin canal remains in its feasibility phase. These are multi-year projects. That means a window still exists – narrow but real – in which Pakistan retains meaningful agency over the outcome.
That window is approximately three to seven years. Once the infrastructure is operational, physical diversions will have created new hydrological realities. Legal challenges, however well-founded, cannot undo a dam or restore a diverted river to its original course. The moment for decisive action is now. (To Be Continued)
The writer is a former Engineer-in-Chief, PhD in Finance (investment in fragile economies and weak institutions). He can be reached at khatana651273 @gmail.com.