The Indus Waters Treaty Was Never About Water

The Indus Waters Treaty Was Never About Water

(IN BRIEF) The Indus Waters Treaty was never merely a technical water-sharing agreement, but a political compact built on trust, goodwill and strategic restraint between India and Pakistan. India accepted major concessions under the 1960 treaty, including giving Pakistan access to the larger western river system and accepting strict limits on its own development rights, while continuing to honour the agreement through decades of wars, terrorist attacks and diplomatic crises. Over time, however, India came to view Pakistan’s repeated objections to Indian infrastructure projects as a pattern of strategic obstruction that weakened the treaty’s spirit of cooperation. Pakistan’s water insecurity is also presented as a deeper domestic governance challenge, shaped by underinvestment, inefficient irrigation, declining storage capacity and weak institutional planning, rather than being caused solely by India’s upstream position. Against this background, India’s decision to place the treaty in abeyance after the April 2025 Pahalgam terrorist attack is framed not as a sudden act of “weaponising water,” but as the result of a long reassessment of whether a treaty built on reciprocity can survive when the political trust behind it has eroded.

(OP-ED) ATHENS, 8-Jul-2026 — /EuropaWire/ — When India placed the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) in abeyance following the April 22, 2025 terrorist attack in Pahalgam, much of the international commentary portrayed the decision as the weaponisation of water. That interpretation, however, mistakes the consequence for the cause. The Indus Waters Treaty was never merely a legal instrument allocating the waters of six rivers between two nuclear-armed neighbours. It was an ambitious political compact built on a far more valuable commodity than water itself: trust.

Negotiated in the aftermath of Partition and signed on September 19, 1960 under the auspices of the World Bank, the Treaty reflected a bold assumption—that India and Pakistan, despite deep political hostility, could preserve one sphere of cooperation insulated from the volatility of their broader relationship. For more than six decades, that assumption allowed one of the world’s most enduring transboundary water agreements to survive wars, military crises and diplomatic ruptures. What has changed is not the geography of the Indus Basin, but the political environment that sustained this extraordinary arrangement. To understand why India concluded that the Treaty could no longer remain detached from the wider bilateral relationship, it is necessary to revisit the remarkable bargain on which it was founded.

That bargain was exceptional by any international standard. The negotiations began with the World Bank’s proposal of February 5, 1954, which required India—the upper-riparian state—to accept far-reaching concessions in pursuit of a permanent settlement. India agreed to abandon planned developments along the upper reaches of the Indus and Chenab river systems, relinquish the diversion of nearly six million acre-feet (MAF) of Chenab waters and accept significant constraints on the future development of rivers originating within its own territory. New Delhi accepted the framework almost immediately despite these restrictions, while Pakistan took nearly five years before formally endorsing it in December 1958.

When the Treaty was finally signed in 1960, the asymmetry became institutionalised. India retained exclusive rights over the eastern rivers—the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej—whose combined annual flow amounts to roughly 33 MAF. Pakistan received the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab, representing approximately 135 MAF, or nearly 80 percent of the basin’s annual flow. Contrary to a common misconception, India did not obtain additional water through the agreement. Instead, it relinquished claims to the substantially larger western river system in exchange for what was expected to become a durable framework for peaceful coexistence.

The imbalance extended beyond allocation. The Treaty imposed detailed restrictions on India’s irrigated cropped area, storage capacity and hydropower development on the western rivers through highly specific engineering and operational criteria, while placing no comparable constraints on Pakistan downstream. In one of the most unusual provisions found in any international river agreement, India also agreed to contribute approximately £62 million—worth roughly US$2.5 billion in today’s terms—to finance the infrastructure that would allow Pakistan to transition to the new water-sharing regime. These were not simply technical compromises over river management. They reflected a deliberate strategic investment in regional stability and the belief that political goodwill could outlast geopolitical rivalry. For decades, that calculation appeared justified. Ultimately, however, it also became the Treaty’s greatest vulnerability.

India’s subsequent conduct reinforced the extraordinary nature of that political commitment. Despite repeated military confrontations and terrorist attacks that fundamentally transformed bilateral relations, New Delhi continued to implement the Treaty without suspension or violation. The agreement remained intact through the wars of 1965 and 1971, the 1999 Kargil conflict, the 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament, the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the Uri and Pulwama attacks, and numerous other periods of heightened tension. Few international agreements have demonstrated comparable resilience under such sustained geopolitical pressure. The Indus Waters Treaty became widely celebrated precisely because it appeared capable of surviving where virtually every other aspect of India-Pakistan relations had failed.

Yet beneath that narrative of resilience, a different dynamic was gradually emerging. While India increasingly viewed the Treaty as a stabilising mechanism that should remain insulated from political confrontation, Pakistan relied with growing frequency on its procedural provisions to challenge Indian infrastructure projects that New Delhi argued were fully consistent with the Treaty’s terms. The first major dispute emerged over the Salal Hydroelectric Project in 1974, culminating in the 1978 Salal Agreement under which India accepted significant design modifications—including the reduction of the dam’s height and operational flexibility—that substantially diminished the project’s long-term efficiency. Similar disputes followed over the Tulbul Navigation Project, launched in 1984 to improve navigation and water management in Kashmir but effectively suspended since 1987 despite repeated bilateral negotiations and compromise proposals by India in 1998, 2004, 2006–07, 2011 and 2012.

The same pattern continued with Baglihar, Kishenganga, Ratle, Pakal Dul and Lower Kalnai, each becoming the subject of prolonged technical objections, neutral expert proceedings or international arbitration. The Baglihar project remained under dispute for more than a decade after construction began in 1999, while Pakistan’s objections to Kishenganga—first raised in 1988—ultimately progressed to the Court of Arbitration despite years of technical consultations and Indian design revisions. From India’s perspective, these recurring disputes gradually evolved beyond legitimate technical disagreements into a sustained pattern of strategic obstruction that delayed infrastructure development, increased project costs and constrained the exercise of rights explicitly recognised under the Treaty. Whether one accepts that interpretation or not, the cumulative effect was significant: an agreement conceived as a symbol of cooperation increasingly became an arena of strategic contestation, steadily eroding the mutual confidence upon which India’s extraordinary concessions in 1960 had originally rested.

By the early 2020s, therefore, the debate surrounding the Indus Waters Treaty was no longer simply about river management. It had become inseparable from a broader question: could an agreement built on assumptions of reciprocity continue to function when one party believed that the political foundations of that reciprocity had progressively disappeared?

Much of the international debate has portrayed Pakistan’s growing water insecurity primarily through the prism of India’s upstream position. That narrative, however, overlooks a far more complex and longstanding reality. Pakistan inherited one of the world’s largest contiguous irrigation systems, yet decades of inadequate planning, underinvestment and weak water governance have progressively undermined its long-term water security. Per capita water availability has fallen from approximately 5,260 cubic metres in 1947 to below 1,000 cubic metres by 2018, while groundwater extraction has expanded dramatically—from roughly 160,000 tube wells in the mid-1970s to nearly 1.4 million by 2017–18—making Pakistan the world’s third-largest extractor of groundwater. Nearly one-third of available river water continues to flow into the Arabian Sea without productive utilisation, existing reservoirs have steadily lost storage capacity because of sedimentation, and no major storage project comparable to Tarbela has been completed since the 1970s despite a population that has more than tripled and a climate that has become increasingly volatile.

The structural weaknesses extend well beyond infrastructure. Successive governments have struggled to build political consensus on major reservoir projects such as Kalabagh, while inefficient flood irrigation, the cultivation of water-intensive crops, weak water pricing and chronic underinvestment in modern irrigation technologies have slowed meaningful reform. Long-standing disputes between the federation and the provinces over water allocation continue to undermine coherent national planning, while the devastating floods of 2022 exposed serious deficiencies in floodplain management, drainage systems and water storage. More recently, reductions in federal development spending—including significant cuts to water-sector allocations for fiscal year 2026–27—have reinforced concerns that long-term investment continues to lag behind political rhetoric. Independent assessments, including those of the World Bank, have estimated that poor water management costs Pakistan approximately four percent of its GDP annually. None of these structural challenges can be resolved through the Indus Waters Treaty alone. They point instead to a broader conclusion: Pakistan’s long-term water security will depend as much on domestic governance and institutional reform as on cooperation over transboundary rivers.

The Indus Waters Treaty was negotiated for a geopolitical environment that no longer exists. Its preamble spoke of achieving “the most complete and satisfactory utilisation of the waters of the Indus system of rivers” in a “spirit of goodwill and friendship.” Those words were not ceremonial. They reflected the understanding that the Treaty’s legal architecture rested upon a broader political commitment to restraint, reciprocity and peaceful coexistence. More than six decades later, India argues that the strategic assumptions underpinning that agreement have fundamentally changed. Population growth on both sides of the border, increasing pressure on finite water resources, the urgency of expanding renewable hydropower, the accelerating effects of climate change and an increasingly hostile security environment have combined to create circumstances that the Treaty’s architects could neither fully anticipate nor adequately address.

Against this backdrop, New Delhi formally invoked Article XII(3) of the Treaty in January 2023 and again in August 2024, seeking discussions on reviewing and modifying the agreement to reflect contemporary realities. India maintains that while Pakistan responded within the prescribed period, the central question of substantive modification remained unaddressed. From India’s perspective, the decision to place the Treaty in abeyance after the April 2025 Pahalgam terrorist attack was therefore not an abrupt departure from six decades of policy, but the culmination of a much longer process of strategic reassessment. Whether one agrees with that interpretation or not, the issue now extends beyond the allocation of river waters. It raises a broader question about the relationship between international law and interstate conduct: can an agreement negotiated in an era of goodwill continue to operate unchanged when the political conditions that sustained it have been fundamentally transformed?

The debate over the Indus Waters Treaty should move beyond the simplistic narrative of “weaponising water.” The more consequential question is whether any international agreement can remain indefinitely insulated from the broader conduct of the states that are party to it. For sixty-five years, the Treaty endured because both India and Pakistan, despite wars, crises and deep political differences, recognised that preserving one channel of cooperation served a larger strategic purpose. Today, that premise is under unprecedented strain.

The future of the Treaty will therefore depend not only on the flow of the Indus, Jhelum or Chenab, but on whether the political conditions that once made cooperation possible can be rebuilt. International agreements derive their resilience not solely from legal obligations, but from reciprocity, good faith and the confidence that both parties remain committed to the principles upon which those agreements were founded. Rivers follow geography; treaties follow political will. The Indus Waters Treaty was never just about water. It was about trust. And when trust erodes, even the most celebrated agreements must confront the realities of a changing strategic landscape.

About the author

Dimitra Staikou is a Greek lawyer, journalist, and professional writer with extensive expertise on South Asia, China, and the Middle East. Her analyses on geopolitics, international trade, and human rights have been published in leading outlets including Modern Diplomacy, HuffPost Greece, Skai.gr, Eurasia Review, and the Daily Express (UK). Fluent in English, Greek, and Spanish, Dimitra combines legal insight with on-the-ground reporting and creative storytelling, offering a nuanced perspective on global affairs.

SOURCE: Dimitra Staikou