The Indus Waters Treaty

Indus Waters Treaty, 1960 — how the basin was divided

Background

• Signed in 1960 between Jawaharlal Nehru and Ayub Khan, brokered by the World Bank.
• Ramaswamy R. Iyer notes the original logic: irrigation networks then had to be developed in western Punjab, now part of Pakistan.
• Restrictions were also placed on the extension of irrigation in India.
• Institutional machinery → Permanent Indus Commission, with neutral expert determination and Permanent Court of Arbitration referral; data exchange on project operation and irrigated agriculture. Under Article V India paid approximately £62.06 million; international financial assistance went to Pakistan for irrigation works.

Contention

• Pakistan has objected to Indian projects on the western rivers, for example the Tulbul project.
• Indian resentment centres on having conceded about 80% of the water; Article XII says the treaty may from time to time be modified, but this requires ratification by both.
• Iftikhar A. Drabu — the treaty has withstood an acrimonious relationship and three wars, and is considered one of the most successful water-sharing arrangements in the world. It survived the wars of 1965, 1971 and 1999 and the standoffs of 1987, 2001–02, 2008, 2016 and 2019.

Options and considerations

• Brahma Chellaney → renegotiate to reflect changed geopolitical realities; India is disadvantaged as upper riparian.
• Using the treaty as a pressure point → suspend Permanent Indus Commission meetings; maximise use of the allocated share; contemplate withdrawal, particularly in response to Chinese dams on the Indus.
• TCA Raghavan → future negotiation is possible, including a joint river basin authority. UNDP has called on India to share the water deficit from the western rivers during lean seasons.

Is stopping the flow practical?

• Blocking flow means blocking the three western rivers, which carry more than 80% of the Indus basin’s flow — achievable only by storage or diversion.
• Diversion → Iftikhar A. Drabu: 117 BCM would inundate nearly 120,000 sq km to a height of one metre every year, or the whole Kashmir valley to seven metres in a single year. Diverting any one river needs a man-made river running hundreds of kilometres.
• Storage → a single Tehri-sized storage takes nearly a decade; even thirty simultaneous projects would impound water only around 2030.
• Either way Pakistan feels no impact for at least the next 30 to 50 years, and the environmental cost of both is catastrophic.

Arguments against manipulation

• Asma Yaqoob → the treaty is legally a “non-exit” partnership; denying Pakistan access would damage India’s global reputation and unsettle China and Nepal, with whom India is itself a downstream recipient.
• Maya Mirchandani → calls to abrogate are knee-jerk emotional responses; abrogation would alarm other countries with rights over rivers flowing from India.
• Sayanangshu Modak → by keeping to the treaty India strengthens its standing as a responsible upstream riparian when engaging China. Equally, since neither goodwill nor friendship — the preamble’s stated spirit — now exists, critics argue India has no obligation to continue.
• Without Pakistan actually feeling any impact, abrogation would only feed lobbies within Pakistan that want relations to deteriorate.
• Amit Ranjan → the widening supply-demand gap has produced water nationalism; militant groups have taken up the issue, with March 2010 rallies in Muzaffarabad and Lahore denouncing India’s “theft” of waters through “illegal dams”.

Blood and water can’t flow together. — Narendra Modi, after Uri, 2016. In 2019 India’s water minister threatened to let “not even a single drop of water” reach Pakistan.

The suspension of April 2025

• On 23 April 2025 India suspended the treaty, triggered by the Pahalgam attack.
• Legal basis → India invoked Article 62 of the Vienna Convention, arguing a fundamental change of circumstances caused by Pakistan’s support for terrorism.
• What India gains → the way opens to untapped hydropower on the western rivers, an estimated 18,000 MW, feeding energy needs and development in Jammu and Kashmir.
• Suspension, not revocation → this allows continued diplomatic engagement and possible renegotiation; India can halt data-sharing and pause dispute mechanisms without outright abrogation.
• Implications for Pakistan → threatens water security in Punjab and Sindh, deepening economic crisis and political instability.
• Diplomatic risk → international backlash, damage to India’s standing as a reliable partner in transboundary water agreements, and a precedent for future disputes.
• Environmental and technical constraints → ecosystem and sediment effects, and the geological difficulty of building in the seismic Himalayan region, requiring substantial investment and time.
• Pending Indian projects — the Shahpurkandi Dam on the Ravi, the Ujh Dam in Jammu and Kashmir and the Ravi–Beas link in Punjab — need to be expedited to feed the food bowls of India.

Abeyance — the word, the law, the capacity

The word India chose

• India said abeyance, not suspension and not termination — the choice was deliberate. Article XII(4) keeps the treaty in force until replaced by another ratified treaty; there is no exit clause, so a stated withdrawal would have been a plain breach.
• India’s letter of 24 April 2025 cited significantly altered population demographics and the need to accelerate clean-energy development, and accused Pakistan of refusing modification talks and of breaching the treaty through sustained cross-border terrorism.
• India is not a party to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, and the IWT predates it — which is why the two sides argue past each other on Articles 60 and 62.

The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 will be held in abeyance with immediate effect, until Pakistan credibly and irrevocably abjures its support for cross-border terrorism. — Vikram Misri, Foreign Secretary, on the CCS decision, 23 April 2025

Is it lawful? Three positions

Intent versus capacity — the gap that decides the question

• The treaty allows India only 3.6 million acre-feet (about 4.4 km³) of storage on the western rivers, against some 182 km³ flowing to Pakistan yearly. India has built about 0.7 MAF of that entitlement.
• Permitted plants are run-of-river and hold little water; new large storage would take years, some to 2032. So the real pressure today is informational, not hydrological — halting flood data and technical exchange hurts Pakistan more than any dam can at present.
• Action since abeyance → sediment-flushing at Baglihar, Salal and Dulhasti on the Chenab without notifying Pakistan; fast-tracked Chenab hydropower — Pakal Dul (1,000 MW), Kiru (624), Kwar (540), Ratle (850), Sawalkote (1,856). J&K’s installed hydropower is set to rise about 46%, from 3,540 MW to 5,164 MW, by December 2026.
• No confirmed evidence yet that aggregate flows have changed; the shift so far is legal and procedural.

Unable for now to block water flows to Pakistan, India can, however, halt the flow of information. In some ways, this could be India’s most powerful current card.

David Michel, CSIS, 1 May 2025

The arbitration clash

• Pakistan’s Court of Arbitration case (PCA No. 2023-01), chaired by Sean D. Murphy, ruled on 27 June 2025 that abeyance does not remove the Court’s competence.
• India did not appear and calls the Court illegally constituted, while accepting the parallel Neutral Expert track (Michel Lino) that it had itself requested — two tracks running at once on the same dams.
• A further Maximum Pondage award (15 May 2026) went against India, which the Ministry of External Affairs dismissed as null and void.
• The clash is less about any single dam than about whether a party can walk out of a binding dispute system by relabelling its exit.

The text of the Treaty, therefore, does not provide for the unilateral ‘abeyance’ or ‘suspension’ of the Treaty. — Court of Arbitration, Supplemental Award on Competence, 27 June 2025

One year on — 2026

• Positions have hardened and diverged: India says the treaty is in abeyance, Pakistan says it is fully operational and effective. Home Minister Amit Shah has said it will never be restored; President Zardari objected on World Water Day, 22 March 2026.
• Pakistan raised the issue at a UN Security Council Arria-formula meeting on 30 January 2026.
• The basin lost about 24.8% of perennial snow and ice cover between 2001 and 2021 — the argument that climate stress leaves both states no real alternative to cooperation, whatever the treaty’s legal status.

Theory — how to frame it in an answer

• Amal Chandra → coercive treaty retaliation: a treaty becomes an instrument for imposing costs on a state accused of sponsoring terrorism — a move from liberal institutionalism toward realism.
• Medha Bisht → coercive diplomacy displacing strategic idealism, which had assumed that cooperation breeds stability. Her caution: this framing may make future cooperation harder, because it pushes aside the ecological view of shared rivers.
• Masha Tokas → securitization theory — India recast water from a technical matter into a security concern, ending the older habit of keeping the treaty apart from politics. Against this she sets regime theory, which the treaty exemplified for decades.

In such scenarios, power trumps principle, and realism supplants liberal institutionalism.

Amal Chandra, Global Policy Journal, 14 May 2025

Escalation risk

• Pakistan has drawn a red line, treating any real interruption of flows as an act of war — which raises the danger of miscalculation between two nuclear states.
• Dan Haines (UCL) → even symbolic disruption could hurt Pakistani agriculture, close to a quarter of the economy.
• David Michel → India’s upper-riparian advantage could rebound, since China sits above India on the same river system and may copy the tactic on the Brahmaputra; touching a settled water treaty may also unsettle smaller neighbours such as Bangladesh and Nepal.

Any attempt to usurp the water of the lower riparian, or to stop it, or to divert it would be an act of war against Pakistan and would be responded to with full force, including nuclear.

Muhammad Khalid Jamali, Pakistan’s Ambassador

Contention II — water: Farakka and Teesta

• India and Bangladesh share 54 common rivers. A bilateral Joint Rivers Commission (JRC) has worked since June 1972 to maximise benefits from common river systems, but only two rivers — the Ganga and the Teesta — have been the subject of formal agreement, and the JRC has been inactive since 2011.

Farakka Barrage

• Nilanjan Ghosh → the Farakka Barrage, long the point of contention in transboundary relations, is now emerging as an inter-state water dispute. It was planned to enhance the flow of the Bhagirathi-Hooghly and revive the port at Kolkata downstream.
• Bangladesh was critical from the proposal stage, apprehending that enhanced flow into the Bhagirathi-Hooghly would reduce the dry season flow of the Ganges/Padma into Bangladesh.
• What should be done → removal of Farakka would harm ecosystem services in that part of the state. The basic problem is the flawed design of the barrage, which did not consider the sediment variable; ecologically informed engineering is the need of the hour. River basin commissions with powers above the federal states should be set up to prevent escalation of inter-state conflicts, and outmoded engineering paradigms should be dispensed with.

Teesta

• A 315 km river rising in the eastern Himalayas near Chunthang in Sikkim, flowing through West Bengal into Bangladesh and on to the Bay of Bengal; a tributary of the Brahmaputra, known as the Jamuna in Bangladesh. It originally flowed south into the Padma and around 1787 changed course eastward to join the Jamuna.
• The dispute → contested since 1947, when the catchment areas were allotted to India. After the JRC was set up in 1972, an ad hoc arrangement of 1983 gave India 39% and Bangladesh 36%; allocation has been under discussion since 1972, with only 25% of the waters shared and the remainder unevenly divided. Bangladesh seeks a 25% share. Negotiations began in earnest after the Ganga Water Treaty of 1996 and have made limited progress.
• Constant dam building along the Teesta in Sikkim has reduced lean season flow into Bangladesh, on which the livelihood of millions depends. As a lower riparian, Bangladesh is naturally sensitive on transboundary issues.
• For West Bengal, the river sustains five northern districts — Darjeeling, North and South Dinajpur, Cooch Behar and Jalpaiguri — among the poorest farming districts, with about 12.77% of the state’s population. There is also the matter of Kolkata port silting up and needing more water in the lean season.
• A framework agreement under the Manmohan Singh government faced obstacles from coalition politics and objections from West Bengal, along with complications from India’s water agreements with Pakistan. The West Bengal Chief Minister vetoed the proposed treaty in 2011 but has more recently said the state is ready to share water if suitable alternatives, such as interlinking of rivers through canals, are explored with the central government.
• Tariq A. Karim → despite advances in other areas, the Teesta dispute remains a major concern for many Bangladeshis, and this emotional factor exacerbates tensions.
• Jaideep Majumdar → unresolved issues on the Teesta might weaken India’s position on other water disputes, such as the Brahmaputra with China; failure could also undermine opportunities for “Blue Water Partnerships” in the Indian Ocean.
• S.D. Muni → broader strategic interests should not be impeded by narrow domestic concerns; the Gujral Doctrine of good neighbourly relations could serve as a basis for resolution.

Rivers, defence and security

River water sharing

• India’s first hydropower projects were on the Kosi (1954) and Gandak (1959); the Nepalese perceived them as tilted heavily in India’s favour [Gyawali; Shrestha]. To accommodate these concerns the agreements were revised in 1964 (Gandak) and 1966 (Kosi).
• Akhilesh Upadhyay notes a general impression in Nepal that it did not get a fair deal on the Kosi and Gandak. S.D. Muni — a deep cleavage of distrust followed, and no major project could be undertaken until the Mahakali Treaty of 1998.
• Implementation of the Mahakali Treaty has barely moved. Out of commercially viable potential of 45,000 MW, Nepal has developed hardly 600 MW — not enough even for its basic requirements — so it buys power from India rather than selling.
• Both sides have agreed to assemble a team of experts to resolve differences and finalise the detailed project report for the 6,480 MW Pancheshwar Multipurpose bi-national plant on the Mahakali.

Defence and security

• S.D. Muni — Nepali territory has been used, given the open border, by cross-border terrorists from Pakistan, criminal gangs, smugglers of both countries, and for the flow of fake Indian currency.
• The hijacking of IC 814 from Kathmandu in December 1999 made prevention of such incidents a major Indian concern.
• India stresses strengthening the legal framework against common cross-border challenges and has provided liberal assistance for infrastructure, capacity building, equipment and training.

Hydropolitics of South Asia and the China Factor

• Water flows dynamically and disregards state boundaries, which poses a particular challenge to simplistic notions of state sovereignty. Dams and river management can engineer new flows and affect downstream availability, making transboundary waters a geopolitical problem.
• Water is a strategic concern for China, a key stakeholder in South Asian water relations and in the Ganga–Brahmaputra–Meghna Basin. The glaciers feeding the Ganga lie in China, and the Brahmaputra — the Yarlung Tsangpo — is the lifeline of the region. China’s growing reliance on water shared with neighbours may run counter to its diplomatic efforts to present a positive international image.
• China currently shares flood forecasting data with India and Bangladesh during the monsoon, though it briefly stopped the practice with India in 2017, purportedly because of the Doklam standoff and India’s boycott of the BRI. Such knowledge needs to be shared more frequently, to include other countries, and through mechanisms insulated from wider political tension and the whims of officials.
• Beijing’s differentiated behaviour → reluctant to engage in meaningful basin-wide cooperation, and acts differently depending on the basin and the neighbour. To the north it shares rivers with Mongolia, North Korea and Russia, has more bilateral treaties with them than with any others, and typically decides collectively — vastly different from its treatment of countries to the northwest, south and southeast.
• China is a signatory to several bilateral water agreements, but these are often non-binding memorandums on the selling of hydrological data, joint research, navigation and management of river islands. It denounced the Mekong River Commission, established in 1995 by Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, yet established the Lancang–Mekong Cooperation in 2014 to coordinate sub-regional initiatives and advance connectivity through BRI-funded infrastructure.
• This shift does not necessarily indicate a preference for multilateral water cooperation across all basins; Beijing is unlikely to participate in basin-wide cooperation it has not initiated or does not control. Any dam building or diversion on the Tibetan Plateau or along the Yarlung Tsangpo will affect India, Nepal and Bangladesh alike, and both Dhaka and Kathmandu feature prominently in Beijing’s regional ambitions.
• China has at times used dam building or the withholding of hydrological data as a coercive tactic, and could resort to both in the Ganga–Brahmaputra–Meghna Basin. Basin countries therefore need innovative policies for collective action that both initiate discussion and keep participants engaged.

The Sindoor spillover

David Michel (CSIS) warns that India’s upper-riparian advantage could rebound — China sits above India on the same river system and may copy the tactic on the Brahmaputra. India’s willingness to touch a settled water treaty may also unsettle smaller neighbours such as Bangladesh and Nepal.

Ambika Vishwanath — the prescription

India should make common cause with Bangladesh and other basin countries as equal partners, so as to collectively initiate dialogue with China. India can engage China on issues that are not politically sensitive — improving water quality, agricultural water usage. The two already have institutional arrangements for data sharing on climate change; joint research on glaciers can be made part of such initiatives.