Water Needs Endanger Historic India-Pakistan Pact
India threatens to vacate historic Indus Waters Treaty
By: Nirupama Subramanian
A 64-year-old treaty brokered by the World Bank for river-water sharing between India and Pakistan appears to be unraveling. Last week, India sent Pakistan a notice for “review and modification” of the Indus Waters Treaty, calling off all meetings of the Permanent Indus Commission (PIC), a bilateral technical body that oversees the implementation of the treaty, until Pakistan agreed to talks on the matter. Quoting unnamed “sources,” media in India reported that the word “review” signals the intention to scrap the treaty and negotiate a new one.
Delhi's concerns reportedly include the population increase in the Indus basin on the Indian side, the need for India to meet its emission targets under the UN-sponsored global warming pact and the impact of “cross-border” terrorist acts in Jammu & Kashmir.
The Indus Waters Treaty, which divided six rivers of the Himalayan Indus river basin between the two countries, represents the only settlement of an India-Pakistan dispute. It doesn’t have an exit clause. Neither side can terminate it unilaterally. While modifications can be made, termination of the treaty is possible only by negotiating another treaty to replace it. India's move has the potential of turning a treaty that has withstood seven decades of mutual hostility between the two countries into another friction point. The two sides haven’t engaged with each other since 2019, when India carried out an aerial bombing mission inside Pakistan after a suicide bomber killed 40 security personnel in Kashmir, and later that year, made constitutional changes abolishing the special status of Jammu & Kashmir in the Indian union. Diplomatic ties have remained downgraded since then. Official trade too ended. Relations between the two neighbors at this time are at their lowest in two decades.
Over the years, the IWT's water-sharing arrangements have been under stress, but the treaty itself was not openly challenged, staying above the fray despite growing murmurs in India that it was an “unfair” agreement, and the suspicion on the Pakistani side that India could weaponize the water by obstructing water flows or by flooding its most fertile plains in Punjab province.
But within a couple of years of taking office in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi signaled that he didn’t view the treaty as sacrosanct. Through 2016, a series of strikes on Indian military bases along the border with Pakistan that Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based terrorist outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed, caught Delhi unaware. After one such attack at Uri in September 2016, Modi declared that “blood and water cannot flow together at the same time.” He also set up a committee that included national security experts to study the terms of the treaty and to maximize the use of the rivers allotted to India so as to minimize their natural flow into Pakistan.
The treaty, whose terms were debated and discussed by water engineers from both sides with the mediation of the World Bank, took a dozen years to finalize. At the time, it was hailed as a visionary agreement for lasting peace in a region still recovering from the bloodshed of Partition and the first India-Pakistan war.
Signed in 1960 by India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistan's President Ayub Khan, it granted the sole use of three “eastern” rivers – the Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej – to India for “unrestricted” use. Three “western” rivers – the Indus, Chenab, and Jhelum – were given to Pakistan. While the Indus flows through the Ladakh mountains into Gilgit Baltistan on the Pakistan side, the Chenab and Jhelum flow through Jammu & Kashmir. On its side of the territory, India is allowed to use their waters for local and “non-consumptive” purposes. The treaty's annexures are a forest of technical specifications for irrigation and the setting up of “run of the river” hydroelectric power projects without affecting the flow or water levels downstream.
Pakistan is opposed to almost every Indian hydropower project on these rivers. The treaty contains a graded dispute settlement mechanism. Any alleged violations deemed “questions” are in the first instance dealt with by the two Commissioners – one each from India and Pakistan – of the PIC. If they are unable to resolve the matter, which is then deemed a “difference,” it goes up to a World Bank-appointed neutral expert. If it’s judged a “dispute,” the matter moves up to the final stage of arbitration. In the first few years of this century, for instance, Pakistan and India sparred over the Baglihar dam on the Chenab. The dispute was resolved by arbitration. The ruling went in India's favor.
The present crisis over the treaty can be traced to two other projects, a run-of-the-river hydroelectric power station at Ratle on the Chenab, and the Kishanganga, on an eponymous tributary of the Jhelum (it’s called the Neelum on the Pakistani side). The latter is a functioning project. Ratle has not been completed yet. In a surprise move in October 2022, the World Bank activated two stages of the dispute settlement mechanism simultaneously, granting a neutral expert at India's request and launching arbitration at Pakistan's request. One Pakistani expert writing in Dawn, Pakistan’s largest English-language newspaper, said the Bank had “unwittingly” pitted the two countries against each other. In India, the Hindu newspaper said the Bank may come to regret its “moment of weakness.” The World Bank too acknowledged that “carrying out the two processes concurrently poses practical and legal challenges”.
In response, in January 2023, India made an official pitch for “modification” of the conflict-resolution mechansim, setting a deadline of 90 days for Pakistan to respond. Citing “sources,” Indian media reported at the time that having the two processes at the same time “creates an unprecedented and legally untenable situation, which risks endangering IWT itself.” It was suggested that India would seek changes to the dispute resolution mechanism of the treaty, perhaps to do away with the World Bank. India challenged the jurisdiction of the court of arbitration in the matter and lost. Both processes are continuing.
In June this year, a delegation of water experts and others from Pakistan, accompanied by a large entourage from the World Bank led by a neutral expert, visited Ratle, Kishanganga, and a third hydropower site to which Pakistan has objected. India's notification to Pakistan for a “review and modification” of the treaty, came weeks later, on August 30. The Indian media was briefed on the development by “sources” on September 19, in the midst of two provincial elections – in Haryana and Jammu & Kashmir. Both have stakes in the IWT. While the delegation was still touring, a regional leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in Hindu-majority Jammu called for the treaty to be terminated as it had benefited only Pakistan and jeopardized the development and water security of Jammu & Kashmir. In Haryana, farmers have long demanded more irrigation water from the Sutlej, one of the three Treaty rivers in India's share.
Haryana's conflict is not with Pakistan, it is with the neighboring Indian state of Punjab, which is seen to have cornered the largest share of the Sutlej waters. But the water conflict between the two neighboring Indian states reinforces a festering sentiment that India got a raw deal in the IWT, that the treaty is outdated and can’t address the water needs of a population that has grown exponentially in the past 60 years, a situation worsened by climate change-impacted rainfall patterns, glacial melts and lower water levels in the rivers. By one calculation, the IWT gave India, the upper riparian, less than 20 percent of the water in the Indus river systems.
Pakistan's response to India's challenge has been to reiterate the importance of the treaty. Describing it as a “gold standard” among water treaties, a spokeswoman said Pakistan was committed to complying with it and expressed the hope that India would do so as well. Any problems could be discussed between the Indus Waters commissioners, she said.
Pakistani commentators suspect that Delhi's desire to renegotiate the treaty is linked to its August 2019 constitutional changes in the status of Jammu &Kashmir and India's claim, reiterated by the top leadership of the ruling BJP, over parts of J&K territory, including Gilgit-Baltistan, on the Pakistani side of the Line of Control. In 2012, India prevented the World Bank and Asian Development Bank from financing the construction of a dam on the Indus in Gilgit-Baltistan, asserting its claim over the region.
It is not clear how seriously India will pursue its notification to Pakistan. What is clear is that the two sides have neither political will nor the statesmanship required to negotiate a new treaty to replace the existing one. The record speaks for itself. At this point, they can’t even greet each other on their national days. The IWT is now officially one more “issue” in a long list of unresolved problems between the two sides. Without the PIC meetings, the water arrangements will continue to limp along. More “let's stop the water to Pakistan” rhetoric will be heard from India, even if no actions are taken to translate the threat. It will keep the two countries on edge, satisfying hardliners in both. The bigger signal from India is it doesn’t believe peace with Pakistan is possible.
The twist in the tale is that in the east, India is a lower riparian to China on the Brahmaputra. Commentators in Pakistan, whose close military and political ties with China constitute Delhi's “two front” nightmare, have noted that China is the “uppermost riparian” in the Himalayan region. In 2020, China stepped in to fund the construction of the Diamer Bhasha dam. It was seen in Pakistan as Beijing's willingness to assert itself against India's “water hegemony.”