By Ashok Nilakantan Ayers
For 66 years, the Indus Waters Treaty– IWT — survived wars, military crises and diplomatic breakdowns between India and Pakistan. Today, it is facing its gravest challenge.
India has kept the treaty in abeyance since April 2025, following the Pahalgam terrorist attack, and has repeatedly said there can be no return to business as usual unless Pakistan credibly and irrevocably ends its support for cross-border terrorism. New Delhi reiterated that position in July 2026.
Pakistan, meanwhile, has raised the rhetoric. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has declared that “every drop” of Pakistan’s water is a red line, warning of a direct response if India interferes with its water supplies. Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has taken the opposite position, arguing that the treaty has disadvantaged Kashmir for decades and should remain suspended, effectively making the present arrangement a permanent one.
The confrontation raises a much larger question: Can water become an instrument of national security without becoming a weapon of regional instability? While the world is disputing the intransigence of Iran in blocking transit through Hormuz and charging toll while international maritime laws guarantee free passage through international waters.
But the IWT cannot be compared to the Iran Hormuz situation because this is between two countries and India’s position is very clear — stop cross border terrorism , Pakistan has been training the Let and JeM , internationally banned organisations, to infiltrate into India and cause disturbances . India’s stand in terms of cross border terrorism is real judging by the trends or the sequences of disturbances from the Bombay 1990s train explosions, 26/11 terror attacks on three prominent places in Mumbai including the Taj hotel in which over 1,000 people died. The unforgivable attack on law-abiding tourists in Pahalgam last year that shuttered the IWT.
An unusual treaty that gave India the eastern rivers: The 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, brokered by the World Bank, divided the six rivers of the Indus basin. India received unrestricted use of the eastern rivers — Ravi, Beas and Sutlej — while Pakistan received the western rivers — Indus, Jhelum and Chenab — subject to specified Indian uses, including domestic consumption, non-consumptive uses and limited irrigation and hydropower.
The bargain was remarkably generous to Pakistan in one sense: although the three western rivers flow through Indian territory, the overwhelming bulk of their waters was reserved for Pakistan.
For decades India largely accepted the arrangement as the price of regional stability. But the treaty increasingly became contentious in Jammu and Kashmir, where successive governments have complained that restrictions on Indian projects have prevented the full utilisation of rivers flowing through the Union Territory.
India’s argument today is therefore not simply that Pakistan is receiving too much water. It is that a treaty negotiated in 1960 cannot be insulated from the security relationship between the two countries when that relationship has fundamentally changed.
Pakistan’s counterargument is equally straightforward: water rights cannot be made conditional upon political or security disputes. For a country heavily dependent on the Indus system for agriculture, irrigation, drinking water and hydropower, the stakes are existential.
That makes the present impasse dangerous. Should India scrap the treaty permanently? There is a powerful political argument for doing so. If Pakistan continues to support cross-border terrorism, New Delhi has little incentive to restore an arrangement it considers structurally unfair.
But permanently abandoning the treaty would carry costs. First, India cannot simply turn off the Indus. Much of the water flows naturally downstream, and India’s storage and diversion capacity is nowhere near sufficient to instantly withhold Pakistan’s supplies. Building reservoirs, canals and hydropower projects takes years.
Second, a permanent rupture would remove one of the few institutional channels that survived repeated India-Pakistan wars. Third, water is increasingly becoming a climate-security issue. Changing monsoon patterns, glacier melt, droughts and floods mean that both countries need more data, not less; more coordination, not less.
The better answer may therefore be not restoration of the old treaty, but renegotiation of the entire framework. Indian government sources have already indicated that the existing treaty cannot continue in its present form and requires comprehensive renegotiation.
India could seek greater flexibility for hydropower, irrigation, storage and navigation in Jammu and Kashmir while retaining minimum downstream guarantees for Pakistan. A new agreement could also incorporate climate change, population growth, environmental flows, real-time hydrological data and disaster management.
That would convert water from a weapon of confrontation into an instrument of leverage for a new bargain.
India has water disputes on almost every frontier; Pakistan is not India’s only water challenge. With Bangladesh, the most immediate issue is the Ganga Water Treaty, signed in 1996 and due to expire in December 2026. The treaty governs dry-season sharing at Farakka. Climate change, altered river flows and growing water demand have made renewal increasingly complicated.
The Teesta remains an even more politically sensitive issue. Bangladesh wants a larger share of Teesta waters, but West Bengal has historically resisted an arrangement that it believes could hurt its own farmers. There is, importantly, no India-Bangladesh Teesta water-sharing treaty.
With Nepal, India has agreements covering the Kosi, Gandak and Mahakali rivers. The challenge has often been less about outright water war than delays, implementation, flood management, irrigation benefits and hydropower.
The Brahmaputra rises in Tibet before flowing through Arunachal Pradesh and Assam. India has no comprehensive water-sharing treaty with China. Instead, the two countries have relied on mechanisms for sharing hydrological information and discussing trans-border rivers. The Brahmaputra data-sharing arrangement expired in 2023 and the Sutlej arrangement in 2020, with renewal still being pursued through diplomatic channels.
That is potentially more worrying than the Pakistan dispute because China is the upstream power. India’s vulnerability is therefore not merely about allocation but about information, dams, flood forecasting and upstream control.
India’s water wars are not confined to its borders; Ironically, India’s fiercest water battles are often within India itself.
The Cauvery dispute between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu has been running for generations. Even after the Supreme Court’s 2018 judgment and the creation of the Cauvery Water Management Authority, arguments over how much Karnataka should release to Tamil Nadu continue. In August 2026, Karnataka again objected to a direction to release 12,000 cusecs daily, while protests and a bandh brought the dispute back onto the streets.
The Ravi-Beas dispute involving Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan has remained unresolved for decades. The tribunal dealing with it has now been extended until 2027. The Krishna dispute among Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh/Telangana has similarly remained trapped in prolonged adjudication.
Even new disputes continue to emerge. In February 2026, the Supreme Court noted that negotiations between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka over the Pennaiyar river had failed and directed the Centre to constitute a tribunal.
India has therefore developed an elaborate machinery of tribunals, courts and river authorities, yet many disputes survive for decades.
The way forward: manage water as a shared resource; The lesson from both the Indus crisis and India’s internal disputes is that river water cannot be managed successfully through political arithmetic alone.
India needs a new national water strategy built around five principles. First, renegotiate old international treaties where hydrology and political circumstances have fundamentally changed. The Indus framework should be modernised rather than simply restored.
Second, separate minimum humanitarian water flows from political disputes. Even hostile states need rules preventing catastrophic consequences for civilians.
Third, establish basin-wide scientific institutions. Water allocation should increasingly depend on real-time rainfall, reservoir storage, crop requirements, groundwater levels and climate projections rather than historical formulas.
Fourth, make water efficiency the centre of the debate. India’s states and Pakistan alike waste enormous quantities of water through inefficient irrigation. The cheapest new source of water is often the water that is not wasted.
And finally, India needs a permanent National River Commission with genuine authority to mediate inter-state disputes, enforce tribunal and Supreme Court decisions, and plan river basins as ecological and economic units rather than political territories.
The Indus crisis should therefore not end with India simply switching the treaty back on or Pakistan waiting for the old arrangement to return. Nor should it automatically culminate in the permanent abandonment of a 66-year-old pact.
The real opportunity is larger: to negotiate a 21st-century water compact based on security, equity, climate change and India’s legitimate development needs.
Water may be Pakistan’s “red line”. It is also India’s strategic resource. But the wisest use of that resource may be not to deny water to a neighbour, but to use India’s upstream position to force a more durable bargain — one in which terrorism, development and water security are finally addressed as part of the same geopolitical equation. (IPA Service)
