With Indus Waters Treaty’s suspension, India is playing long game to corner Pakistan

Following the Cabinet Committee on Security’s (CCS) meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack, India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri announced a slew of punitive measures directed at Pakistan but one stood out from the rest: holding the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance.

“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,” said Misri in a media briefing.

Even as the Narendra Modi government has not released finer details about what the decision entails, Pakistan has reacted by declaring the Indus Waters Treaty action as an “act of war”.

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By holding the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance, India has seized a moment that it had been looking for and is now addressing the shortcomings of the treaty as well as mounting a response to the Pahalgam attack, says Prof Medha Bisht of the Department of International Relations, South Asia University (SAU), Delhi.

Since the onset, it has been clear that the Modi government would not respond to the Pahalgam attack with a singular military action and any military action would be part of a much broader response that includes military, economic, and diplomatic moves — similar to how India responded to Chinese aggression in 2020 that resulted in the standoff at the border that has still not been resolved completely. That decision, by the way, set a precedent for a global patter of responses to China’s belligerence in various forms.

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In an immediate future, despite Pakistan’s dire reaction, the taps in the country are not going to run dry. With the Indus treaty on hold, India is playing a long game to corner Pakistan. However, Pakistan’s framing of the treaty’s practical suspension is more about rallying people around the flag instead of addressing the long game that anyway Pakistan can do little about — the nation is held hostage by its geography.

Pakistan uses Indus treaty to rally people

Following the CCS meeting in India, Pakistan’s National Security Committee (NSC) chaired by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif called the Indus treaty decision “an act of war” — apparently yet another indication of how badly Pakistan is itching for war.

The NSC decided to put all bilateral agreements with India, including the Simla Agreement of 1972, in abeyance. The Simla Agreement had been the basis of the adherence of the Line of Control (LoC) as the de facto border and ceasefire agreements of 2003 and 2021.

Separately, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, a former foreign minister of Pakistan and a key coalition partner of Sharif, said, “Either our [Pakistan’s] water would flow in this river or their [India’s] blood. We are the heirs of this river.”

While there are genuine concerns in Pakistan about the suspension of the Indus treaty, such reactions have to do with reinforcing India as a common enemy and rally people around the flag — one of the main drivers of the Pakistan-sponsored attack in Pahalgam.

With the Pahalgam attack, the Pakistani Army appears to be triggering an external confrontation to save itself from domestic troubles, says Aishwaria Sonavane, a Pakistan researcher at the Takshashila Institution.

“It looks like an attempt by the Pakistani Army to reassert control after a dip in public perception and recent internal security lapses involving the Baloch insurgency and Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). A hyper-nationalist pivot also works as a distraction narrative,” says Sonavane.

If Pakistan’s taps won’t run dry, what’s India aiming at?

To be sure, India cannot stop water from flowing into Pakistan, says Prof Bisht of SAU, Delhi, a scholar of water governance and transboundary issues in the subcontinent.

Under the Indus Waters Treaty, India is allowed unrestricted use of all the waters of Ravi, Sutlej, and Beas rivers, and Pakistan has control of the Indus, Chenab, and Jhelum rivers.

“India does not have the infrastructure to store water that flows into Pakistan or divert water away from Pakistan elsewhere into India. So, the narrative that India can create a severe water shortage is not true. But there are ways in which India can flex power as an upstream state that can affect Pakistan’s agriculture,” says Bisht.

Around four-fifths of Pakistan’s agriculture and one-third of its hydropower depend on the Indus river system. Agriculture accounts for one-fourths of the country’s economy.

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Bisht tells Firstpost that while India cannot stop water from flowing into Pakistan, it can tamper with the flow that can affect the availability of water for agriculture, hydropower generation, and other purposes at times of high requirement, such as in summers.

Under the Indus treaty, India had been sharing information related to the river with Pakistan in advance, including the flow of water and any major release or withholding of water, so that Pakistan could make appropriate arrangements. With the treaty in abeyance, such information-sharing has stopped.

Essentially, India now has a definite leverage of weaponising water as an upstream state.

“To an extent, India now has the ability to induce water-scarcity or minor floods in Pakistan with the tampering of water flow and withholding of water-related information. A sudden release of water or reduction in the flow of water can create some problems in Pakistan,” says Bisht.

An example of which was seen on Saturday, April 26, when India didn’t inform Pakistan about the release the Jhelum water, sparking panic in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), where residents reportedly fled homes to a safer place and authorities were confused about how to deal with the situation.

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Critics of such weaponisation have said that while Pakistan gets its water from India, India gets its water from China-occupied Tibet, and China can very well come to Pakistan’s rescue by similarly weaponising water against India. Bisht says that would be not a concern.

“Essentially, there has never been any information-sharing between India and China. As for the weaponisation of water, there is nothing that China has not already been doing with rivers flowing into India for a long time,” says Bisht.

India’s long game with Indus waters

India’s long game with the Indus treaty’s suspension appears to be three-fold.

First, India has seized an opportunity to renegotiate the treaty that had been deemed unfavourable for years.

Last year, India had sent Pakistan a notice to seek modifications in the treaty. Previously, the two sides had been in dispute about the method of dispute resolution.

“Practically, the treaty had been in suspension for years. Now, it has been suspended formally. Now, India can push for renegotiations to reach a deal it deems favourable. The treaty can be a leverage in the broader India-Pakistan negotiations as well. The new Indus treaty, which India had been wanting for years, would likely address the issues that have emerged since the original treaty was reached, such as climate change, focussing on quality and not just quantity of water, and biodiversity,” says Bisht, the scholar of water governance at SAU, Delhi.

Second, India is ramping up the fuller utilisation of eastern rivers of the Indus system and its allocated quota in the western rivers.

Currently, India utilises around just 20 per cent of the waters from the Indus river system because of limited infrastructure, according to estimates. Over the past decades, new projects have been put in motion to maximise the utilisation and retention of the water that’s rightfully India’s share as per the treaty

Third, India has medium- and long-term plans to gradually reduce the volume of water flowing into Pakistan and divert it into farmlands in north and northwest India.

Union Water Minister CR Patil has said that the government has prepared a plan to not let “even a drop of water” into Pakistan. He did not give any timeline about the implementation of the plan.

Patil said, “A roadmap was prepared in the meeting with Union Home Minister Amit Shah. Three options were discussed in the meeting. The government is working on short-term, medium-term, and long-term measures so that not even a drop of water goes to Pakistan. Soon, desilting of rivers will be done to stop the water and divert it.”

In the medium- to long-term, the government has decided to ramp up infrastructure to retain, divert, and repurpose water that currently flows into Pakistan, according to sources.

They say that the government has decided to ramp up desilting of existing dams and fast-tracking of under-construction hydropower plants and reservoirs and look at redirection of rivers to maximise retention of water inside India and minimise the flow of water into Pakistan.

With the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance, India can take these steps without any diplomatic-ethical issues and without requiring to defend these steps at various dispute resolution forums where Pakistan may otherwise challenge them.

Reports further say that the government is working on a legal strategy to address legal challenges that Pakistan or World Bank, which is also party to the treaty, may mount at international forums.