Indus Water Treaty: Talking Peace, Threatening War

September 02, 2026 | Nilesh Kunwar

Double Talk

During his 2020 United Nations General Assembly address, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Imran Khan had mentioned that “There will be no durable peace and stability in South Asia until the Jammu and Kashmir dispute is resolved on the basis of international legitimacy.”
Though Khan took the high moral ground by invoking the regional peace and stability factor, he unashamedly exposed Pakistan’s proclivity for using force to resolve issues by reminding the audience that “Kashmir has been rightly described as a nuclear flashpoint.” His utterance rekindled bitter memories of the Pakistan army led tribal invasion of Kashmir in 1947, another attempt in 1965, and the Kargil intrusions of 1999.
While India has enunciated its ‘no first use’ nuclear policy, Pakistan hasn’t. Hence, it doesn’t require rocket science to discern as to who would be responsible for initiating a nuclear conflagration on the Kashmir issue. The “nuclear flashpoint” worry frequently expressed by Islamabad is in effect a brazen threat disguised as a deep concern and needs to be viewed as such by the international community.

Threats Galore

With New Delhi holding the Indus Water Treaty [IWT] in abeyance after the brutal targeted killing of tourists belonging to a particular community by Pakistan sponsored terrorists in April 2025, Pakistan has once again issued a host of threats ranging from the macabre to downright bizarre.
Pakistan Peoples’ Party chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari declared that “The Indus is ours and will remain ours - either our water will flow through it, or their [India’s] blood.” More recently, he has upgraded his threat to nuclear level by saying, “One of the key aspects of Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine is that attempts to strangle the country’s economy or restrict its waterways fall among the rare scenarios that Pakistan has said could trigger a nuclear response.”
Director General [DG] of Pakistan army’s media wing Inter-Services Public Relations [ISPR] Lt G Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry said "If you block our water, we will stop your breath," a repeat of Lashkar-e-Taiba [LeT] co-founder Hafiz Saeed’s warning to India that “If you stop the water, we will, God willing, stop your breath, and then blood shall flow in these rivers.”
Pakistan’s Chief of Defence Forces [CDF] Field Marshal Asim Munir’s has cunningly declared that “We will wait for India to build a dam, and when it does so, phir 10 missile sey faarigh kar dengey [we will destroy it with 10 missiles]." India is not so naïve as to build dams on the rivers whose water is allocated to Pakistan under
IWT and Field Marshal Munir knows that.
So, his fire and brimstone laden threat of using missiles to destroy dams built by India gives him the advantage of reinforcing his alpha male façade without running the risk of having to walk his talk. As no Indian dam will ever come up on rivers allocated to Pakistan, there would be nothing for the CDF to attack with missiles.
Two months ago, Pakistan’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, in collaboration with the Institute of Regional Studies organised a seminar titled “Indus Water Treaty: An Instrument of Peace and Regional Stability.” Unfortunately, Islamabad’s attempts to demonise India and project itself as a victim of New Delhi’s highhandedness didn’t succeed and one reason for this was Pakistani Information Minister Attaullah Tarar’s uncalled for threat that any attempts to divert or stop Indus Basin water would be met decisively, because this is something that India has neither done, nor intends doing.
So, when the Pakistani Embassy in the United States organised yet another seminar [albeit a virtual one] on “The Indus Waters Treaty: South Asian Security at the Crossroads,” it came as no big surprise since Islamabad religiously follows the dictum-“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it" propagated by Hitler’s Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.
During this seminar, Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar yet once again issued a threat, saying that “Any attempt to deprive Pakistan of the water rightfully allocated to it under the IWT would have profound consequences for regional peace and security.” That this event hardly made any news was expected all along, as was New Delhi turning a deaf ear to Dar’s threat.

Unanswered Questions

Islamabad needs to explain that if it’s so concerned about regional peace and security, then what explains its stoic silence on Field Marshal Munir’s factually incorrect and extremely provocative statements like “what India labels as terrorism [in J&K] is actually a legitimate and lawful struggle for freedom recognised by international law”?
Secondly, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif maintains “that every single drop of Pakistan's water is our red line” and warns that “if India does not come to its senses, it will be responded to directly.” So why does he grudge Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s matter-of-fact assertion that “water and blood cannot flow together” as well as understand that that Pakistan sponsored terrorism is India’s red line, crossing which would also be “responded to directly,” as was done through Operation Sindoor?

IWT Abeyance

Nishant Sirohi, a Law and Society Fellow at Transitions Research has very fittingly demystified the issue of holding IWT in abeyance. He opines that “India has temporarily suspended procedural cooperation, i.e. participation in dispute resolution forums, joint mechanisms, and routine diplomatic engagements tied to [Indus water] treaty operation.
He further clarifies that “This is not abandonment [of IWT]; it is a calibrated form of legal restraint, undertaken in the face of a long-standing, unaddressed wrongful state-sponsored act of terrorism that strikes at the core of trust on which the IWT was premised.”
Former Chairman, Bhakra Beas Management Board and Member, National Security Advisory Board, Davendra Kumar Sharma opines that “The IWT’s technical provisions are increasingly outdated, failing to account for modern advancements in dam engineering and construction as well as the volatile impacts of climate change.
He considers that “By adhering to 1950s-era technical constraints, the Treaty has effectively stifled advancements and innovations in engineering and construction of dams as well as hydroelectric projects and sustainable sediment management.” His diagnosis- “Technologically, the IWT is ‘frozen’ in time.”
These observations put things in the correct perspective and hence need to be publicised.

Exposing Pakistan’s Untruth

While Islamabad may complain that India has precipitated its water crisis, New Delhi needs to remind the world that several years ago, may experts had warned that Pakistan would be facing water scarcity by 2025.
In 2018, Michael Samuel, Master of Public Administration at Islamabad’s Quaid-I-Azam University had written that “unfortunately, the country is unable to save water and now an alarming red light has been turned on for Pakistan that it will face a water crisis in 2025.” He also mentions that “India has constructed 3200 dams and reservoirs to save water for future needs whereas in Pakistan we have only 150 dams and reservoirs.”
Pakistan’s inefficient water management was flagged way back in 2015 during a DW interview with Michael Kugelman, South Asia expert at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center. When asked about the possible solutions to Pakistan’s water crisis, he replied. “The tough thing is that there is no silver bullet. A series of measures need to be taken. First of all, however, Pakistan's leaders and stakeholders need to take ownership of this challenge and declare their intention to tackle it. Simply blaming previous governments, or blaming India, for the crisis won't solve anything.”
This didn’t happen and today Pakistan is blaming India – exactly what Kugelman had predicted more than a decade ago!
The reality is that Pakistan’s water woes are self aggravated. While India was investing in dams, reservoirs and waterways, the Pakistan army was busy splurging on tanks and fighter jets. While its humongous defence expenditure couldn’t save East Pakistan, it definitely left little for infrastructural development and Pakistan’s water management programme languished due to lack of finances.

New Delhi’s Stance

Islamabad knows the art of making mountains out of molehills by relying on indiscriminate repetition of a mix of emotional rhetoric and threats ad nauseam to make up for the deficiency of logic in its arguments, and its Kashmir narrative is a case in point. New Delhi thus needs to not only rebut Islamabad’s false narratives but also systematically expose and dismantle its disinformation campaign with facts.
New Delhi’s assertion that blood and water can’t flow together has struck the right cord within India, but its import can easily be contorted to convey a misleading impression that India has stopped/ is in the process of stopping water allocated to Pakistan under IWT. New Delhi therefore needs to make it clear that it is only harnessing its rightful water share and all developmental work being undertaken is as permitted under IWT.
IWT has allocated water to India and Pakistan by giving each country exclusive rights over three rivers each. This is an unscientific allocation- while Pakistan receives a whopping 80 percent of the water flowing through the Indus Basin, India gets a meager 20 percent. This skewed distribution ratio, which tilts heavily in favour of Pakistan, needs to be revised to ensure equitable water allocation in terms of quantity.
It also needs to emphasise that IWT doesn’t have any provisions for incorporating more efficient and modern engineering techniques related to dams/allied infrastructure construction being universally used, without approval of the other party. This has given Islamabad the opportunity to follow an obstructionist approach on IWT related issues, like keeping the Tulbul Navigation Project in suspended animation for nearly four decades. Accordingly, IWT in its present form is unacceptable.
Hence, New Delhi needs to stand firm on its justified demand that Pakistan honestly fulfills its obligations of ensuring “a spirit of goodwill and friendship,” the edifice on which IWT stands before any talks on this treaty takes place. Simultaneously, it must push for renegotiating the archaic and asymmetrical provisions of IWT so that it meets the present day requirements.