The Earth may be covered by nearly 71 percent water, yet humanity lives in scarcity. Just 3 percent of that expanse is fresh water and most of it lies trapped in glaciers or underground aquifers. This leaves only a thin trickle for more than eight billion people to share, cultivate and survive on. From ancient kingdoms to modern states, water has always been at the heart of contests of power, the source of prosperity and the trigger of conflicts. In the Indian subcontinent, no story captures this struggle more vividly than the saga of the Indus river system and the deeply flawed Indus Waters Treaty.
Few realise that one of the world’s most water stressed nations is our very neighbour, Pakistan. Its deserts and plains, particularly in Punjab and Sindh, survive entirely on rivers that either rise in the mountains of Jammu and Kashmir or pass through them. For Pakistan, Kashmir has never been about some ethereal notion of faith or sentiment. Its obsession with the Valley has always been brutally strategic: whoever controls Jammu & Kashmir controls the rivers of life that Pakistan’s agriculture depends upon. This is not a mere speculation. Pakistan’s leaders themselves have admitted it. President Ayub Khan, who signed the Indus Waters Treaty, said: “The very fact that Pakistan had to be content with waters of three Western Rivers underlined the importance of having physical control over the higher reaches… the only solution of the Kashmir issue acquired a sense of urgency on the conclusion of the treaty”. Years later, General Pervez Musharraf was equally blunt when he said, “Any lasting peace would have to be based on the fair distribution of Indus waters from the Pakistani perspective” and Muhammad Anwar Khan, President of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, declared: “Pakistanis who believe they can survive without Kashmir are wrong. The economy is dependent on agriculture and hence on water and therefore on Kashmir”. There is no clearer admission. To Islamabad, Kashmir has always meant water security. That is why Pakistan has waged wars, infiltrated terrorists and fuelled secessionist campaigns in the Valley. The rivers matter more to Rawalpindi than the Kashmiris themselves; for decades, those very people have been sacrificed as cannon fodder in pursuit of the Indus.
In 1960, India made what history now regards as one of its costliest diplomatic concessions. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, convinced that generosity could buy peace, signed the Indus Waters Treaty with Ayub Khan under the World Bank’s mediation. Under this so-called “model of cooperation”, India retained exclusive rights over the three eastern rivers; Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, while Pakistan was ceded control over the three western rivers; Indus, Jhelum and Chenab, which together represented nearly 80.5 percent of the waters of the Indus basin, around 154 million acre-feet annually. India was left with a meagre 19.5 percent, despite being the upper riparian, the source region through which all six rivers flowed. Nehru insisted before a skeptical Parliament, “We purchased a settlement, we purchased peace”. But peace was promptly shattered when Pakistan launched Operation Gibraltar in 1965, a full-scale infiltration of Kashmir, just five years after the treaty was signed. Ever since, Islamabad has waged war after war, both overt and covert. Yet the treaty remained; locked in stone, insulated from reality, chaining India while rewarding aggression. The people who suffered the most from this “magnanimity” were the people of Jammu and Kashmir. Year after year, Pakistan’s canals bloomed green thanks to Kashmir’s rivers, irrigating 16 million hectares of farmland that guzzle nearly 97 percent of Pakistan’s total water usage. Meanwhile, Kashmir’s own farmers faced empty canals and dwindling opportunities. The injustice was stark: J&K bore the costs of terror, war and violence exported by Pakistan and simultaneously saw its economic potential throttled because its rivers were mortgaged by treaty to the very aggressor across the border. This frustration found expression over the years. In 2002, the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly passed a resolution demanding termination of the Indus Waters Treaty and in 2009, the state government mooted a proposal for an assessment of the economic losses incurred due to the agreement. That effort culminated in 2018, when a Denmark based firm, DHI, was hired to quantify the damage. Yet, despite these measures, Kashmiris remained powerless to alter the treaty, forced to watch their rivers enrich Pakistan while their own livelihoods stagnated. Nowhere was this helplessness more visible than in the fate of projects conceived for their upliftment, the most striking being the Tulbul Navigation Project.
Conceived in the 1980s, the Tulbul Navigation Project was to be a modest 440-foot barrage at the mouth of Wular Lake on the Jhelum River. Its storage would have been only 0.3 million acre-feet, within treaty parameters. Yet its benefits for Kashmir would have been transformative. By regulating flows, it would ensure year-round navigation of a 20 kilometre stretch between Sopore and Baramulla, cutting drastically the transport costs of Kashmir’s most vital produce; 2 million metric tons of apples. It would irrigate 2,00,000 hectares of farmland, stabilise winter crops when the Jhelum shrinks to a paltry 2,000 cusecs, generate 10–15 MWs of power for local consumption and sustain thousands of families who depend on Wular Lake for fishing, chestnut harvesting and tourism. Pakistan objected furiously in 1987, claiming such a small volume violated Indian commitments and the project was abandoned. For 38 years, Kashmiris have paid the price of this veto, with their livelihoods hindered for no justifiable reason.
The tragedy doesn’t stop there. Run of the river hydroelectric projects in J&K like Baglihar, Kishenganga, Ratle, PakalDul, Kiru, Kwar and countless others have each been targets of Pakistan’s relentless objections. Through the Permanent Indus Commission, Neutral Experts and Court of Arbitration, Islamabad dragged India into endless technical disputes. Sediment flushing ducts, pondage volumes, spillway gates, turbine intakes; these became tools not of hydrology but of Lawfare. Kishenganga was delayed for 7 years; Ratle and PakalDul by nearly a decade each. Lower Kalnai has languished unfinished for over a decade. In sum, projects worth billions and with capacity exceeding 18,000 MW of hydroelectricity lay stuck, leaving J&K dependent on imported power, while Pakistan weaponised the delay. The intent was not water security alone; it was to throttle Kashmir’s economic growth and to ensure that poverty remains a fertile ground for separatist propaganda.
This is why India’s decision in April 2025, in the wake of the Pahalgam massacre, to suspend the Indus Waters Treaty is both just and necessary. It is defensible under international law: Article 62 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties explicitly allows suspension when a “fundamental change of circumstances” has destroyed the basis of consent. Pakistan’s sustained sponsorship of terrorism constitutes exactly that fundamental breach. “Blood and water cannot flow together”, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had declared years earlier. By suspending Indus Water Treaty, India has matched its words with action.
The suspension of this treaty does not mean weaponising water. It means reclaiming sovereignty over a resource that arises in our own land and which has been denied for our own use. It means reviving Tulbul and providing Kashmiri farmers, fishermen and boatmen the benefits they deserved decades ago. It means accelerating Ratle, PakalDul, Kiru and Kwar, generating thousands of crores in revenue for Jammu and Kashmir. It means harnessing the untapped hydropower potential of the Chenab and Sindh rivers, lighting up homes, creating jobs and unshackling Kashmir’s economy from stagnation. It means that the rivers of Kashmir will serve its people first and not a nation that thrives on exporting terror while guzzling Indian waters.
Of course, Pakistan will claim victimhood. But its water crisis is largely the result of choices made by its own establishment. With barely 30 days of storage and a 31 percent deficit projected this year, inefficiency and corruption have crippled its canal system, with nearly 70 percent of water lost before reaching the fields. Rampant deforestation and silting have further degraded its reservoirs. Instead of prioritising conservation, reform and the welfare of its people, Pakistan’s deep state invested in hostility and in nurturing Jihad as state policy. The inevitable shortages that ordinary Pakistanis now endure are not imposed from outside, they’re born out of decades of neglect and misdirection by their own leaders.
For India, the suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty is far more than an act of national security. It is an act of Justice. Justice to Parliamentarians in 1960; from Harish Chandra Mathur to Ashoka Mehta to the then young Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who warned passionately against Nehru’s concession, calling it a second Partition and a betrayal of farmers. Justice to the families of Jammu and Kashmir who have suffered not only through terror, but also by the theft of their rivers’ bounty. Justice to India’s farmers who were denied irrigation in Punjab and Rajasthan while crores were paid in sterling to Pakistan. Justice, finally, to the logic of sovereignty: that no nation can be expected to water the fields of its enemy while its own people thirst.
The waters of Kashmir belong first and foremost to the people of Kashmir. For too long, they have watched their rivers flow westward bearing prosperity to fields across the border, while gunmen and propagandists supplied from the same direction turned their orchards into graveyards. It is time to end the irony. It is time that the Jhelum, Chenab and Indus serves this beautiful heaven that has suffered the most due to Pakistan’s dirty proxy warfare. If and when the Indus Waters Treaty is ever revisited or resumed, India must ensure that it is not at the cost of its own people once again. Jammu and Kashmir, whose rivers and mountains give birth to these lifelines, can no longer remain voiceless in decisions that determine their destiny. The voices of Kashmiri farmers, boatmen, orchard keepers and youth must be written into any new arrangement.