With tensions rising between India and Pakistan in the wake of a deadly terrorist attack

earlier this month that killed more than 40 Indian police officers in Kashmir, New Delhi has
decided to retaliate in part by cutting off some river water that flows downstream to
Pakistan. The decision to build a dam on the Ravi River, whose waters are allocated to India
by treaty but a portion of which had been allowed to flow through to Pakistan, adds an extra
source of conflict between two nuclear-armed neighbors that have repeatedly clashed over
the disputed Kashmir territory.

To understand the issue better, Foreign Policy spoke with Sunil Amrith, a professor of South
Asian studies at Harvard University and the author of Unruly Waters, a look at how water
shapes South Asia’s history, politics, and economic development.

Foreign Policy: India and Pakistan were torn apart at Partition, including critical water
resources that had been shared under British India; is this the mother of all transnational
water conflicts?

Sunil Amrith: It probably is, at least in the suddenness, the arbitrariness, and the brutality
with which it emerged. In Asia, many of the other transnational water conflicts were slower
to escalate—for example, it wasn’t until the 1980s that neighboring states had the capacity or
the ambition to dam and divert the upper reaches of the Himalayan rivers. In terms of the
numbers of countries and interests at stake, the Mekong is perhaps the ur-transnational
water conflict in Asia, but in the sense of a conflict that was created with the stroke of a pen,
the conflict over the Indus delta is quite distinctive.

FP: From the vagaries of the monsoon and famines in the colonial period to the
development and dam-building boom in the Jawaharlal Nehru years, how central is control
of water to India’s concept of nationhood, especially under Prime Minister Narendra Modi?

SA: The control of water has long been central to many visions of freedom and nationhood
in India; that is one of the key arguments in Unruly Waters. This goes back to at least the
late 19th century, when a diverse group of Indian nationalists, British water engineers, and
administrators began to see irrigation as India’s salvation. The dam-building boom of the
Nehru years epitomized the ambitions of a proud post-colonial state and its planned
conquest over the vagaries of nature and climate. Nehru famously called large dams the
“temples of the new India.”

Under Modi, the control of water has continued to be of symbolic value. The government has
also committed itself to the gigantic river-linking project, at an estimated cost of at least $90
billion. But none of this started with Modi. I think in terms of their approach to water
management, there is a long thread of continuity across the past several Indian governments.

FP: In this case, India seems to be exercising its legitimate claim to the waters in the Ravi.
Do you see this escalating, to the point that India starts to infringe on Pakistan’s allocated
waters in the western rivers or even abandons the Indus Water Treaty altogether? What
happens if it does?

SA: The World Bank-brokered IWT of 1960 is a paradox: It is touted by many scholars of
international relations as an example of successful cooperation between hostile states, and at
the same time it’s a frequent target of complaints from politicians on both sides of the
border.

Following the failure to broker a deal where India and Pakistan would manage the water
resources of the basin collectively, the Indus Treaty sought to legislate their division: The
waters of the Sutlej, the Beas, and the Ravi were awarded to India; and the west Indus, the
Jhelum, and the Chenab to Pakistan.

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In practice, a significant quantity of water flowed into Pakistan even after India’s extraction
of what water it needed from the eastern rivers. But this is now in question, as India has
vowed to impound more water from the Ravi River. Interestingly, one factor that stopped
India doing this earlier was internal conflict over the river’s use between the Indian states it
flows through. We must always remember that conflicts over water in South Asia are intra-
national at least as much as they are international. This is unlikely to change anytime soon.

There have been periodic calls in India for a unilateral withdrawal from the Indus Treaty, a
threat that was issued last in 2016. So far, this has not led to action, and things have settled
back into an uneasy coexistence. I would like to think that both sides have too much to lose
from the unraveling of these delicate arrangements for the brinkmanship to be pushed too
far. But given the global slide to unilateralism and the heightened tension the region, there is
always the possibility of strident rhetoric provoking a conflict over water, a conflict in which
the real losers will be local people on both sides of the border.

FP: Pakistan is a seriously water-stressed nation already. How serious are the implications
for Pakistan of diversions of water flow?

SA: Pakistan is one of the most water-stressed countries in the world. One
recent estimate suggests that Pakistan will face a shortage of 31 million acre-feet of water by
2025. [Pakistan uses about 104 million acre feet every year for agricultural irrigation.] Its
underground aquifers are critically depleted from the over-extraction of groundwater, and
the two largest dams—the Tarbela and the Mangla—have seen a decline in their storage
capacity due to excessive deposits of silt. As such, any diminution in water flow will have
serious consequences for the livelihoods of Pakistan’s farmers, who have already faced, over
the past few years, a dearth of fresh water during the critical season—just before the
monsoon, when the summer crop is planted.

FP: Given where the rivers are, is this dispute best understood within the context of the
Kashmir conflict, or just a legacy of the Partition?

SA: Both. One reason why Partition so immediately created a water conflict in the Indus
basin is that it was already one of the most thoroughly engineered hydraulic systems in the
world at that time. But Kashmir was crucial to the conflict from the very outset—something
that Daniel Haines’s excellent book, Rivers Divided, shows very clearly. The waters of the
Chenab and the Jhelum—awarded to Pakistan under the IWT—flow through Indian-
administered Kashmir before they flow into Pakistan. This meant that negotiations over
water were always bound up with concerns over territorial sovereignty—and it is one reason
why tensions in Kashmir very quickly escalate conflicts over water, as has happened in this
case.
FP: India isn’t just an upstream nation, with respect to Pakistan. It’s downstream from
China. What are the prospects, given Chinese hydropower development in the Tibetan basin,
that there are further transnational water conflicts, with dire impacts downstream?

SA: More than 400 dams are under construction, or planned for the coming decade, in
India, Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan; many more will be built across the Chinese border in Tibet.
If the plans come to fruition, this will be among the most heavily dammed regions in the
world. These schemes both aggravate international tensions and carry grave ecological risks,
which themselves respect no borders. To the same extent that India fears Chinese ambitions
to dam the Brahmaputra in particular, Bangladesh has already felt the negative effects of
India’s hydraulic engineering upstream.

Having said this, I am always reluctant to draw too direct a line between water scarcity and
political conflict—either across or within borders. Conflicts over water are inextricably bound
up with politics at every level from the local to the regional. The specter of “water wars” is a
blunt tool with which to capture the unpredictability of struggles over water. The existential
importance of water might defuse conflict as much as competing attempts to control water
will deepen it.

FP: Climate change threatens Tibetan Plateau water resources in a couple of ways—more
rainfall in the medium term, but also quicker glacial melts and less water flow in the future.
How much could climate change aggravate the already tense cross-border water situation?

SA: The recent Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment suggests that, even with a drastic
reduction in carbon emissions, one-third of the Himalayan glaciers are doomed to melt by
the end of this century; without a reduction in emissions, that grows to two-thirds. The
livelihoods of well over a billion people are directly at risk from this. Most studies predict
that, after an initial period of augmented river flow due to glacial melt, the rivers will begin
to dry up for part of the year from 2050 or 2060, putting at risk the food security of a
significant portion of humanity. The threat of further conflict as a result is multifaceted.
Reduced flow will lead to energy as well as water shortages. The increasing prevalence of
extreme precipitation events, also widely predicted, will threaten the stability of the dams,
with grave risks downstream.

The report on the glaciers made the headlines, in a few places, for a day or two. It staggers
me that this isn’t the biggest news story in the world at the moment.

2.

Water wars: Are India and Pakistan

heading for climate change-induced
conflict?
Across the world, climate change is sparking conflict as people struggle over
dwindling resources. The fight over water could quickly escalate between India
and Pakistan — and both have nuclear arms.
Yemen, Somalia and Syria are just some of the places where climate change is
increasingly regarded as a root cause of violent conflict. But while much of the focus on
climate change-attributed conflict has predominantly been on Africa and the Middle
East, a potentially even deadlier clash over resources may be looming on the horizon in
Asia.
That's because India and Pakistan — bitter rivals over water — both have nuclear
weapons in their arsenal.
The two countries have a long but strained agreement over sharing water from the Indus
River and its tributaries. Waters from the Indus, which flow from India and the disputed
Kashmir region into Pakistan, were carved up between India and Pakistan under the
1960 Indus Water Treaty (IWT).
Read more: Water scarcity in Pakistan – A bigger threat than terrorism
The IWT divides the six major rivers of the Indus basin between Pakistan and India.
Pakistan was granted rights to most of the water in the region's western rivers — the
Indus, Jhelum and Chenab — which flow through Indian-administered Kashmir.
The dispute over the Kashmir region — a flashpoint between India and Pakistan for more
than six decades — is hugely intertwined with water security. Both countries claim the
whole region, but each only controls a part of it.
While the IWT has managed to survive the wars and other hostilities, it is increasingly
being strained to its limit. Pakistan has accused India of throttling its water supply and
violating the IWT by constructing dams over the rivers flowing into Pakistan from
Kashmir.
"Any country with nuclear weapons, if they're backed into a corner because they have no
water — that's really dangerous," said Jeff Nesbit, author and executive director of non-
profit climate communication organization Climate Nexus.
'A matter of survival'
For Sherry Rehman, Parliamentary Leader of the left-wing opposition Pakistan People's
Party (PPP) in the Senate, water security, especially in South Asia, "has become a
regional security threat."
"We are now facing challenges brought about by climate change which were not a
primary focus during the negotiations for the Indus Water Treaty," she told DW.
"It has become a matter of survival," she continued. "Aside from the lack of formal
dialogue, the rhetoric floating around suggesting a possible water war is particularly
alarming."
A treaty under threat
For Pakistan, the Indus waters are a lifeline: most of the country depends on it as the
primary source of freshwater and it supports 90 percent of the country's agricultural
industry.
And while Pakistan was considered relatively plentiful with water, a mixture of
mismanaged irrigation, water-intensive agriculture and climate change has reduced the
Indus to a trickle in parts.
A 2018 report from the International Monetary Fund ranked Pakistan third among
countries facing severe water shortages.
When the rapidly-melting glaciers in the Himalayas, which feed the Indus waters,
eventually disappear as predicted, the dwindling rivers will be slashed even further.
Holding water to ransom
In 2016, India came close to tearing up the IWT. It blamed Pakistani militants for an
attack on Indian army personnel in Indian-administered Kashmir in September of that
year.
Nesbit of Climate Nexus told DW he sees India's threat to terminate the IWT as a bigger
problem than the warning of military reprisals.
"Had they done that, it would have triggered a water war, it would have triggered an
actual war," Nesbit told DW.
"Never mind a nuclear strike or a military strike, if they were to actually terminate the
Indus Water Treaty, that's much more dangerous to Pakistan's survival, because they
would have no way to grow food. And then they would be relying on food imports at a
time when their population is exploding. So that particular incident was really
dangerous."
Nesbit, whose 2018 book 'This is the Way the World Ends' deals in part with the
Pakistan-India water disputes, said it has the potential to become the most deadly
climate change-attributed conflict in the world.
"It's one thing for a country to run out of water, as Yemen has," he told DW, explaining
how it triggered water riots that led to the government's collapse and military
intervention by Saudi Arabia.
"But the difference is, Yemen is quite poor. And when the same thing happened in
Somalia, Somalia is quite poor, so it breeds domestic terrorism, it breeds the collapse of
civil government, but it doesn't trigger the kind of regional nuclear confrontation that an
India-Pakistan war would."
China watching from further upstream
There's one factor which may keep India from acting on threats to cut off Pakistan's
access to the Indus waters, according to Nesbit: China.
"Even India is at the mercy of China, because they are even further upstream," he told
DW. "If China were to look to its own borders near India and were to aggressively pursue
water runoff from the glaciers in the Himalayas, it would have a similar effect on India,"
he said.
"That's why China's watching the India-Pakistan water wars quite closely, to see the
decisions that India makes," he added.
"So the mitigating factor is that India knows it can't be too aggressive in seizing control
of water access because further upstream, the same thing could happen to them."
Elsewhere in Asia, other conflicts have also been linked to climate change. For instance
the unprecedented flooding in Thailand in 2011 which sparked major protests over
unfair emergency supplies distribution and ultimately led to a military coup that
overthrew the democratically-elected government in 2014. The military junta is still in
power to this day.
On a global level, Janani Vivekananda, climate security expert at consultancy Adelphi, is
somewhat more hopeful about how the struggle over water will play out.
"The trend is people cooperate rather than fight over water because it's just too
important and I think this is what will happen just out of necessity," she told DW.
"Because there's too much to lose."

3.

NEW DELHI — India vowed Thursday to cut back on water flowing through its rivers
to arid Pakistan, a threat it has made before but now seems more determined to carry
out in the wake of a suicide bomb attack last week for which India has blamed
Pakistan.

Nitin Gadkari, India’s transport minister, said in a Twitter message that “Our Govt.
has decided to stop our share of water which used to flow to Pakistan. We will divert
water from Eastern rivers and supply it to our people in Jammu and Kashmir and
Punjab.”

Some analysts said this was the strongest threat India has made yet since the attack
in which a suicide bomber killed more than 40 Indian troops in the disputed region
of Kashmir.

A full-blown water war could be catastrophic to the hundreds of millions of people in

India and Pakistan who depend on river water. But this latest threat was not
accompanied by details on when or how India might act to divert more water from
Pakistan downstream or how large, in reality, such diversions would be.

Under a longstanding treaty governing the use of the Indus River and its tributaries,
Pakistan still controls most of the water and India has not challenged that.

India has been struggling to find a way to punish Pakistan for the attack last week.
The bomber was a young man who grew up in the India-controlled part of Kashmir.
He rammed a car full of explosives into an Indian convoy, ripping apart a bus packed
with paramilitary troops.
Jaish-e-Mohammed, a militant group with links to Pakistan, claimed responsibility
for the attack, and India accused Pakistan of helping the bomber pull off his deadly
mission.
For decades, Pakistan and India have been locked in a violent
dispute over Kashmir, a mountainous territory that both nations
claim. Western intelligence officials have said that Pakistani
security services allow anti-India militants to operate in Pakistan
and that some of these militant groups provide material support
and expertise, like bomb-making know-how, to insurgents in the
Indian-controlled parts of Kashmir.
But Pakistan no longer runs large militant training camps as it had in the 1990s and
early 2000s, these officials said.

Each day since the attack, India and Pakistan have traded barbs, threatened and
insulted each other and, at the same time, tried to carefully woo other countries to
their sides. India is eager to isolate Pakistan, but Pakistan has powerful friends in
China and Saudi Arabia, both major investors.

Though this latest attack seemed to strike a nerve in India, with many people hungry
for revenge, India has few good military options. Both India and Pakistan field
nuclear arsenals and thousands of troops on the border. Even the most jingoistic
members of India’s military elite are wary of escalating tensions.

So the Indian government has looked for other ways to hit back or, in the views of
some of its critics, appear as though it is hitting back. This is hardly the first time it
has threatened to reduce Pakistan’s water supply.

In 2016, after militants attacked an Indian Army base near the town of Uri, Prime
Minister Narendra Modi said “blood and water can’t flow together” and his
government threatened to do the same thing. Instead, the Indian military staged
what it called surgical strikes against targets just across the border in Pakistan.

This time around, India seems more serious about using water as punishment. Under
the Indus Water Treaty, a World Bank-brokered agreement that goes back decades,
India and Pakistan divided the rights to the enormous Indus River and its tributaries
that wind across the subcontinent.

Both sides have grumbled over certain provisions and both rely heavily on the water
flows for hydropower and agriculture.
n Thursday, after Mr. Gadkari’s threat to reduce the flow of water
from the Indus’s eastern tributaries into Pakistan, Indian media
reported that officials in that same ministry clarified that this was a
longstanding policy.
Even before the attack, Indian officials said that water allocated to India under the
treaty was flowing to Pakistan and that it planned to use those flows for new
hydropower projects and farms.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor at Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and an
expert on the India-Pakistan water treaty, said that for years India has struggled to
harness waters from the rivers that it controls.

“This statement by the Indian government is an attempt by them to show to the

country that the government appears to be doing something,” Mr. Chellaney said.
“When in actual terms they have done nothing. This is more of a rhetorical statement
being used to play to the popular anti-Pakistan sentiment.”

Pakistan has yet to officially respond to the water threat. But on Thursday, Pakistan
once again denied any role in the suicide bombing, saying it was “not involved in any
way, means or form in the said incident.”

IOK is shorthand for what Pakistan calls India Occupied Kashmir and the statement
was alluding to the legions of young men from villages across India-controlled
Kashmir who have joined the militants or taken part in dangerous street
demonstrations to protest Indian control. The response to such demonstrations is
often heavy handed with Indian security forces firing pellet guns and live
ammunition into crowds.

Arif Rafiq, a political analyst at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said India’s
threats were driven by national elections expected in the coming months.

Mr. Modi’s government needs to look tough, he said, and is signaling “that it can
leverage its upper riparian location to coerce Pakistan.”

“While I don’t see any imminent threat to Pakistan,” Mr. Rafiq added, “we may be
getting a glimpse of the future of conflict in South Asia. The region is water-stressed.
Water may be emerging as a weapon of war.”

4.
LONDON – After the terrorist attack on Indian troops in Kashmir two weeks ago that
killed 40 Indian soldiers, but before Tuesday’s retaliatory airstrikes across the border
into Pakistan by the Indian Air Force, the Indian government did something
unprecedented. It threatened to cut off Pakistan’s water. Or at least, it sounded like
that.
On Feb. 2, Nitin Gadkari, India’s transport minister, tweeted: “Our Govt. has decided
to stop our share of water which used to flow to Pakistan. We will divert water from
Eastern rivers and supply it to our people in Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab.”
Dangerous talk: That way lies nuclear war.

In December 2001, after a Pakistan-backed terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament,

there was a seminar in Karachi designed to calm everybody down. It was going quite
well until somebody alleged that India had plans to use the “water weapon.” At that
point a Pakistani participant stated flatly that any conflict over water would lead to a
nuclear first strike against India by Pakistan.

So Gadkari’s threat had everybody scared — for about five minutes. Then it became
clear that it was only hot air. He was just referring to an existing plan to build a dam
on the Ravi River, one of six that feed the giant Indus River system.

It would stop some of that river’s water from flowing on into Pakistan, but all the
water in the Ravi belongs to India according to a 1960 treaty between the two
countries. India has been letting some of it flow through, but it doesn’t have to.

India could do a great deal of harm to Pakistan if it chose to. Five of the Indus’s six
tributaries flow across Indian territory before they reach Pakistan, and 85 percent of
Pakistan’s food is grown on land irrigated by the waters of the Indus system.

Ignorant Indian nationalists often think threats about water are a good way to
control Pakistan. In fact, they are a good way to get nuked. But there’s an election in
India this spring, and Gadkari is not the sharpest tool in the box.

As soon as the grown-ups intervened, the water weapon was off the table, which is a
good thing. But there is now a “limited war” underway between India and Pakistan,
and it is getting less limited by the hour.

The suicide attack on Indian troops in Kashmir two weeks ago was the deadliest in
three decades, and Jaish-e-Mohammed, a militant Islamist group based in Pakistan,
took credit for it. The retaliatory airstrikes ordered by India’s Prime Minister
Narendra Modi were the first to cross the border into Pakistan proper since the 1971
war. Now Pakistani planes have bombed Indian territory, and another Indian fighter
that crossed into Pakistan has been shot down and its pilot captured. There is shell-
fire both ways along the Line of Control (LOC) in Kashmir.

Why does this sort of thing go on happening? The short answer, alas, is because the
Pakistani Army needs it to continue.

When the Indian and Pakistani leaders signed the Lahore Declaration of 1999,
committing the two countries to a peaceful resolution of the conflict over Kashmir,
the Pakistani Army and its accompanying militants almost immediately invaded the
Kashmir district of Kargil, on the Indian side of the LOC.

It took quite a serious little war for the Indian Army to push them out again — but
then, the whole object of the operation, from the Pakistani Army’s point of view, was
to have a little war. They didn’t need to win. They just had to kill the peace process.

In 2008, Pakistan’s president said that the country was willing to adopt a “no first
use” policy for its nuclear weapons. Shortly afterward, while Pakistan’s foreign
minister was in Delhi, Pakistan-based militants of Lashkar-e-Taiba slaughtered 166
people in a terrorist attack in Mumbai. Like Jaish-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Taiba
has close links with the Pakistani armed forces.

And when Modi made a surprise visit to Pakistan in 2016, talking peace and
friendship, Jaish-e-Mohammed militants attacked the Indian air base at Pathankot
one week later. Is there a pattern here?
Other countries have armies, but Pakistan’s army has a country. The army dominates
not only politics but the economy. It sells insurance, clothes, meat and concrete. It
owns huge chunks of the country’s real estate. It provides very well for its officers
while they are on active service, and also in retirement.

It will continue to control the lion’s share of the economy only so long as it has the
threat of the Indian “enemy” as an excuse, so it works hard to keep that threat alive.
The Indians are no angels in this relationship — maybe they should ask themselves
why they even want Kashmir — but it is Pakistan’s army that keeps the game alive.

5. Why India Must Refrain From a Water War With

Pakistan
Threatening Pakistan’s water supply will have a negative impact on India
and all of South Asia.
“Water that belongs to India cannot be allowed to go to Pakistan” — so said Indian
Prime Minister Narendra Modi last year. And that was the point when the potential
for a water war between India and Pakistan became a reality. The Pakistani response
by Foreign Affairs Advisor Sartaj Aziz, who said that revocation of the Indus Waters
Treaty (IWT) by India “can be taken as an act of war,” furthered the narrative of a
looming water war.

Pakistan and India have already had a minor water brawl, in 1948 when India (the
upper riparian state) choked the water flow toward Pakistan. Partition bestowed
India an advantage, as the headwaters were located in its territory, leaving Pakistan
exposed to India’s physical capacity to cut off vital irrigation water. As a result, India
kept limiting Pakistan’s share of water. Seeing the possibility of another conflict
between the two neighbors, the international community plunged in to fix the Indo-
Pak water crisis. With the help of the World Bank, both states eventually agreed to
the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) in 1960.

The IWT enabled Pakistan and India to equally share and utilize water coming from
the Himalayan Mountains. The treaty is exemplary since it has survived dozens of
Indo-Pak military skirmishes, hostile political atmospheres, and diplomatic hiccups.
What has gone so wrong that now India is flexing its muscles to terminate the treaty,
or at least change it to increase Indian benefits? Is it mere electoral rhetoric ahead of
the state elections in Indian Punjab that motivated Modi to threaten IWT by saying
“The government will do everything to give enough water to our farmers”? Or is India
truly ready to now exercise its burgeoning military might?

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Whatever the motives are, New Delhi must reconsider before waging water war on
Pakistan.

The Road to Another (Water) War

In the presence of nuclear weapons, advanced ballistic missile programs, and huge
armies on both sides, a traditional war is highly unlikely between the two rivals.
Instead, a water war is in the making, largely from India. Wullar Barrage, the
Kishanganga Project, Baglihar Dam, and dozens of other small and medium
hydroelectric and irrigation projects are a few examples of Indian projects that
obstruct the Pakistani share of water.

Making things worse, a report released by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) stated
that “Pakistan’s storage capacity is limited to a 30-day supply, well below the
recommended 1,000 days for countries with a similar climate.” Pakistan’s
indispensable reliance on Indus water leaves very few options for Pakistan should
India restrict flows.

Currently, the dialogue process between the two neighbors is on hold. Permanent
Indus Water Commissioner meetings usually end unproductively and Modi’s idea to
review the IWT added fuel to fire. Pakistan could wait a bit longer to determine the
extent of the water crisis but depleting water reservoirs, domestic energy woes, and
growing agricultural needs may push Pakistan to take a hard line, which could
eventually unleash water war.

Chinese Retaliation?

After seven decades of friendship, Pakistan and China are cementing their bilateral
engagements by the initiation of the China-Pakistan-Economic-Corridor (CPEC).
China remains the most valuable investor and facilitator in overcoming Pakistan’s
existing acute shortage of energy. CPEC not only includes many coal based power
plants (e.g., Sahiwal, Engro Thar, Port Qasim etc.) but it also some hydropower
projects like the Suki Kinari and Karot projects. These would be jeopardized if India
were to interrupt water flows.

Last year, China blocked a tributary of the Brahmaputra River in Tibet, which sent
shockwaves to India. Pakistani media perceived the blockage as deliberate Chinese
pressure to ease mushrooming Indian pressure on Pakistan. China, though, asserted
that the move was necessary to construct the long-planned Lalho hydroelectric
project and that the construction would not interrupt water flow toward India. Still,
many saw the move as a “soft” message that India should refrain from instigating
water wrangles with Islamabad. This interpretation is largely buttressed by the
timing: the initial work on the Lalho project started back in 2014, but the blockage
came immediately after Modi’s water warnings to Pakistan. China’s Zam
Hydropower Station, which became operational in 2015 on the Brahmaputra
River, also raised Indian eyebrows over the prospect of disrupting water supplies.

Starting from Tibet, the Brahmaputra River flows into Arunachal Pradesh, Assam,
and later into Bangladesh. With control of the Tibetan headwaters, China could block
the water flow at any time. Unlike Pakistan and India, there is no water treaty
between China and India; however, both established an Expert Level Mechanism
(ELM) in 2013 by which Beijing would provide India with data on water flows.
Indian utilization of a water blockade against Pakistan could thus invite China to
retaliate in kind, making things worse for the entire region.

Regional Peace at Stake

As stated earlier, the IWT has been exemplary over the decades for its ability to
withstand ebbs and flows in the bilateral relationship. Revoking the treaty may
endanger regional security. The Indus water system, which originates from China
and subsequently flows to India and Pakistan, could generate a three party crisis with
a bigger threat of large-scale war.

Moreover, Indian revocation of the IWT could also send a negative message to
neighboring countries. For instance, around seven rivers, including the Kabul River,
flow from Afghanistan to Pakistan. The Kabul, Kurram, and Gomalis Rivers are the
main irrigation source for more than 150,000 acres in Paksitan’s Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province, and there is no water-sharing formula or mechanism
between the two sides. The latest reports indicate that India is assisting Afghanistan
in constructing 12 hydropower projects on the Kabul River. Seeing the Indian
revocation of IWT could well encourage Afghanistan to follow a similar course in a
bid to pressure Pakistan on the issue of the Durand Line.

Given that Indian could become “water stressed” country by 2025, it will surely
pursue alternatives for ensuring water availability even during lean periods. In
addition to Pakistan, India also has signed a 30 year bilateral water sharing
agreement with Bangladesh in 1996, but the water crisis between the two states still
persists. Modi’s visit to Bangladesh in 2015 witnessed the signing of 22
agreements, but not a single related to water, which of course enhanced Bangladeshi
anxieties. If India is successful in revoking the IWT and the international
community can’t effectively forestall the newly emerging Indo-Pak water crisis, New
Delhi could also decide to obstruct water flowing toward Bangladesh for power
production and irrigation.

India shares water issues with nearly all its seven neighboring states. In the 21st
century, where the Indian economy is on the rise and it needs regional peace to grow
smoothly, sparking a water crisis will not give India a positive image. Territorial
disputes already mar India’s bid to become a vibrant international leader, and
revoking the IWT or any other agreement with neighbors could only add insult to
injury. At a time when New Delhi is facing a number of water sharing disputes,
reviewing a long-settled water-sharing formula with Pakistan would be a harmful
option to experiment with. Instead of invalidating existent water-sharing procedures,
India should try to find a mutual workable arrangement that could assist all, thus
avoiding a water war.