After Abeyance: Indus Basin and the New Water Politics

The post-abeyance phase has positioned Indus Basin management at the intersection of water infrastructure, legal frameworks, diplomacy, and security. The central issue is whether the IWT can remain a viable framework for India-Pakistan water relations.

The Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) entered a new phase following India’s announcement in April 2025 to place the Treaty in abeyance. For over six decades, the IWT served as a rare constant amid the otherwise volatile history of India-Pakistan relations. Its longevity was based on the institutional premise that cooperation over the Indus basin could be separated from broader political and security dynamics between the two states. This foundational assumption has now been set aside.

Pakistan’s response has adhered to established patterns, though with heightened intensity. The government has invoked international law, underscored the sanctity of treaties, sought international attention, continued to employ the Treaty’s dispute-settlement mechanisms, mobilised domestic political opinion, and increasingly framed water as a national security concern. In April 2025, Pakistan’s National Security Committee warned that any attempt to stop or divert waters allocated to Pakistan would be treated as an “Act of War.” By July 2026, Pakistan’s military leadership publicly reaffirmed its commitment to take “all measures necessary” to secure the country’s water share.

A comprehensive understanding of Pakistan’s current response necessitates a review of the specific outcomes established by the IWT.

A prevalent perception holds that India and Pakistan agreed to share the waters of six rivers, with India receiving less than 20 per cent of the Indus Basin’s total water volume. However, Indian civil engineers involved in the negotiations interpreted the arrangement differently. Faced with the challenge of establishing an equitable volumetric sharing formula, they adopted a hydrologically rational approach by apportioning the basin. The Treaty’s logic prioritised creating predictable spheres of utilisation rather than the annual division of water flows.

Consequently, the Indus Basin was divided into two groups of three rivers each: the Western Rivers (Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab) and the Eastern Rivers (Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej). India vigorously pursued complete and exclusive rights over the waters of the Eastern Rivers. The Eastern Rivers were allocated for India’s “unrestricted use,” while Pakistan “shall receive for unrestricted use” the water of the Western Rivers.

At the time, the Western Rivers had an average annual flow of approximately 135.6 million acre-feet (MAF), while the Eastern Rivers averaged only about 32.6 MAF, or roughly one-fourth of the Western Rivers’ flow. Consequently, about four-fifths of the basin’s average annual flow was allocated to Pakistan. This arrangement was a source of discontent in India. During the Lok Sabha debate on 30 November 1960, several parliamentarians contended that, given the extent of the Indus Basin’s catchment area within Indian territory, India was entitled to approximately 40 per cent of the basin’s waters.

Some observers characterised the division as a “second Partition,” invoking the territorial and political trauma associated with 1947.

Indian negotiators were fully aware of the water volumes at stake, but prioritised securing absolute and exclusive control over the Eastern Rivers. As negotiations progressed, India agreed to pay £62.06 million (Rs 83 crore) to ensure that none of these waters would flow to Pakistan. This financial commitment became politically contentious. During the November parliamentary debate, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru faced criticism from members who considered the settlement overly generous and accused him of being “fiscally irresponsible.”

Exclusive access to the Eastern Rivers was considered essential for India’s agricultural and developmental objectives. For instance, East Punjab required irrigation for nearly 1.5 million acres of agricultural land, and India was simultaneously implementing major irrigation and hydroelectric projects such as the Bhakra project and the Rajasthan Canal. The economic and strategic advantages of securing exclusive rights to the Eastern Rivers were therefore deemed to outweigh the settlement's financial costs. Furthermore, the £62.06 million payment was scheduled in ten instalments between 1961 and 1970, which mitigated India’s immediate financial burden.

The Treaty was negotiated in the 1950s, a period characterised by smaller basin populations, limited infrastructure, and minimal policy attention to climate change or glacier retreat. Its institutional strength lay in the assumption that technical cooperation could persist despite strained political relations. The Permanent Indus Commission was established to embody this principle.

The Treaty’s longevity did not depend on continuous political cooperation between India and Pakistan. Rather, it endured because both parties valued predictable rules, established procedures, and institutional continuity, even during periods of acute political hostility. In this regard, the Treaty was intentionally narrower than the broader bilateral relationship, focusing specifically on water management rather than political disputes. However, this insulation was never absolute, and evolving strategic, environmental, and demographic factors have increasingly exposed its limitations.

Pakistan’s concerns regarding India’s actions in the Indus Basin are longstanding and form part of a broader strategy to portray India as the aggressor and Pakistan as the vulnerable downstream state. In 1952, Pakistan’s first foreign minister, Zafrullah Khan, brought the canal-water dispute before the United Nations Security Council, characterising India’s regulation of water as a humanitarian injury to Pakistani farmers and depicting the upper riparian as having the power to deprive the lower riparian of its livelihood. This framing attracted significant international attention.

Five years later, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto took the argument further. In the United Nations, he described depriving a lower riparian of its river rights as a form of “economic aggression” and warned that interference with irrigation supplies could threaten. Asif Iftikhar Ahmad, Pakistan’s UN ambassador, has more recently framed the issue as a test of the international system and treaty sanctity. In January 2026, Pakistan used an Arria-formula meeting of the Security Council to argue that India’s action was not merely a bilateral matter but raised broader questions about the reliability of international agreements. An Arria-formula meeting is an informal format that allows members of the UN Security Council to engage privately with external actors, non-state groups, or experts outside the formal procedures of official Council meetings.

For decades, Pakistan has recognised that its primary diplomatic advantage does not reside in prevailing over India on technical details of dams or reservoirs, but in reframing bilateral engineering disputes as broader moral and legal issues. This strategy is effective because, as a downstream state, Pakistan can present itself as vulnerable and water-dependent. India must recognise the narrative and strategic significance attached to water in this context.

The announcement of the Treaty’s abeyance following the Pahalgam terror attack has fundamentally altered its political and strategic context. The abeyance grants India greater policy flexibility to develop and utilise the waters allocated under the Treaty. However, this development is often misinterpreted as giving India the capacity to manipulate or significantly alter river flows, particularly in the Western Rivers.

Existing projects such as Salal, Baglihar, Dulhasti, Kishenganga, and Nimoo Bazgo, together with newer projects such as Pakal Dul, Ratle, Kiru, and Kwar, form an important network of upstream infrastructure. Their significance lies in their combined potential to increase India’s capacity to store, regulate, and utilise water, and to generate run-of-the-river hydropower projects on the Western Rivers.

NHPC Power Plant Next to Salal Dam in Chenab River | NHPC Limited

These developments have heightened Pakistan’s concerns and help explain the intensity of its response. In June 2026, Pakistan’s Foreign Office asserted that it had not been consulted regarding Indian projects, characterising them as attempts to “weaponise water” and warning that Pakistan retained all options to protect its water rights. The primary concern extends beyond current water volumes to India’s potential to substantially increase its upstream regulatory capacity and influence the timing and management of future flows.

The abeyance of the Treaty has not ended its legal machinery. It has shifted the dispute towards questions of interpretation, jurisdiction and the legitimacy of the processes through which the Treaty is being interpreted. The dispute predates the announcement of abeyance. India and Pakistan had already disagreed over the Kishenganga and Ratle hydroelectric projects. Pakistan sought adjudication through a Court of Arbitration, while India requested the appointment of a Neutral Expert. The World Bank eventually allowed both processes to proceed, despite concerns over the practical difficulties created by parallel proceedings. The Treaty itself envisages different mechanisms for different categories of issues: the Permanent Indus Commission for a “disagreement”, followed by a Neutral Expert for a “difference” and, in specified circumstances, a Court of Arbitration for a “dispute.” This disagreement acquired greater significance after April 2025. The Court of Arbitration continued its proceedings despite India’s refusal to participate. It issued an award on the interpretation of the Treaty in August 2025 and subsequently issued a decision on Pakistan’s request for clarification. In May 2026, it issued a further award concerning maximum pondage at Indian hydroelectric projects.

India has rejected the legitimacy of this process, arguing that the Court was constituted contrary to the Treaty’s dispute-settlement framework and that the issues should first be addressed through the Neutral Expert mechanism. Pakistan, by contrast, has maintained that the arbitration remains valid and that the Treaty’s dispute-settlement provisions continue to bind India.

This has produced an unusual institutional situation. India considers the Treaty to be in abeyance, while Pakistan continues to invoke its legal mechanisms. Both sides operate from fundamentally different interpretations of the Treaty’s current status. Pakistan is incentivised to maintain the proceedings, as they provide a forum to sustain its legal claims and reinforce the position that the Treaty remains operative. Conversely, India is motivated to contest the proceedings, since allowing arbitration to proceed uncontested could strengthen an interpretation of the Treaty that New Delhi no longer accepts.

The legal contest is therefore unlikely to dissipate solely because of the suspension of formal treaty cooperation. Instead, the dispute has shifted from interpreting individual project provisions to broader questions of jurisdiction, procedure, and the Treaty’s continuing legal status.

Perhaps the most consequential shift in Pakistan’s response has been to frame water as a matter of national security. Pakistan’s National Security Committee made this explicit in April 2025 by describing water as a “Vital National Interest” and warning that any attempt to stop or divert Pakistan’s flows would be regarded as an “act of war”. This framing has since extended beyond civilian political discourse. In July 2026, the Corps Commanders’ Conference, chaired by Field Marshal Asim Munir, reaffirmed the military’s commitment to “taking all necessary measures to safeguard Pakistan’s water rights”.

This shift obscures the distinction between water management and national security. Pakistan’s reliance on the Indus system for agriculture, irrigation, energy, and food security has long rendered water central to its national resilience. When upstream infrastructure is viewed through a security lens, technical issues related to dams, storage, and hydropower acquire strategic and potentially military significance. This dynamic creates a classic security dilemma: India may perceive expanded infrastructure on the Western Rivers as an enhancement of its water entitlements, while Pakistan may interpret the same developments as an increasing capacity for coercion. The risk is that water management, rather than serving as a domain for managing bilateral differences, becomes another arena for broader strategic rivalry.

Pakistan is likely to intensify its efforts to internationalise the dispute. A bilateral contest favours India’s position as the upper riparian, whereas an international framing enables Pakistan to invoke broader principles of treaty law, downstream interests, and international security. The objective is not necessarily to secure an external mechanism capable of compelling India to release water, but rather to impose greater political and reputational constraints on India’s exercise of its upstream rights. This dynamic helps explain Pakistan’s continued engagement with the United Nations, the World Bank, arbitration mechanisms, and international diplomatic forums.

This approach is consistent with historical precedent. As previously noted, Pakistan has repeatedly sought to frame Indus Basin disputes in broader international terms, with rhetoric evolving from accusations of “callous” conduct in 1952, to “economic aggression” in 1957, and more recently to concerns regarding the sanctity of international agreements. India’s response must therefore address the international legal dimension, rather than treating the dispute solely as a bilateral political issue.

A particularly important aspect of India’s response is to distinguish territorial sovereignty from treaty-based rights of water utilisation. Article IV (15) expressly preserves existing territorial rights over the rivers, their beds, and banks, while the Treaty establishes rules governing the use of their waters. It does not transfer sovereignty over the rivers to Pakistan.

India should also consistently argue that Pakistan’s cross-border terrorism seriously undermines the conditions necessary for fulfilling the Treaty’s objectives, particularly the “cooperative spirit” of “goodwill and friendship” referenced in its Preamble. Articulating these distinctions would enable India to frame its position not as a rejection of treaty obligations or international law, but as an assertion that treaty-based water rights function within, rather than supersede, the broader framework of sovereign rights, state interests, and the conditions of cooperation envisaged by the Treaty itself.

The implications of the post-abeyance situation raise a more fundamental question of domestic water governance in Pakistan. The IWT provided Pakistan with a relatively predictable allocation of the Western Rivers, but predictability of supply does not necessarily translate into efficient or sustainable water management. Pakistan faces structural pressures, including population growth, groundwater depletion, climate variability, ageing irrigation infrastructure, low irrigation efficiency, and persistent inter-provincial competition for water. The inter-provincial dialogue convened by Pakistan’s Ministry of Water Resources in February 2026 is instructive in this regard. Federal and provincial representatives discussed both short- and long-term water availability following India’s decision to place the Treaty in abeyance, indicating that the implications were being assessed not only as an external security challenge but also in terms of Pakistan’s internal water management.

This underscores a critical distinction: securing access to water and ensuring water availability are not synonymous. Even if Pakistan successfully defends its position on the Treaty at the international level, broader water-security challenges will persist. While the Treaty provides a framework for river water allocation, it cannot address issues such as declining groundwater, inefficient irrigation, inadequate storage, shifting cropping patterns, or weak water governance.

Pakistan therefore faces two interconnected but distinct challenges: first, protecting its access to the Western Rivers, and second, improving the efficiency and sustainability of domestic water management. The former is politically visible and easily framed as an external threat, while the latter requires complex reforms involving irrigation practices, groundwater extraction, water pricing, crop choices, storage, inter-provincial allocation, and institutional capacity. Over time, the greater threat to Pakistan’s water security may originate internally. Persistent water stress, weak governance, and inter-provincial competition could become significant sources of political and social instability.

India should exercise strategic restraint. The value of abeyance does not reside in issuing dramatic threats, but rather in the time and policy space it provides for India to gradually expand its capacity to store, regulate, and utilise its legitimate share of Indus waters. Accordingly, India should accelerate the development of viable infrastructure, strengthen hydropower and storage capacity, and optimise seasonal flows without making commitments beyond hydrological realities. In this context, abeyance offers India an open-ended timeframe to build the capacity it has historically lacked.

The broader implications for South Asia are also significant. As an upper riparian relative to Pakistan and Bangladesh and a lower riparian relative to China, the precedent India sets in the Indus Basin will be closely scrutinised. A sustainable strategy requires capacity, credibility, and restraint. India should prioritise building the capacity to utilise its water resources, defending its position through a clear legal and diplomatic narrative, and avoiding actions that could be construed as weaponising water.

The abeyance of the IWT signifies more than a rupture in a six-decade-old water arrangement. Water has become more explicitly integrated into the strategic relationship between India and Pakistan, and the Treaty itself is now subject to competing legal, diplomatic, and political interpretations.

The central issue is what kind of institutional framework can govern the Indus Basin when the political conditions that sustained the Treaty have fundamentally changed. Although a return to the previous equilibrium appears increasingly unlikely, this does not necessitate the absence of rules or institutional arrangements. Geographic and hydrological imperatives will continue to bind the two riparian states, irrespective of political differences. The challenge is to negotiate a new equilibrium that reconciles sovereign interests and legitimate water-security concerns with the evolving hydrological, environmental, and strategic realities of the Indus Basin.

[The article is exclusive to NatStrat. The views expressed by the author(s) are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of the organisation.]