Rivers beyond rivalries: Rethinking the Indus Waters Treaty

Once celebrated as a shared lifeline between India and Pakistan, the vocabulary surrounding the Indus has changed. Increasingly, it has become militarized, with terms such as “strategic asset,” “weapon,” “deterrence,” “escalation” and even “battlefield” creeping into discussions on the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, the agreement governing the sharing of the basin’s rivers.

More unsettling is the ease with which some now speak of “choking,” “starving,” “cutting off water supplies” or “turning off the tap.” Such language turns water into a weapon and obscures the truth: the Indus sustains some 300 million people, countless animals and entire ecosystems on both sides.

Political leaders have only amplified this rhetoric, and the language has become increasingly macabre. “Blood and water cannot flow together,” proclaimed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “Either our water will flow through it, or their blood,” warned Pakistan People’s Party chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari.

No treaty survives on legal clauses or hydrology alone. It endures because it is underpinned by trust, precisely what is missing between India and Pakistan today.

- Zofeen T. Ebrahim

Beneath the militarized rhetoric lies a deeper impulse: to conquer, possess, control and dominate what was never meant to belong to one nation alone, but to sustain everyone who depends on it.

Ironically, while the language surrounding the Indus has grown more combative, the river itself has become increasingly fragile. Today, the basin faces stresses the treaty’s architects could never have imagined: retreating glaciers, erratic monsoons, groundwater depletion and escalating demand for energy and water.

Yet while so much has changed, the treaty itself has remained frozen in time.

Signed in 1960, it divided the basin by allocating entire rivers rather than sharing the benefits of the resource.

Today, experts describe the division of the six rivers as a “binary” model of water sharing: you take one, I’ll take the other. They argue that it is far less advantageous than sharing the benefits of the resource itself: you’re upstream, so you generate hydropower; I’m downstream, so I produce food. By exchanging these benefits, rather than simply dividing the rivers, both countries could derive greater value from the basin.

With roughly 80 percent of the Indus system’s waters flowing to Pakistan under the treaty, India has long argued that the arrangement left it shortchanged. Pakistan maintains that the allocation reflects hydrological reality and regards the treaty as essential for predictable downstream flows.

Today, the 85-page treaty appears to be on life support.

India’s dissatisfaction had been building for years, with New Delhi arguing that the agreement no longer reflected contemporary realities such as climate change, population growth and rising water demands. After the April 2025 Pahalgam attack, India announced it was holding the treaty in abeyance, citing Pakistan-linked terrorism.

In Pakistan, there are almost as many views on the future of the treaty as there are pages in the treaty itself, perhaps even more. Some describe it as the country’s lifeline, casting it in existential terms. Others argue it has outlived its usefulness and should be laid to rest. Still others focus on the treaty’s legal provisions: it has no sunset clause, they note, so it continues in perpetuity until both parties agree to terminate it, and any unilateral attempt to end it should be legally challenged.

What is striking, however, is how rarely a middle path, modernizing rather than abandoning the treaty, is discussed.

Part of the reason is that the treaty has acquired an almost sacrosanct status, not only in Pakistan but also in international water diplomacy. It is widely regarded as one of the world’s most durable bilateral water-sharing agreements between two hostile neighbors.
Iconic though the treaty may be, there is nothing inherently irreverent about asking if it remains fit for purpose.

The 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty between the US and Canada has been supplemented through successive agreements. The 1944 US-Mexico water treaty has evolved through binding decisions addressing drought, environmental flows and climate pressures. Likewise, the Mekong Agreement established a basin-wide commission that enables Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam to manage shared waters through dialogue rather than confrontation.

The lesson is simple: the world’s most enduring water treaties have survived precisely because they have evolved with changing times.

In this new era of climate uncertainty and geopolitical tension, the real question is not whether the Indus Waters Treaty will survive. It is whether its structures, including the water commissions and the treaty’s rules, are making the basin resilient or more vulnerable.

Equally important is another question: has political mistrust so constrained the Permanent Indus Commission that it has been unable to perform its most important purpose, which is not merely administering the treaty but building confidence between the two countries? Indus water commissioners may be expert engineers, but have they been trained in negotiation and diplomacy?

The difficulty is that such questions are no longer being asked. The debate has been hijacked by security narratives and nationalist rhetoric, leaving little room for evidence-based discussion about the basin’s future.

Ultimately, no treaty survives on legal clauses or hydrology alone. It endures because it is underpinned by trust, precisely what is missing between India and Pakistan today. Until that trust is rebuilt, there is little prospect of the treaty being meaningfully revised or modernized.

And it can certainly be rebuilt. The rivers that have long divided the two countries could also become the reason they cooperate again. Rivers do not recognize borders; they sustain everyone in their path. If political imagination fails, as one water expert warned, “Pakistan will have to plan for life without a treaty.”

- Zofeen T. Ebrahim is a Karachi-based independent journalist. X: @zofeen28