 "Mohammad Asif Khan")
 "A drone view of Teesta river at Sangkalang, Sikkim (REUTERS)")
A drone view of Teesta river at Sangkalang, Sikkim (REUTERS)
At the President’s House in Karachi, on 19 September 1960, India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, stood beside Pakistan’s Ayub Khan and the World Bank’s William Iliff to sign a document that was the result of nine years of negotiations — the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT). Nehru called it a day whose value lay less in the material benefits, considerable as those were, than in the “psychological and perhaps even the emotional” ones, proof that India and Pakistan could cooperate on something as fundamental as a shared river.
The Times of India ran a cartoon by R K Laxman, and captioned it “Rest in Peace? Temporary Burial”, which ran alongside reports of the ratification formalities still being ironed out, a joke about a peace nobody quite trusted to last.
The joke has turned out to be prophetic. Sixty-five years later, on April 23, 2025, a day after the terror attack at Pahalgam in which 26 people lost their lives, the India’s Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) put the treaty “in abeyance”.
“If you look at the treaty, there is no word around abeyance or suspension,” said Naho Mirumachi, professor of environmental politics at King’s College London. “The treaty says you can either modify the treaty or you can terminate the treaty. So, in many ways, this term ‘abeyance’ is very ambiguous. From a legal perspective, the treaty is still in place. The treaty hasn’t been ripped up.”
Some experts say that suspending the treaty was not an impulsive decision.
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 "Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Hyderabad House in New Delhi in October 2024 (Reuters)")
“India had been signalling dissatisfaction for years over the treaty,” said Uttam Kumar Sinha, senior fellow at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA) and author of Indus Basin Uninterrupted. “Pahalgam actually triggered it for India to quickly bring out a counter-response,” he said.
“Never have we done (such a thing) so quickly. We had the Uri and Pathankot attacks, the 2001 Parliament attack, and the Mumbai attack, but we always contemplated and debated. This time, the CCS acted immediately.”
He pointed to a formal notice India sent Pakistan in January 2023 seeking renegotiation. That notice cited changed circumstances: Persistent cross-border terrorism, climate change and altered hydrology, demographic pressure, and Pakistan’s repeated use of the treaty’s dispute-resolution mechanism to obstruct Indian hydropower projects on the western rivers.
“It is a strategy of coercive diplomacy, a war by other means. You can put pressure on Pakistan by doing several things on the rivers, so you don’t really need to intervene militarily,” Sinha said.
The main point of contention is the treaty’s structure. Under the treaty, Pakistan received roughly 80 per cent of the water of the Indus River basin, and 20 per cent went to India. India got the three eastern rivers — Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej — and Pakistan was given the three western rivers — Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab.
India retained certain entitlements on the western rivers for domestic use, non-consumptive use, agriculture, and hydroelectric power generation, which, Sinha noted, “we have not fully utilised”. India also has the right to create water storage capacity of up to 3.6 million acre-feet on the western rivers.
“The treaty was negotiated by civil engineers and not politicians and diplomats,” Sinha said. Yet he acknowledged that “it was not so much the volume that determined India’s negotiating position. It was the control of the eastern rivers that mattered more.”
India needed the eastern rivers to irrigate fields in Punjab and build the Bhakra Nangal Dam and Indira Gandhi Canal in Rajasthan. “No treaty can be good when one party gains everything. It has to be a process in which you gain something, and you concede something.” But can India actually cut off Pakistan’s water supply? Mirumachi said, “Trying to stop the flow of water into Pakistan is going to be a huge effort with huge costs. And it will also take a long time. It’s not going to happen overnight.”
The treaty’s demise, however, can be considered symbolic, at least in the short term. India has pushed ahead with projects like the Chenab-Beas Link Tunnel. Pakistan, in turn, has warned that any attempt to stop or divert its share of water would be considered an “act of war”. The Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled in June that India cannot unilaterally hold the treaty in abeyance, a decision India called “illegal and void”.
“The Indus Water Treaty has been very robust and resilient. Because it was in place for more than 60 years, I think this current verbal threat is a new sort of phase where frustrations between the countries are being publicly expressed.” Mirumachi said.
China’s shadow
Pakistan is not the only country that India shares rivers with, and this adds to the complexity of the problem.
In India’s eastern region, it is China that holds the upstream advantage when it comes to the Brahmaputra river. China is building what is considered to be the world’s largest hydroelectric dam in the river, which it calls the Yarlung Tsangpo, at a cost of $178 billion. The dam will be the costliest and most powerful dam ever to be constructed in that region.
For India, which lies downstream, the construction of the dam has emerged as a security issue. Since June 2023, China has suspended sharing of hydrological information about the dam with India.
“Anything of such gigantic size close to the border will certainly be of great concern, both in terms of what the Chinese can deliberately do and in terms of natural disaster. If something happens to the dam, we will be the first to get impacted,” Sinha said.
India asked China to resume sharing hydrological information during negotiations in August 2026, but China has shown no signs of acceding. While India treats it as a matter of security, China claims the dam will have minimal effect on water flow.
“When you develop a dam upstream, there are going to be impacts downstream,” said Mirumachi.
“This involves data sharing and coordination between countries. It’s an issue of how states communicate their intention to develop major infrastructure and how that is going to be negotiated with downstream states.”
Further downstream, the Teesta River, which originates in Sikkim and merges with a tributary of the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh, has become another site of conflict. A 2011 draft agreement, which would have allocated 42.5 per cent of the water to India and 37.5 per cent to Bangladesh collapsed after then West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee opposed it, citing the state’s own water needs. The state has since unilaterally withdrawn water from the Teesta and dug additional canals upstream.
River-related conflicts
Nilanjan Ghosh, who heads development studies at the Observer Research Foundation, argues that the river’s problems are entirely man-made.
“The Teesta is largely a man-made issue. The scarcity of water is also man-made. It is not about climate change or anything of that sort that is working there,” he said. He pointed to the proliferation of dams and increased dry-season paddy cultivation on both sides of the border as the real drivers of the conflict.
“There will be more than 20 dams in Sikkim which are non-functional. This severely compromises what we call the integrity of the river system. Further downstream, this is tantamount to almost killing the river,” Ghosh said.
Bangladesh has now turned to China. It is pursuing a Teesta River Comprehensive Management and Restoration Project, with China offering nearly $1 billion for the project.
“As far as water is concerned, India should not be worried,” said Ghosh. “Now, if you say that it is geopolitics and this actually brings Bangladesh closer to China, that is a different concern,” he added. India’s water conflict woes do not end here: Nepal’s water disputes with India are less dramatic . The 1996 Mahakali Treaty was meant to promote cooperation between the two countries, but nearly three decades later Nepal has complained that it has not received the water it is entitled to under the treaty.
India’s upstream projects on rivers like the Koshi and Gandaki have raised concerns in Nepal about their downstream impact. But unlike other disputes, these have largely remained contained. “South Asia is entering a new era of water diplomacy, one that will have to be built on discussion and deliberation rather than a treaty text nobody anticipated needing to argue over,” Mirumachi said.
Back in 1960 Nehru said he believed “the spirit does triumph even in this very material age”. It’s hard to say in 2026 whether he’d still believe it.
Written By
Mohammad Asif Khan
Mohammad Asif Khan is a Senior Correspondent at Business Standard, where he covers defence, security, and strategic affairs.
 "Mohammad Asif Khan")
First Published: Sep 10 2026 | 6:25 AM IST
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