Abdullah Mustafvi
Rivers ignore borders, making shared water a necessity for human survival, which led to the creation of treaties to separate hydrology from politics and ensure cooperation. India’s April 2025 decision to place the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) in abeyance weaponises this technical agreement, shattering 65 years of successful, good-faith data sharing and setting a dangerous global precedent.
This action turns a historic pillar of stability into an existential threat by transforming vital access to water into a political lever. A state, like India, cannot credibly demand respect for international law, trade agreements, and climate accords while treating its most vital water treaty as dispensable. The tendency of suspending agreed-upon rules or treaties amid political tensions is catastrophic for peace in South Asia.
The immediate damage is to Pakistan, but the mechanism of damage is what should alarm the world. India has withheld critical hydrological information. In a river basin, data is much more than paperwork involving the cycle of activities related to the survival of human beings. Pakistan’s agriculture depends on timely knowledge of flows, releases and changing snowmelt patterns. Its reservoir operations, irrigation scheduling and flood forecasting all require upstream information.
When an upstream state deliberately restricts that information, it converts uncertainty into a security threat. Farmers are forced to gamble on planting dates. Irrigation losses rise. Food prices become volatile. In an era of climate-driven hydrological volatility, this is especially reckless. Floods are getting stronger, droughts are getting longer, and glaciers are behaving unpredictably. Climate adaptation requires more cooperation, not less. Water is inseparable from food security, livelihoods and economic stability. Over 90% of Pakistan’s agriculture depends on the Indus system.
By manipulating the water treaty, India is actually targeting wheat fields, dairy farms and 240 million people. Treating a shared river as leverage against a downstream population is the opposite of responsible transboundary governance.
It is coercion disguised as statecraft. The larger danger is precedent. The world has more than 300 shared river basins. The Nile, the Mekong, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Colorado, the Danube. All of them depend on the same principle that India is now undermining.
It is a universally accepted fact that treaties survive politics, and that data is a public good, not a bargaining chip. If an upstream power can legally suspend cooperation whenever it chooses, downstream states everywhere become insecure. We will enter a world where hydrological information is traded for concessions, where dam operations are announced as warnings, and where water becomes a routine instrument of pressure.
That is exactly the behaviour international water law was written to prevent. India has long projected itself as a responsible regional and global stakeholder. That credibility is now at stake. The IWT was designed to keep technical cooperation alive so that political disputes would not automatically become water crises. By collapsing that firewall, India risks being seen not as a mediator but as a state willing to use essential resources as coercion.
The international community should therefore read the Indus crisis as a warning, not as a bilateral footnote. Pakistan has stood on principles and demanded shared governance of water by law, transparency, cooperation and equitable management. When that principle erodes, the damage radiates outward. India should be pressed to restore treaty-based cooperation, to resume the full and timely exchange of hydrological data, and to address any disputes through the mechanisms the treaty itself provides. There are commissioners, neutral experts, and arbitration courts for a reason.
The lesson for the world is unequivocal. Water must never become a weapon. Once upstream power is converted into political coercion, the damage moves from irrigation channels to international law, from crop cycles to human security, from one basin to the entire idea of cooperation. In a century defined by climate stress, we cannot afford to turn rivers into battlegrounds. The Indus is a test case. If we fail it here, we will fail it everywhere.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
