“Water, the cradle of life, becomes a sword in the hands of war.” The line, inspired by the 1938 Yellow River flood, captures a recurring truth: rivers that sustain civilisation can be repurposed to coerce or destroy. Dutch defenders drowned their own polders in 1672, Britain’s Dambusters breached Ruhr dams in 1943, Saddam Hussein desiccated Iraq’s marshes in the 1990s, ISIS alternated between floods and thirst in Syria, and the 2023 breach of Ukraine’s Nova Kakhovka dam displaced thousands.
Against that backdrop, India’s April 2025 suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) is momentous—not because sluice gates have slammed shut overnight, but because New Delhi has openly cast Pakistan’s lifeblood as strategic leverage.
Brokered by the World Bank in 1960, the IWT carved the basin into two unequal zones. India gained full control of the eastern rivers—the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej—whose average annual flow is roughly 41 billion cubic metres, while Pakistan received near‑exclusive use of the mightier western rivers—the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab—about 99 billion cubic metres.
India’s uses of those western streams were restricted to run‑of‑river hydropower and limited irrigation. In practice, New Delhi ceded some 70 per cent of the system’s water to its downstream neighbour, yet the accord endured, lauded by President Dwight Eisenhower as a “bright spot” in diplomacy and surviving two wars.
Disquiet nevertheless simmered. Indian engineers lamented that the treaty’s rigid quotas ignored population growth, climate stress and technological advances. Islamabad, for its part, treated every Indian dam proposal—Kishanganga, Ratle, Bursar—as an existential threat. After terror strikes in Uri (2016) and Pulwama (2019), Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned, “Blood and water cannot flow together,” while Water Resources Minister Nitin Gadkari pledged to harness India’s full eastern‑river share.
February 2024’s Shahpur Kandi barrage finally stopped the Ravi’s residual trickle into Pakistan—a move entirely legal yet powerfully symbolic. When New Delhi served notice in January 2023 that it wished to renegotiate the pact, Islamabad stonewalled; two years later, the suspension landed like a thunderclap.
What can India, as the upper riparian, really do? Existing run‑of‑the‑river plants give it power to modulate flows for a few critical days—enough to unsettle Pakistan’s irrigation schedules at planting time. Over the medium term, it can accelerate storage dams, reroute Chenab waters into Jammu’s canals or tap the Indus for Ladakh.
Engineers caution that complete stoppage would demand massive reservoirs, a decade of construction and huge budgets, while mis‑timed releases could flood Indian valleys. The deterrent, therefore, lies less in a tap that shuts tomorrow than in a credible willingness to expand capacity, compelling Islamabad to weigh water insecurity in every strategic choice.
Pakistan’s dependence is stark. Agriculture employs nearly half its workforce and guzzles 90 per cent of freshwater withdrawals; more than 100 million acre‑feet from the Indus feed the world’s largest contiguous canal system. Yet inefficiencies are legendary: roughly two‑thirds of that allocation evaporates, leaks or flushes to the Arabian Sea unused. Aquifers in Punjab and Sindh are collapsing; the Indus Basin is the planet’s second‑most overstressed. Even a modest curtailment could ignite food inflation, rural unemployment and urban migration, rattling an economy already strained by debt and climate‑driven floods.
Scholars illuminate the deeper fault lines. Daniel Haines, in Indus Divided, argues the 1960 accord was about partition, not equity: carving flows so each state could plan on its own. Niranjan Gulhati, an Indian negotiator, later rued that the compromise left India short of water despite its larger catchment. Sunil Amrith warns that “sacralising” the treaty obscures its Cold‑War parentage—and its brittleness in a warmer, wetter, more volatile world.
History also cautions that hydraulic brinkmanship invites retaliation. China controls Brahmaputra headwaters and could, in extremis, tighten flows to India’s northeast. Within Pakistan, hard‑liners already brand the suspension an act of war, and the military may seek diversionary crises along the border. Nuclear deterrence looms over every miscalculation.
India’s leverage, therefore, must be calibrated. Three instruments stand out. First, complete utilisation of the eastern rivers: link canals in Punjab and Rajasthan can reclaim the final dribbles still sneaking across the border, satisfying domestic farm lobbies without breaching any normative principle. Second, deft seasonal management of western‑river pulses: seven‑day drawdown windows, legal under the treaty’s design manuals, allow India to release or withhold a surge at moments that matter to Pakistani sowing schedules, delivering a diplomatic nudge rather than a fatal blow. Third, the announcement—and credible financing—of new storage projects sends a long‑term signal; even if completion lies a decade away, the option of future restriction exerts deterrent weight today.
Each step stops well short of collective punishment. That restraint is vital. Any impression that India is targeting civilians would erode its international standing, galvanise Pakistan’s allies and invite sanctions.
Ecologically, reservoirs and diversions must be engineered with climate models in mind; Himalayan glaciers are thinning fast, and misestimates could shorten the useful life of billion‑dollar assets. Domestic politics matter too: upland communities in Himachal or Ladakh will resist projects that inundate ancestral villages merely for strategic storage.
Suspension need not mean permanent rupture. Indeed, it could prod both countries toward a 21st‑century compact attuned to glacier retreat, hydropower demand and flood management. Joint basin authorities, real‑time data sharing and catastrophe‑insurance pools could replace rigid quotas with adaptive governance. International financiers—from the World Bank to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank—might back canal‑lining in Sindh or drip‑irrigation in Indian Punjab, easing Pakistani vulnerability while creating Indian export markets for agri‑tech.
For sixty‑five years, the Indus Waters Treaty bottled up strategic rivalry beneath a veneer of cooperation. By lifting the cork, India is wagering that credible hydraulic pressure will dampen Pakistan’s tolerance for cross‑border militancy. The gamble will work only if applied with surgical precision: enough to deter, not enough to provoke uncontrollable escalation.
Water can indeed be a sword; wielded wisely, it can also be a scalpel that trims incentives for proxy conflict while nudging both rivals toward a more resilient, climate‑ready Indus future. Water can indeed be a sword; wielded wisely, it can also be a scalpel that trims incentives for proxy conflict while nudging both rivals toward a climate‑ready Indus future.
“When two nations share a river, they are forever bound—either by the current of cooperation or by the undertow of coercion. The choice is not in the water, but in the wisdom of those who command its flow.
Let the next chapter of Indus history be written by that wisdom, not by thirst.
Disclaimer: Anurag Punetha is a New Delhi-based Senior Journalist and writes on culture and diplomacy.
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