Dear young friends,
I address you as someone who spent more than a decade negotiating across a table from Pakistan on the Indus Waters Treaty, and six years as India's Commissioner. I do so not to relive old arguments, but because the choices your generation makes about this Treaty will shape the subcontinent's water future far longer than mine did. You deserve the facts.
Start with what the Treaty actually did in 1960. It divided six rivers of one basin between two nations that had, until 1947, shared them as one country. India, sitting upstream and controlling the headworks, could have kept far more. Instead, it allocated with great generosity the three Western Rivers — the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab, carrying over 80 percent of the basin's flow — to Pakistan, retaining for itself only the three smaller Eastern Rivers. Interstingly, India further paid the equivalent of roughly USD 2.5 billion in today's value to help Pakistan build the infrastructure, including in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, that it needed to use that water — merely to formalise the 12 million acre-feet it was already using before Partition. India called it “buying peace” at the cost of abandoning the development of its vast arid tracts. No comparable upper riparian anywhere in the world has ceded so much, and then even paid the lower riparian for the ‘privilege’ of doing so. This is the part of the story too often left out when Pakistan speaks of Indian “aggression.”Holding a water treaty together for six decades requires a responsible upper riparian. The peace held through the wars of 1965, 1971 and 1999, and through repeated Pakistan-sponsored terror attacks on Indian soil because India chose an unusually accommodative posture even under grave provocation. Pakistan, for its part, has persistently misused the objection mechanism available to it under the Treaty, raising objections to Indian project designs on grounds well beyond the narrow technical criteria the Treaty actually permits. It has objected to nearly every run-of-the-river hydropower project India has proposed on the Western Rivers, however small. The Salal Dam, which stands as a testimony, has since silted up so badly that it now functions as little more than a raised riverbed. Tulbul , the aspiration of Kashmir, stands suspended for four decades. Pakistan uses comparable spillway designs on its own Neelum-Jhelum project, a few kilometres from the Kishenganga project where India is forbidden the same. A treaty meant to enable “the most complete and satisfactory 2 utilisation” of shared waters became, in practice, a mechanism for stalling India's development in Jammu and Kashmir.
India's decision to hold the Treaty in abeyance until Pakistan credibly and irrevocably ends its support for cross-border terrorism is not a response to the Pahalgam terror attack alone, and not a unilateral rupture of a working technical arrangement. It rests on a simple principle of international law: goodfaith performance is a bilateral duty, and a state cannot invoke treaty rights while sponsoring terrorism against the very neighbour with whom it shares that treaty. India is a victim state that has suffered devastating terrorist attacks on its soil for decades, carried out by actors operating from Pakistani territory and with the support of the Pakistani state. A treaty designed to foster cooperation cannot survive as a one-way obligation when the other party continues to undermine the relationship through proxy violence. As our government has put it plainly: blood and water cannot flow together.
A wave of commentary, much of it amplified through Western media, has since framed this suspension as an escalatory or destabilising act, and reinstatement of the original terms as indispensable to regional peace. This framing is both misleading and morally inverted. It lets Pakistan cultivate the image of a wronged nation while continuing to sponsor the very violence that made the Treaty untenable. India cannot be expected to subordinate its sovereign interests, security imperatives and developmental needs to maintain an outdated, inequitable arrangement brokered by a third party. Its measured response — including the suspension of treaty participation — is not a threat to regional stability; it is a long-overdue signal that the terms of engagement must change. Some intellectuals draw parallels with the Aral Sea basin, the Mekong River Commission, and the Senegal River Basin to argue for cooperative governance. These are states that share broadly aligned developmental interests — a reminder that cooperation frameworks require at least a baseline of good faith to function. India enjoys no such assurance from Pakistan, which makes the comparison with the Mekong Commission or the Jordan-Israel water arrangements fundamentally inapt.
Here is what I most want your generation to understand: India has prioritized her intersts — fasttracking construction of Ratle, Kiru, Kwar and Pakal Dul on the Chenab, expediting projects like Kirthai and Sawalkote, and beginning the long-overdue desilting of existing reservoirs. India is expanding irrigated area in Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh, carrying water to other parts of the Indus basin, and building storage — for its own food security and to make the basin resilient to climate change. This is not "weaponising water," a phrase Pakistan has used freely in recent months. It is a country finally building what it was always entitled to build, in territory that has waited decades for the power, irrigation and employment these projects will bring to Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh.
On the other hand, Pakistan's water crisis is not India's making, and no restoration of the Treaty will solve it. Of the 143 billion cubic metres that reach Pakistan's canal headworks each year, barely 55 billion cubic metres reach the farms; the rest is lost to unlined canals, over-irrigation and crumbling infrastructure — losses roughly twice the entire share India draws under the, now suspended, Treaty. While India focused on development, Pakistan focused on what it is best at — terrorism. A 1970s 3 Pakistani plan called for one major dam every decade; fifty years on, not one has been completed. The World Bank's own study concludes bluntly that the country's greatest water challenges are internal, not external. As a result, Pakistan can store water for barely 30 days against an international benchmark of 120. For the records, India focussed on development and has built over 220 days of storage. It has 6,545 are operational/completed dam across India against 73 in Pakistan. Blaming an upstream neighbour is simply easier for Pakistan than fixing water governance at home.
Rivers do not observe borders, and geography will still bind India and Pakistan together long after both our generations are gone. But cooperation cannot be one-sided indefinitely, and a treaty cannot be asked to survive a policy of “bleeding India through a thousand cuts” while blood is spilled on our side of the border. The path back runs through Islamabad's abandonment of terrorism as an instrument of state policy — not through international arbitration forums whose jurisdiction India disputes, and not through appeals to victimhood that ignore six decades of Indian restraint.
Young friends, you are inheriting a river system and a difficult neighborhood. My generation tried generosity first; the record of the last two decades is what generosity, unreciprocated, produced. What you decide to do with that history — whether to demand reciprocity as the price of cooperation, or to let sentiment substitute for scrutiny , will determine whether the Indus basin's next sixty years look like its first sixty, or something better.
I hope you choose better, and I hope you choose it with the facts in hand.
Best wishes!
Indus Waters Treaty Dialogue. 19 September 2026, Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi.