IT’S been more than a year that India has freezed essential everyday procedures like mandatory inspections and hydrological data exchange through the Permanent Indus Commission. New Delhi has committed a profound breach of international law. Under Article 26 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT), agreements must be performed in good faith (pacta sunt servanda), and Article 57 strictly prohibits unilateral suspension without mutual consent. Furthermore, India’s claim that Pakistan’s use of tiered arbitration over the Kishanganga and Ratle projects constitutes a material breach holds no legal water. This stance was explicitly rejected by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (CoA) in its June 2025 Supplemental Award, which declared the treaty fully binding and valid.
In this backdrop, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and Institute of Regional Studies hosted the International Seminar on Indus Waters Treaty at the Jinnah Convention Center in Islamabad. Bringing together prominent politicians, diplomats, and international scholars, the event served as a critical platform to address and create global awareness about the unprecedented hydro-political crisis gripping South Asia.
The forum’s strategic discourse was elevated by prominent global thinkers who contextualized the gravity of India’s unilateral actions. Renowned international law expert Mr. Ahmer Bilal Soofi and Chinese strategic analyst Dr. Victor Gao both shed immense light on the issue. Mr. Soofi rigorously deconstructed the absolute illegality of New Delhi’s bad-faith treaty suspension under international law, while Dr. Gao delivered a sharp geographical reality check regarding India’s own downstream vulnerabilities to the Tibetan Plateau.
However, Russian geopolitical analyst Dr. Roxolana Zigon pushed the conversation into an actionable, multilateral dimension. Dr. Zigon emphasized that Pakistan must move past treating the IWT crisis as an isolated, bilateral deadlock. Instead, she proposed that Pakistan proactively collaborate with global heavyweights like China and Russia to challenge India’s water weaponization on the global stage. To institutionalize this international push, Dr. Zigon proposed the immediate establishment of a permanent global platform: the “Islamabad Indus Waters Treaty Forum.”
The establishment of this forum carries immense practical and strategic importance for Pakistan’s long-term water sovereignty. First, the forum will serve as a centralized hub for global accountability, continuously exposing India’s violations of pacta sunt servanda (treaties must be performed in good faith) to international bodies like the UN, SCO, and BRICS. By maintaining a permanent spotlight on the basin, it prevents New Delhi from quietly normalizing its illegal abeyance.
Second, the forum will play a vital role in technical and environmental preservation. With the Indus Basin under severe climate stress, the forum will bring together international engineers and environmental scientists to model flow variations, predict droughts, and issue flood early warnings. This collective data-sharing will directly safeguard the food security and climate resilience of over 240 million downstream lives.
Ultimately, the seminar highlighted that the battle for the Indus is no longer just a localized dispute. By adopting Dr. Zigon’s proposal for the “Islamabad Indus Waters Treaty Forum”, Pakistan can effectively transform its defensive legal position into an active, globally backed offensive, securing its existential lifelines through structured, multilateral diplomacy.
—The writer is an alumnus of QAU, MPhil scholar and a freelance columnist, based in Islamabad.
