Zahid Shakoor Ch
EVERY Pakistani child learns one truth before almost any other. Our rivers are our life.
The Indus, the mighty Sindh, is not just water flowing to the sea. It is the farmer’s hope, the mother’s kitchen, the poet’s song, and the green in our fields. So when India announced in April 2025 that it would hold the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance, it did not feel to us like a diplomatic move. It felt like a hand reaching for our throat. Let me tell the story simply, with its history, so the world can judge for itself. In 1960, after nine long years of patient negotiation, India and Pakistan signed the Indus Waters Treaty in Karachi. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru signed for India, President Ayub Khan for Pakistan, and the World Bank stood as broker and witness. The idea was simple and, in spirit, fair. It divided the six rivers of the Indus basin. India received the three eastern rivers, the Ravi, the Beas and the Sutlej. Pakistan received the three western rivers, the Indus, the Jhelum and the Chenab.
Because Pakistan sits downstream, the treaty was written to protect us from one clear fear. That India, sitting upstream, might one day choke our water in a moment of anger. For sixty five years the treaty did its quiet work. It survived three wars. It survived the darkest hours between our two nations. Around the world, experts came to call it one of the most successful water agreements in human history, two rivals sharing one river system in peace. That is the treaty India has now tried to tear.
Let me be fair about India’s stated reason. On 22 April 2025 a terrible attack in Pahalgam, in Indian administered Kashmir, killed 26 people. It was a tragedy, and Pakistan condemned the killing of innocents, for we have buried too many of our own to cheer anyone’s grief. New Delhi says it acted out of security and sorrow. But sorrow is not proof. India blamed Pakistan without evidence, and the very next day announced it would suspend the treaty. Its leaders reached for a cold slogan, that blood and water cannot flow together. India’s own Home Minister declared that Pakistan would never get the treaty back, and would be starved of water.
Think carefully about what those words mean. The water of the Indus feeds around 240 million people. Roughly 80 percent of Pakistan’s water, and most of our farming, depend on these rivers. To threaten that water is not to punish a government. It is to punish children, farmers, and the unborn crops of an entire nation. That is collective punishment, and there is an honest word for it. Aggression.
India has already stopped sharing river data with us, the very flood warnings that save lives in the monsoon season. It has begun flushing and refilling reservoirs at dams such as Baglihar and Salal without informing us, exactly as the treaty forbids. India may not yet own the dams to halt our rivers entirely. But the intention has now been spoken aloud, and an intention, once revealed, cannot be unseen.
Here is what gives me hope, and here is where I want the world to look closely. Pakistan did not answer anger with anger. Pakistan did not march to war. Pakistan walked to the law. The Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague examined India’s move. In 2025, and again in 2026, the court ruled clearly that no country may suspend this treaty on its own, and that the court keeps full authority over the disputes. India’s response was to call the world court illegal and walk away.
International law rests on an old and simple principle called pacta sunt servanda, which means that agreements must be kept. It is written into the Vienna Convention that governs all treaties. The word abeyance that India invented has no standing in international law at all. A country cannot sign a solemn promise, enjoy its benefits for sixty five years, and then throw it away the moment it grows angry. If a treaty can be broken like this, then no treaty anywhere is safe, and smaller neighbours such as Bangladesh and Nepal are right to watch with new worry.
And this is not only Pakistan speaking for itself. Recently, in Islamabad, scholars, diplomats, legal minds and water experts from many countries gathered for an international seminar on the treaty as an instrument of peace and regional stability. Their verdict was calm and united. The Indus Waters Treaty is one of the most enduring water sharing agreements the world has ever built, a model of cooperation founded on law and honest dialogue, and any attempt by one side alone to suspend it or hold it in abeyance strikes at the very foundation of international agreements. They warned that when the sanctity of treaties is weakened, the harm does not stay inside South Asia. It shakes the confidence of every nation, large and small, that has ever trusted the rule of law over the rule of force.
There is also a new reason this treaty matters more today than it did in 1960. Our glaciers are melting, our seasons are turning strange, and floods and droughts now arrive with a cruelty we have never known. In such a world, the honest sharing of river data and the calm management of shared waters are not luxuries. They are the difference between a warning and a drowning, between a harvest and a hunger. To cut a downstream nation off from that cooperation in the very age of climate change is not strength. It is recklessness dressed up as power, and the whole world has a stake in stopping it.
There is also a fact of geography that India would prefer the world to forget. The Indus does not begin in India. It is born high in Tibet, inside China, near the holy Mount Kailash, and so is the Sutlej. The water flows from China, through India, and only then reaches Pakistan. This makes China, not India, the true uppermost neighbour of these rivers. China has stood with Pakistan as, in its own words, an ironclad and all weather friend, and it moved to speed up the Mohmand Dam so that we may store and secure our own water. I do not say this as a threat. I say it as a plain truth. Rivers do not obey borders drawn by armies. If water is ever turned into a weapon, that weapon can point in more than one direction, and the only sane path is the one the treaty always stood for, cooperation and not coercion.
Let me also be honest about who we choose to be in this moment. Pakistan has not walked away from the treaty. Pakistan has stood inside it. We remain committed to every legal, institutional and diplomatic path the treaty and international law provide. We ask for dialogue, for arbitration, for good faith, for the quiet machinery of dispute resolution that has served both nations for two generations. That is not weakness. In a nuclear neighbourhood, patience under provocation is its own kind of courage, and history remembers which side kept its word.
I write this as a son of this soil. I have seen our farmers raise their hands to the sky and pray for water, and thank Allah when it comes. I have watched the Indus turn dry earth into golden wheat. Water is not politics for us. It is survival, dignity and faith.
So I ask the world plainly, do not look away. The Indus Waters Treaty is not India’s property to cancel. It is a promise witnessed by the world, upheld by the world’s own court, defended by scholars across many nations, and relied upon by hundreds of millions of innocent people. Let the World Bank, the United Nations, and every country that believes in law say clearly that no nation may starve its neighbour of water.
Pakistan wants peace. Pakistan chose the law. Pakistan wants its rivers. And, by the grace of God, Pakistan will protect all three.
