A watershed for the Indus treaty

The old, dated agreement is dead. Any new arrangement will need to factor in the new reality

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India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) immediately after the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22 that claimed 26 civilian lives.

Though Operation Sindoor, which followed soon, has been paused, there has been no rethink on revoking the 1960 treaty that apportioned the water in six of the rivers that area part of the Indus river system and flow through Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) and Ladakh to India and Pakistan. That's unlikely to change now.

A series of ground reports in HT reveal that the treaty has become dated: The impact of the climate crisis in J&K and Ladakh, evident in the scorching summer and falling rainfall in the region, has exposed the limitations of the data used to decide water allocations. Which is why J&K chief minister Omar Abdullah, in the wake of the suspension of the treaty, described IWT as “the most unfair document imposed on the people” of the region. The groundswell in J&K is against any revival of IWT and for better use of the rivers for the region. Pahalgam was only the final push against a treaty that experts for long had argued against.