India and Pakistan tension escalates with suspension of historic water treaty

INDIA has taken the highly significant step of suspending the 1960 Indus waters treaty, which governs water sharing with Pakistan, as part of its response to the April 22 terrorist attack in Kashmir that killed at least 26 people.

- DANIEL HAINES KATE SULLIVAN DE ESTRADA

India’s foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, said that “the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 will be held in abeyance with immediate effect, until Pakistan credibly and irrevocably abjures its support for cross-border terrorism”.

India holds Pakistan responsible for the attack, and has responded by putting in place several other measures including telling Pakistani nationals to leave the country.

The attack happened in Pahalgam in the part of Kashmir controlled by India. Both India and Pakistan claim the region, which has been the site of several military conflicts since 1947 and a long-running insurgency since the 1990s.

The thorny question of shared rivers —a legacy of the partition of India and Pakistan at independence from British rule in 1947 —is now entangled with the larger, and escalating, dispute between the counties.

A formal letter from India’s water resources ministry cited both “sustained cross border terrorism by Pakistan” and Pakistan’s refusal to renegotiate the terms of the treaty as key reasons for its suspension.

The treaty suspension could harm Pakistani agriculture in the short term, and seriously disrupt downstream irrigation water supplies to farmers. Significantly, the decision abruptly changes the treaty’s status from an agreement that has been largely (if not fully) insulated from the decades-long conflict between India and Pakistan.

The 1960 treaty splits the management of the transnational Indus River basin between the two countries. India gained full rights over the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, three tributaries of the Indus River known collectively as the eastern rivers. Pakistan gained most of the rights over three western rivers — the Indus main stem and two more tributaries, the Jhelum and Chenab.