Rivers of Rupture & Reunion

In Trial by Water, Uttam Kumar Sinha masterfully navigates the turbulent confluence of geopolitics, history, and hydrology, exposing how rivers in the Indus basin have shaped the fraught legacy of India-Pakistan relations

- SANJEEV CHOPRA

Uttam Kumar Sinha's scholarly treatise Trial by Water: Indus Basin and India-Pakistan Relations could not have come at a more opportune time. Two days after the bloodshed in picturesque Pahalgam—when Pakistan-sponsored terrorists killed 26 tourists on July 22—Debashree Mukherjee, Secretary of the Water Resources (Jal Shakti) Ministry, informed her Pakistani counterpart, Syed Murtaza, of India's decision to keep the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) of 1960 in abeyance with immediate effect. A year earlier, in August 2024, India had issued a formal notice to Pakistan under Article XII (3) seeking a review of the Treaty signed on September 19, 1960, between the democratically elected prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the Chief Marshal Law Administrator of Pakistan, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, at the then-capital of Pakistan in Karachi.

CRESCAT E FLUVIIS

Brokered by the World Bank, this agreement was the result of contentious negotiations, exceeding those of Radcliffe's boundary division. There were three key differences. First, Mountbatten was in complete control. Second, Radcliffe had a deadline—August 15—and, thirdly, the census data of 1941 was a general indicator for assigning Muslim majority districts to Pakistan and the Hindu-Sikh majority districts to India.

Assigning rivers and canals was far more complex. The Indus basin, with its extensive network of 13 canals and 19 headworks, irrigated a total of 36.5 million acres as the largest contiguous integrated irrigation system on a single river. No wonder then that the motto of the British Punjab was the Latin expression Crescat e Fluviis—“Let it grow from the rivers.” And as Sinha tells us, the irrigation network of canals could girdle the circumference of the earth twice over, thereby making Punjab the granary of the Empire and its most prosperous province.