On 23 April 2025, one day after the Pahalgam attack killed 26 civilians in Indian illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIoJK), India announced that the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 would be held in abeyance with immediate effect. Sixty-five years of water-sharing arrangements, arrangements that had survived three wars, multiple military crises and sustained bilateral hostility, were suspended by a single diplomatic declaration. Home Minister Amit Shah stated the treaty would never be restored and that water would be diverted for Indian use. Pakistan called it an act of war. The Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled that the treaty remains legally binding regardless. India rejected the ruling and boycotted subsequent proceedings.

What followed was not merely a diplomatic dispute. It was the deliberate deployment of water as a weapon against 300 million people downstream who had no part in the attack that triggered it.

The Indus Waters Treaty’s vulnerability to this kind of coercion is rooted in geography that its 1960 architects never fully resolved. The three western rivers allocated to Pakistan under the treaty, the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab, all flow through IIoJK before crossing into Pakistan. The headwaters of 80 percent of Pakistan’s irrigated agriculture originate in or pass through a disputed territory under Indian military administration. Every hydropower project India has constructed in IIoJK on these rivers is simultaneously an electricity asset and a strategic lever.

That lever has been built systematically. The Kishanganga project on the Jhelum tributary delivers 330 megawatts and diverts water under a design the Permanent Court of Arbitration only approved subject to mandatory minimum downstream flows of 9 cubic metres per second. The Baglihar dam on the Chenab delivers 900 megawatts across two stages. The Ratle project, 850 megawatts, remains under construction and under active arbitration. Pakal Dul at 1,000 megawatts and Sawalkot at 800 megawatts are advancing. Each project adds to India’s capacity to modulate, reduce or time the flows that reach Pakistan. None of this infrastructure was built in a geopolitical vacuum. India is the upper riparian state. IIoJK is where the upper riparian infrastructure sits.

The treaty contains no unilateral suspension clause. Article XII requires mutual agreement for any modification or termination. India’s declaration of abeyance has no basis in the treaty it claims to be suspending. The Permanent Court of Arbitration said so explicitly. India dismissed the ruling as illegal and continued.

Within weeks of the suspension, the consequences became measurable. Dam maintenance and flushing operations at Indian projects on the Chenab in May 2025 caused flow levels at downstream Pakistani gauging stations to fall by approximately 90 percent. Pakistani agricultural authorities warned of immediate threats to standing crops across Punjab and Sindh. Analysts projected yield losses and rising food costs. These were not projections about a distant future. They were observations about fields already planted, crops already growing, and farmers already dependent on water that had stopped arriving.

Simultaneously, India halted the hydrological data-sharing obligations it had observed for six decades. Flow data, reservoir levels and critically, flood warnings, are no longer being transmitted to Pakistani water management authorities. In a basin where 40 percent of river flow originates from Himalayan glaciers that are losing mass at double the rate recorded before 2000, and where glacial lake outburst floods represent an increasing and unpredictable risk, the absence of upstream data is not an administrative inconvenience. It is a threat to civilian life in every downstream flood plain.

India frames its suspension as a legitimate security response to cross-border terrorism. Examine it against the legal record and the argument fails. The treaty provides a three-tier dispute resolution mechanism precisely for moments of bilateral tension: the Permanent Indus Commission, a Neutral Expert, and the Court of Arbitration. India has used these mechanisms before, and prevailed before them before. Choosing instead to declare the treaty in abeyance is not a security measure. It is a decision that the mechanisms of international law no longer apply when India finds them inconvenient.

The civilians absorbing the consequences of that decision did not make it. Pakistan’s farmers, growing wheat and sugarcane on canal-irrigated land fed by the Chenab and Jhelum, have no connection to any militant organisation. The communities in IIoJK living near dam construction sites, whose villages will be submerged by the Bursar and Pakal Dul reservoirs across more than 20 square kilometres of land, have no voice in the infrastructure decisions reshaping their homeland. They are the population at the intersection of a geopolitical dispute, a legal breakdown and a climate crisis, bearing costs they did not incur for choices they did not make.

Water has sustained civilisations. It has also been used to coerce them. The Indus Waters Treaty was built on the recognition that rivers shared between hostile neighbours require law, not leverage. India has replaced law with leverage. The rivers keep flowing. The question is whether the institutions designed to govern them can survive a powerful state that has decided it is above them.

That question will be answered not in diplomatic channels but in the fields of Punjab, in the flood plains of the Jhelum, and in the villages of Kashmir where the rivers that carry the answer run.

The author is a student of International Relations at the International Islamic University, Islamabad. Currently, he is serving as an intern at the Kashmir Institute of International Relations Islamabad.