The crime: India has weaponised water. On 23 April 2025, following the Pahalgam terrorist attack, India unilaterally put in abeyance the Indus Waters Treaty – a treaty that had survived four full-scale wars and sixty-five years of unbroken enmity between two nuclear-armed states.
Then came the threats. “We will ensure that not a single drop of Indus water flows into Pakistan”, said India’s Water Minister Patil in April 2025. “No, [IWT] will never be restored”. said India’s Interior Minister Shah a month later. PM Modi first said in 2016 and has repeated since that “blood and water cannot flow together”. India has acted on its threat. It stopped the flow of water in the Chenab River from Baglihar Dam in May 2025. A senior Indian government official told Indian Express that this was a “punitive action. By doing this, even if the choke is for a short while, we demonstrate that we will take coercive steps… The Chenab river water irrigates Punjab farmlands, and Pakistan needs to realise we mean to punish them on all fronts”.
Choke, punish and coerce is thus India’s policy. Choking rivers. Punishing and coercing 200 million people not for what they did, but for what their government is accused of without any evidence. The Indian home minister declared that India will “never” restore the IWT and that “we will take water that was flowing to Pakistan to Rajasthan by constructing a canal. Pakistan will be starved of water that it has been getting unjustifiably”.
The government of India has declared publicly its intention to starve a neighbouring population of water. Let that sit beside the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which recognises water as a fundamental human right. Let it sit beside the Geneva Conventions. Let it sit beside every principle of civilised international conduct that humanity has built. Pakistan’s legal position is grounded unassailably in international law. The Court of Arbitration at The Hague noted in June 2025 that the treaty does not provide for unilateral abeyance and reaffirmed its jurisdiction. India’s response? It declared the court “illegal” and refused to participate. When a state loses the legal argument and responds by disavowing the court, that state has confessed its own guilt.
The UN Watercourses Convention of 1997 mandates equitable and reasonable utilisation and No Significant Harm. Under Article 62 of the Vienna Convention, political tensions, including terrorism, do not constitute a fundamental change of circumstances that alters the treaty’s water-sharing purpose. The International Court of Justice ruled precisely this in its 1997 Gabcíkovo-Nagymaros judgment on rights to the waters of the Danube River between Hungary and Slovakia.
India’s weaponisation of water could amount to collective punishment under international humanitarian law, prohibited under the Geneva Conventions and, due to the threat of mass starvation, potentially a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute. The case is made. The verdict, under any honest reading of international law, is already written. India stands condemned. Weaponisation of water is a crime beyond laws and treaties. Putting the IWT in abeyance is attacking a living basin of rivers upon which 200 million Pakistanis depend for their lives. These are not abstract statistics. These are farmers in Punjab whose wheat feeds a nation. These are mothers in Sindh whose children drink from channels fed by Himalayan snowmelt. These are fishermen whose entire livelihood is built around the river.
Prof James Scott wrote that rivers, on a long view, are alive: they are born; they change; they shift their channels; they forge new routes to the sea; they move both gradually and violently; they can teem with life; they may die a quasi-natural death; they are frequently maimed and even murdered. The Indus and the Jhelum and the Chenab are alive. India is trying to kill these living beings. ‘Abeyance’ is not a technical matter; it is a murder weapon that transgresses into millions of Pakistani homes and pulls the trigger.
Robert Macfarlane also argues that rivers are alive. He cites the 2017 Te Awa Tupua Act in New Zealand, which recognises that the Whanganui River is not only alive but also a legal person, giving it the same legal standing as a citizen. Prof Macfarlane insists that we stop using the word ‘it’ for rivers because that mode of address reduces them to the status of stuff. The Indus is not stuff. The Chenab is not stuff. The Jhelum is not stuff. The rivers of the Indus basin are not stuff. They are the soul of our soil.
Pakistan calls upon the international community – every state that has signed the UN Charter, every institution that claims to uphold the laws of nations – to act. To hold India accountable and uphold the principle that water cannot be weaponised. That water treaties cannot be dissolved by the stronger party because they wish to choke, punish, and coerce. That 200 million Pakistanis are not bargaining chips.
The Indus has flowed for ten thousand years. It has nurtured the Indus Valley Civilisation – one of the oldest, most sophisticated human societies in history – long before Delhi existed. Professors Scott and Macfarlane understand something that Delhi’s warmongers do not: a river is a living being, not a pipe. You cannot turn it on and off as political theatre demands. There are no ownership titles to rivers, neither in international law nor in nature. The Indus basin rivers do not belong to India. The rivers belong to the millions of lives they sustain. And not just human life. Our understanding of rivers must expand to tributaries, wetlands, floodplains, backwaters, eddies, periodic marshlands and mangroves to the entire assemblage of life forms dependent on the rivers for their existence.
India cannot put any river in abeyance. India cannot hold water hostage. India cannot starve a civilisation into compliance. India cannot wield rivers as weapons. Pakistan has decided that we shall protect our rivers. Pakistan will protect life and civilisation. Our people and their armed forces have defended this soil in four wars. We will fight India’s attempt at hydro-hegemony. We seek peace, but we shall fight this war if imposed on us.
We shall take this fight to international courts and councils, to the court of world opinion, and to the conscience of citizens everywhere – until weaponisation of water is condemned and outlawed, international law is restored and justice flows as freely as the rivers that nurture the Indus civilisation.
Quaid-e-Azam built a nation on this soil. But the rivers wrote, are writing this moment, and will write this soil’s autobiography with their flow. Let them flow.
The writer is a former federal minister for foreign affairs and defence. This is an edited text of a speech delivered at the recent Indus Waters Treaty Conference in Islamabad. He tweets/posts @kdastgirkhan
