Under Article VIII of the Indus Waters Treaty, each country must appoint a Permanent Indus Commissioner, one Indian and one Pakistani, who together form the Permanent Indus Commission.
The Article makes them the treaty’s living voice, the officials empowered to exchange data, inspect the works, raise objections and try to settle every question the river throws up before it ever reaches a court. For more than sixty years, these two men have sat across from each other and argued the fine print, the cusecs and the pondage, the spillway gates and the design heights, each guarding his country’s share word by careful word.
But there is a third commissioner at the table now – and it is climate change. No article created it. No government appointed it, and no court can overrule it. It attends no meetings and honours no awards. It simply redraws the river while the other two quarrel over a text drafted when the Himalaya was still frozen solid.
That is the truth beneath Pakistan’s water crisis. The country is arguing over a hydrology that has already moved on. The treaty does not contain the word climate even once. It was written for a watershed that has since lost roughly a quarter of its permanent ice, and that loss is not a distant projection but a lived, violent reality. Above Pakistan sit nearly 13,000 glaciers across the Karakoram, the Himalaya and the Hindu Kush, and a warming atmosphere is doing something almost cruel to them. It melts them faster, drowning the country now, while draining the reserve it will depend on later. Pakistan saw it in 2022 and again in 2025. The same ice that floods the country this decade is the water it will not have in the next.
If that were the whole story, it would be a catastrophe enough. It is not. Because the river does not only answer to the climate. Upstream, it answers to India, and India has learned that it need not shut the Indus off to hurt Pakistan. It need only play with the timing. Consider the Chenab. In May last year, its flow at Marala was choked down from about 77,000 cusecs to barely 1,500, with no drought to explain the collapse. Farmers were left staring at a dry bed at the very moment their fields cried out for water.
Then came the opposite. In recent days, that same river has surged back above 70,000 cusecs and begun tearing away farmland in Sialkot’s Bajwat belt, some 500 metres of ground gone, families watching their land, and then their homes, slide into the water. Monsoon rain is part of the picture, and honesty demands as much. But the people living on that bank point squarely at sudden releases from reservoirs upstream, across the border.
This is the rhythm Pakistanis are now asked to live by, parched one month, drowning the next and never on their own schedule. It is what makes water such a perfect weapon. When a country sits downstream of a hostile neighbour who controls both the tap and the clock, it is vulnerable twiceL first to the thirst, then to the flood. Intent need not even be proven. Uncertainty alone, the not knowing whether the next surge is weather or decision, is enough to keep a nation of 240 million permanently off balance. You do not need to fire a shot to starve a harvest. You need only be the one upstream.
Delhi has made its posture plain. In April last year, it declared the IWT in abeyance, a word worth pausing on, because the treaty has no pause button and no exit door. It was written to be permanent. And on the law, Pakistan is not losing; it is winning, repeatedly. The treaty’s Court of Arbitration has ruled against India’s position at every turn. There are two binding awards on the substance, one confirming that the western rivers must flow for Pakistan’s unrestricted use, another affirming real limits on how much water India may hold back and, before them, earlier rulings that the court had jurisdiction, and that no party may unilaterally suspend the treaty.
India’s answer has been to call the court illegitimate and refuse to appear. This exposes the hard limit of international law in a single sentence. A court can hand you the verdict, but it cannot hand you the water. Winning the legal argument and controlling the river are entirely different things, and it is the second that decides whether a harvest lives or dies. Nor should anyone expect the pressure to ease. India is walking into its own water emergency, the world’s largest extractor of groundwater, its farm belt sinking its water table by up to two feet a year, a third of the glaciers feeding its rivers possibly gone by century’s end.
History’s lesson about upstream states is unkind. As they run dry, they do not grow more generous with a shared river; they tighten their grip on it. A frightened, thirsty upper riparian is more dangerous to those below, not less. As India’s own crisis deepens, its scarcity and its hostility are likely to rise together.
And yet, and this is the part the country least likes to hear, not all of Pakistan’s wounds are inflicted from outside. Pakistan can store barely 30 days of water, while the responsible benchmark is 120. In a single monsoon, the country lets well over ten million acre-feet of freshwater pour into the sea, more than it can store nationwide. Agriculture consumes over 90 per cent of Pakistan’s water and still floods fields the old way, losing more than half of it before it reaches the roots. The country has already crossed below the line at which a state is judged water-scarce. Pakistan is wronged, yes. But it is also wasteful, and only one of those is within its power to fix.
So what is to be done, caught as the country is between a melting mountain and a manipulating neighbour? Pakistan must fight on several fronts at once, because no single one suffices. It must take the legal argument global. The International Court of Justice held last year that every state owes a duty not to cause serious climate harm across borders, and that the largest emitters may no longer shelter behind the word ‘developing’, the firmest ground a country with under one per cent of global emissions has ever stood on.
Pakistan must put its own house in order, building storage, pricing groundwater before the aquifers collapse, ending the ruin of flood irrigation and turning at last to desalination and recycling. It must stop treating water, climate and displacement as three files in three ministries when they are one emergency wearing three coats and build, finally, a legal home for those its own law renders invisible, the family displaced by salt or a dead karez, who is neither refugee nor recognised.
And Pakistan must drag the treaty itself into this century. That means reviving the Indus commission around live data rather than paper letters, because a single glacial lake outburst can move millions of cubic metres within hours, and accepting that the delta’s slow death and the basin’s exhausted groundwater are shared liabilities across a system that feeds three hundred million people on both sides of a hostile border, not merely points to score.
The two commissioners will go on arguing about 1960. But the river has already moved on. Until the third presence at that table is recognised, the one melting the mountains and skewing the flows, the country will keep negotiating over a river that no longer exists. Pakistan did not light this fire. But whether it puts it out is, at last, in its own hands.
The writer is an environmentalist.
