By: Fazli Haq
For 65 years, the Indus Waters Treaty stood as one of the rare success stories of India-Pakistan diplomacy, a functioning agreement that survived three wars and decades of hostility between two nuclear armed neighbors. That record ended on 23 April 2025, when India placed the treaty in abeyance following a terrorist attack in Pahalgam that killed 26 civilians, an attack India attributed to Pakistan and Pakistan denied any role in. What has followed is not a paper dispute. It is the slow unravelling of the single mechanism that has kept water, the most basic resource for nearly 300 million people, out of the theater of open conflict.
The stakes are difficult to overstate. 9 in every 10 Pakistanis live within the Indus Basin. Its rivers irrigate more than 90% of the country’s crops and generate the majority of its hydroelectric power. All 21 of Pakistan’s hydroelectric plants sit within the basin. Analysts have noted that India does not even need to cut off flows entirely to inflict serious damage. Manipulating the timing of releases from dams on the western rivers could flood Pakistani farmland during planting season, while withholding water during critical irrigation windows could devastate an entire harvest. Pakistan has already written to India twice in 2025 and once in May 2026 over what it describes as abnormal, abrupt flow variations on the Chenab River.
India’s position has hardened rather than softened with time. Its foreign ministry has stated the treaty will remain suspended until Pakistan credibly and irreversibly ends what New Delhi calls cross border terrorism, and its water resources minister has said publicly that Pakistan will not receive a single drop of water from the Indus system in the years ahead. Indian officials have also pointed to changed circumstances since 1960, including climate change, demographic growth and advances in water management technology, as reasons the treaty’s original terms no longer reflect present realities. Pakistan, for its part, argues that the treaty contains no provision allowing unilateral suspension, a position that found some support when the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled in June 2025 that the treaty does not permit unilateral abeyance and reaffirmed its own jurisdiction over the dispute, a ruling India has rejected and refuses to recognize.
The rhetoric on both sides has moved well beyond technical language. Pakistan’s defence minister has stated that any threat to the country’s water security would be treated as grounds for war. Senior Pakistani military and political figures have separately warned that dams built without agreement could be met with force. These are not the words of a dispute confined to commissions and tribunals. They are the vocabulary of a conflict that has already crossed from the diplomatic register into the language of national security.
Climate change did not create this crisis, but it has made it far less survivable. The Indus system depends heavily on glacial melt from the Karakoram, Himalaya and Hindukush ranges, the largest concentration of ice outside the polar regions, and that melt is accelerating as global temperatures rise. In the near term this increases river flow, but it also front loads water availability into a shorter, more erratic window and threatens a longer term decline as the glaciers themselves diminish. Layered on top of this is a monsoon system growing more volatile by the year, swinging between drought and flood within the same decade, as the 2022 floods and successive dry spells have demonstrated.
This is precisely why the dispute belongs in international security and diplomacy conversations, not only bilateral ones. A transboundary river shared by two nuclear armed states, now stripped of its primary governance mechanism, sits at the intersection of climate stress and strategic rivalry in a way few other flashpoints in the world do. Research institutions studying the standoff have noted that unilateral action by either side is less efficient and more costly than cooperative management. Yet the trust required to sustain any cooperative framework is eroding precisely as the physical pressures on the shared resource intensify.
The Indus Waters Treaty was never a perfect instrument. But its core achievement was narrow and vital: it kept water out of the war calculus for over six decades even as every other dimension of the India Pakistan relationship deteriorated. Its abeyance removes that guardrail at precisely the moment climate change is adding volatility to the very system the treaty was built to manage.
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