Weaponising Indus waters against Pakistan: A war by other means

India Today

15-05-2025

(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated October 10, 2016)In 1990, a Pakistan army brigadier listed three reasons for his country's enduring conflict with India: hatred, Kashmir and water. The hatred was visceral, he noted in his thesis at the prestigious Royal College of Defence Studies in London. The second and third reasons were linked. Pakistan, he reasoned, needed to control Jammu and Kashmir not just for territory but because of the country's water that flowed through it. The officer was General Pervez Musharraf.advertisementIn December 2001, within a week of a sensational attack on Parliament carried out by Pakistan-based terrorists, Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee considered options to make Pakistan pay for its perfidy. The Indian army was mobilised along the border and one of the other punitive measures studied was the Indus Water Treaty of 1960 (IWT). "Officials were called in, presentations made and scenarios drawn up, but in the end, nothing came of it. It lapsed as soon as the military deployment was called off," says one expert who was part of the process.The Modi government has not ruled out a military response to the September 17 attack on an army camp in Uri in which 18 soldiers were killed. The IWT is also on the table but in quite an unprecedented way. On September 26, Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired a review meeting on the Indus Water Treaty at his 7 Lok Kalyan Marg residence.advertisement"Blood and water cannot flow simultaneously," Prime Minister Modi said at the meeting. The government also decided to expedite construction of the Pakul Dul dam, Sawalkot dam and Bursar dam, all located on the river Chenab in Himachal Pradesh.Re-examining the treaty is one of a raft of options being explored by the government to pressurise Pakistan for the September 17 attack on an army camp in Uri where 18 soldiers were killed. The IWT review took place hours before foreign minister Sushma Swaraj attacked Pakistan in the UN General Assembly in New York for its complicity in cross-border terrorism.It was also a day before the MEA announced that PM Modi would not be going to Islamabad for the SAARC summit in November. A review of the Most Favored Nation (MFN) status granted to Pakistan in 1996 is also on the cards. But it is the proposed review of the 66-year-old IWT, that is causing acute consternation within Pakistan."Between the two countries, revocation of the treaty is an act of war," Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's foreign policy advisor Sartaj Aziz said in a September 26 briefing to the National Assembly. Revoking the treaty could harm India's standing at a time when it is trying to build a global consensus to isolate Pakistan over its state sponsorship of terrorism. What New Delhi seems to be contemplating, however, are ways to fully utilise its award of waters and thereby hold out a threat of reduced water flow into Pakistan.advertisementThe 1960 Indus Water Treaty split six rivers between the two countries-the 'eastern rivers' Ravi, Beas and Sutlej to India and the 'western rivers' Indus, Jhelum and Chenab to Pakistan. India is allowed to draw 3.6 million acre feet from the three western rivers flowing into Pakistan, which it has never utilised because of inadequate storage capacity."Water is the only tool of leverage India has over Pakistan," says Brahma Chellaney of the Centre for Policy Research, who authored a paper for the Vajpayee-led government on IWT options. "We are only talking of India reasserting its basic rights for the development of states like J&K, which doesn't have sovereignty over its own water resources."Water is an extremely sensitive topic in Pakistan. It is one of the reasons they have consistently objected to almost every project undertaken by India. "They are a one-river nation. If you stop the Indus, there is nothing there," says a former bureaucrat.advertisement"If you try to stop the waters of Pakistan, you will escalate the conflict to a very serious level," General Musharraf said, warning of 'nuclear war' in an interview to India Today television on September 27.Pakistan is finding even the existing award of nearly 80 per cent of the Indus waters insufficient. On March 8 this year, Pakistan's upper house, the Senate, passed a resolution urging the government to review the IWT by inserting new provisions enabling Pakistan to get more water. A minor reduction in the supply of water to Pakistan could have catastrophic effects on the agriculture-dependent country.Water paranoia has caused it to repeatedly challenge even 'run of the river' dams allowed by the IWT and built by India. In the last such verdict in January 2014, the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague arbitrated in India's favor on the issue of the Kishanganga hydroelectric power project near Bandipore in J&K."Our diplomatic initiative is to separate the people of Pakistan from jehadi elements. Stopping water could prove counter-productive because it will actually fan anti-India sentiment within Pakistan," says Uttam Kumar Sinha of the defence ministry-run think-tank, the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA).advertisementTHE HYDROLOGICAL CHALLENGEIf the government is to make good on its promise of creating massive storage facilities to store its share of the Indus river, it will need to create roughly the equivalent of one-third of India's largest reservoir, the Indirasagar on the Narmada (9.8 lakh acre feet). This promises to be an uphill task going by the glacial pace of big dam construction in India, the huge costs involved and the displacement of people. Experts say it will be at least a decade before solutions like the completion of the three dams on Chenab bear fruit.Agricultural economist Sucha Singh Gill from the Chandigarh-based Centre for Research in Rural & Industrial Development (CRRID) says the government's announcement has the makings of a 'mega misadventure' and 'grandstanding'. "India has neither the capacity to divert nor store the waters of the Indus river system. Developing capacities to regulate river flows needs years."It's one of the reasons why former Punjab CM Captain Amarinder Singh believes the NDA's move on the IWT is deflection. "(It) is an evident and desperate attempt to draw public attention away from the Uri terror attack. What is being contemplated would be hugely detrimental to India. Barring water-scarcity during the winter harvest, it would be suicidal for India to block the natural flow of the rivers into Pakistan. Without the requisite infrastructure, we would end up flooding our own hinterland," he says.advertisementThe most doable measure in the short run is the Tulbul Navigation Project, which the government has resolved to speed up. The project, called Wullar Barrage by Pakistan, was put on hold after objections in 1987. The project aimed at increasing water levels in the Jhelum river to allow for round-the-year navigation between Anantnag, Srinagar and Baramulla. A decision to restart it was taken in 2009 but the file remained stuck at the Prime Minister's Office.Water experts doubt the current measures will work. Himanshu Thakkar, convenor SANDRP (South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers & People), Delhi, equates the government's dam-building tool with punishing Pakistan by "cutting your nose to spite your face in Kashmir, which is already bleeding away". But ex-water resources secretary Dhruv Vijai Singh says, "It's a step in the right direction but the water should be utilised for the benefit of the people and not as a political tool."Wahid Para, PDP spokesman in Srinagar, seems to sense an opportunity in Modi's implicit plan to make Pakistan pay by regulating riverine flows. Para echoes the long-standing discourse of mainstream political parties in the Valley-that "Kashmiris have suffered the worst damage in the IWT between India and Pakistan. Pakistan has always cited Kashmir as a disputed territory, yet it signed the IWT which involved rivers flowing out of the state!" Clearly, a case where Pakistan kept its own interests at heart over that of Kashmir's.Subscribe to India Today MagazineMust Watch