Re-reading the water treaty

TWO senior officials, one each from Pakistan and India, have laid their arguments before an international readership. Dr. P.K. Saxena, former Indian Commissioner for Indus Waters, published a two-part indictment of the Indus Waters Treaty in May 2026, now circulating through Indian embassies worldwide. Syed Mehar Ali Shah, Pakistan’s serving commissioner, replied in Dawn on June 16. Both men know the IWT’s text better than most people today. Read together, their exchange is the most technically precise public debate on the Indus since the IWT was signed. It is also, ultimately, a debate between two officials who are both looking backwards. The rivers they are arguing over are not the rivers that existed in 1960.

What India has argued: Saxena’s argument rests on a single, blunt thesis: India negotiated in good faith and paid for it for 65 years. Pakistan delayed acceptance of the 1954 World Bank proposal by four years, developing new uses on the western rivers throughout, and walked away with 80 per cent of the system’s water. India then wrote a cheque for £62 million to finance the infrastructure that made Pakistan’s allocation work. No other upper riparian has surrendered the larger share of a river system and then paid the downstream state to use it.

The operational grievance is just as direct. Every major Indian hydropower project on the western rivers, Baglihar, Kishenganga, Pakal Dul, Tulbul, has faced prolonged Pakistani challenge. Pakistan privately acknowledged flood-moderation benefits of these projects while publicly blocking them, then packaged the obstruction as a water war narrative and marketed it internationally against a state that had not committed a single treaty violation in 65 years, including through three wars. A treaty, Saxena concludes, cannot hold when one party bears all the obligations and the other collects all the benefits. Abeyance is not the wrong decision at the wrong time. It is the only decision the arithmetic permits.

How Pakistan has argued: Shah’s rebuttal sharply legal, rests on one correction applied five times: Saxena starts with known facts and draws the wrong conclusion.

Even as claims are disputed, climate change is disrupting ecosystems and monsoon cycles.

The 80-20 split is real. The inference is false. Pakistan does not control the western rivers before they enter its territory. The IWT exists because in April 1948, India stopped the taps to Pakistan at a critical agricultural moment. The IWT replaced that upstream discretion with a binding legal obligation. Pakistan’s 80pc is not a gift. It is a protected entitlement against the precise threat Saxena’s abeyance position now revives.

Pakistan’s four-year delay was due diligence, not obstruction. Pakistan was abandoning historical dependence on the eastern rivers and needed to know if the western rivers could physically carry the load. A paper allocation that left canals dry would not have been a settlement. Indian financial contribution was not charity either. It was the price India paid to gain unrestricted use of the eastern rivers, while Pakistan bore the cost of rebuilding an entire irrigation system from scratch.

On design restrictions, Shah’s answer is the most direct in the exchange. Upstream states can manipulate downstream flows. Downstream states cannot return the favour. Restrictions on pondage, spillways and storage are not punishments. They are what makes a downstream entitlement physically real.

On obstruction, the August 2025 Award on General Issues and the May 2026 Supplemental Award on Pondage settle the point: treaty constraints come first. A project is not lawful because it suits India. It must conform to what India signed. The Court of Arbitration confirmed Pakistan’s objections were legally grounded, not political.

The weaponisation charge has reversed direction. Chenab flows at Marala swung from 78,276 cusecs to 1,527 in May 2025 with no rainfall to explain it. They fell to 870 cusecs in December. In May 2026, Marala dropped from 21,887 to 5,689 within a single event window. Pakistan wrote to India each time. India then announced the diversion of Chenab into Beas. Pakistan’s fear of weaponisation is no longer hypothetical. It is documented.

The rebuttal wins the legal argument. On every point where Saxena presents a historical claim as a legal conclusion, Shah dismantles the leap, arguing that the IWT is a settlement of competing rights and existential vulnerabilities. The international courts have been saying so consistently since 2023. Winning the legal argument, however, does not automatically win the political argument. The political battle is now moving in international capitals.

Unchartered waters: Both Saxena and Shah are exceptional practitioners of the law as it was written in 1960. That is precisely the challenge. The treaty they are defending or dismantling divides a river system that assumed stable, predictable flows from a Himalayan watershed that has since lost roughly a quarter of its perennial ice cover. The upper Indus Basin is running hotter, faster and less predictably. The articles don’t contain the word ‘climate’ and do not ask what happens to the arithmetic when the resource itself is structurally changing. It is the claims that are being disputed even as climate change disrupts ecosystems and monsoon cycles.

What they should be talking about: What they should be talking about is climate-proofing the treaty and it starts with a different premise: the Indus Basin is a shared ecological system on which the food security of roughly 300 million people on both sides of the border depends, and it is under physical stress that no treaty revision, no arbitral award and no abeyance declaration can address unilaterally.

Three conversations are overdue: resuscitating the Permanent Indus Commission with real-time data, not paper exchanges, because a single glacial outburst flood moves billions of cubic metres within hours; recognising that the 1960 design constraints were built for a Himalayan environment that no longer exists; accepting that the delta depletion, groundwater exhaustion and sediment loss accumulating across the basin are shared liabilities, not bilateral grievances.

Climate change is the third commissioner. It attends no meetings, files no objections and honours no awards. It is, however, already rewriting the treaty. The only question is whether the two parties act before it finishes.

The writer is a climate expert.

Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2026