The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 has kept two nuclear-armed rivals – India and Pakistan – in a stable river sharing arrangement for more than six decades. Yet that significant achievement now seems to be at risk.
India’s government has stated it is holding the treaty in abeyance and is threatening to cut off water to Pakistan after a terrorist attack killed more than 20 Indian citizens in late April 2025. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi described the treaty as a “blunder” and a “betrayal” of India’s dignity committed by then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and proclaimed that “blood and water cannot flow together.”
The 1960 agreement includes no provisions for abeyance or suspension. Regardless, India is threatening to forgo the treaty and keep the Indus’ water for itself. But is that even feasible?
The answer can be found not only in the history that Modi would like to discard, but also in a new study of conditions on the ground that show such threats are nearly impossible to fulfill.
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Foundations in America’s Big River Expertise
In the post-WWII reconstruction period of the early 1950s, American foreign policymakers sought to transform Asia’s “poverty-stricken river valleys into wonderlands of vegetation and power.” As Arthur M. Schlesinger observed in his 1949 classic, The Vital Center, they saw the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) as a river development model that could “outbid all the social ruthlessness of the Communists for the support of the people of Asia.”
Newly independent India and Pakistan were in a bitter dispute over the Indus River and its tributaries in the era. As A.A. Michel noted in his 1967 book, The Indus Rivers: A Study on the Effects of Partition, Pakistan feared that India, as the more powerful upper riparian, would stop vital water flowing into Pakistan.
Researcher A.H. Alvi, writing in 1962, quoted David Lilienthal, the former head of the TVA and the catalyst behind the treaty, as contending that India and Pakistan could co-manage the basin and that its “worthless, unirrigated land would, with water, become immensely productive and valuable.”
Making India and Pakistan Water Powerhouses
Whether residents of the region considered their land worthless is debatable. Seventy-five years later, however, visions of an oasis in the desert have largely come to pass. Pakistan is now home to the largest contiguous irrigation system in the world, while India ranks among the top 10 hydropower producers.
This success is due in part to the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960. While what the agreement created was hardly the co-managed TVA-style structure that Lilienthal envisioned, it won support by dividing the Indus and granting the three western branches to Pakistan and the three eastern to India.
Central to the treaty’s signing was a financing agreement to build the infrastructure that would facilitate the division. A coalition of countries and the World Bank funded large dams and water works in both India and Pakistan to store and convey water.
Moreover, India agreed to constrain its dams on reaches of Pakistan’s rivers that flowed through Indian-held Kashmir, which is one of the most contested regions on the planet. These dams would be restricted to run-of-river hydropower projects boasting a small storage capacity that would release all water to its downstream neighbor. In so doing, India would limit any ability to close off water, which was Pakistan’s biggest worry.
Can India Really Cut Off Pakistan’s Water?
Pakistan’s greatest worry is back in the news. After India blamed Pakistan for the April attacks on its citizens, the resulting anger escalated into a military conflict in May 2025.
And though the guns have fallen silent for the moment, India has stated its intent never to restore its participation in the treaty, as well as promising to cut off all Indus water flowing into Pakistani territory.
India’s public statements are undoubtedly a blow, especially considering the fact that the treaty has survived much more heated and sustained conflict over past decades. But a Global Water Security Center project team found that India’s threats may amount to little more than aggressive posturing.
Pakistan is particularly vulnerable in its agriculturally productive Punjab region, just downstream of India’s dams on Kashmiri rivers. India backed up its threats to cut off water by carrying out sediment flushing and refilling procedures early in the conflict, which left Pakistan’s irrigation canals in Punjab dwindling.
The analysis by GWSC found that these dams would likely refill in 10 days to 3 weeks, however. Engineers would then need to release water to prevent any damage. Limited water during these filling periods would cause some hardship to farmers downstream, but threats that no water will ever again reach Pakistan are overblown.
Essentially, this is the failsafe written into the agreement. The dams that India could build within the Indus Waters Treaty lack the capacity to cut off all water to Pakistan. Building the infrastructure needed to carry out such a threat would require years of work and billions in investments in difficult and contested terrain.
If India does walk away from the treaty, the constraints placed on its ability to build dams large enough to keep the Indus’ water to itself have prevented this upper riparian from taking immediate, drastic unilateral action against its downstream neighbor.
Raindrops in Pakistan Dampen India’s Plans
Geography may further blunt India’s sabre rattling. Though Pakistan does not control all of the territory through which the Indus flows, much of the basin’s rainfall occurs within its borders. The GWSC study found that in the catchments upstream of its two largest dams, Pakistan receives about 60% of the total rainfall. China and India divide the remaining rainfall upstream of Pakistan’s largest dam, the Tarbela, which lands in the headwaters of the Indus itself. Afghanistan receives the remaining 40% of rainfall that drains into the Chashma Dam.
Thus, even if India were to build large dams within its borders, this new infrastructure would give its government no say over the rain that falls outside them.
Pakistan’s immediate-term concerns are understandable, however. A year of dry conditions has only recently been broken by heavy rainfall. Fights over water between Punjab and Sindh provinces are ongoing. And a collapsed Indus Waters Treaty is hardly an event to be welcomed.
Yet the foundations of agreement remain durable, even if history and diplomacy face challenges. At the very least, the treaty has limited India’s water threats to words and the occasional dry spell as these long-hostile neighbors decide how to proceed from here.
This article was originally published on newsecuritybeat.org
