The sole remnant for India of the Pehelgam false flag attack has been the holding in abeyance of the Indus Waters Treaty, but this sole achievement has been truly painful. It is not so much what India can do now, as what it can do in the future that is giving Pakistani policymakers sleepless nights, because holding it in abeyance meant that India thought it had the freedom to construct anything it wanted on the Indus Waters, even if it meant violating any rights of a lower riparian state, in this case Pakistan. By carrying out such projects, India may try to change the ground situation, and claim that the IWT should be revised. It could then carry out further changes while prolonging negotiations, and perhaps shift the focus of the Indo- Pak relationship from Kashmir, as at present, to the IWT.
Perhaps the mistake that India has made is that the Modi government did not realize the centrality of the issue to Pakistan. While the Kashmir issue is dear to Pakistani hearts, it should be remembered that there have been three wars between the countries, but there have also been so many decades of peace. An armed peace, no doubt, but still peace. However, water is a matter of survival. Kashmir is a dispute, but there is no dispute where the Indus waters are involved. It is therefore a prediction more than anything else that PPP chief and former foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who is leading a parliamentary delegation abroad, Addressing the Middle East Institute, a leading think tank, in Washington, said that India was preparing for nuclear war. In Islamabad, addressing a high-level meeting on the issue, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said this was an act of water aggression.
You don’t play around with a peasant’s irrigation water. Both sides of the water are rife with stories of murders committed over water disputes. The disputes would have been over a couple of minutes extra by one peasant, and the murder would typically have been committed with an axe. Here, as Mr Bhutto Zardari warned, the two sides have nuclear weapons. While using them against each other would certainly make the region an unlivable nuclear wasteland, it will plunge the world into a nuclear winter. Is the world willing to pay this price to keep Narendra Modi’s ego massaged?
