IWT seminar

It will highlight the rights of all lower riparian states, not just Pakistan

The proposal for a seminar on the Indus Water Treaty was important enough for two ministers, Climate Change Minister Musaddik Masood and Information Minister Ataullah Tarar, to announce it, and though it should be clear that it will uphold Pakistan’s position on the Indus Waters Treaty, Senator Masood brought out the reality that the seminar will serve to uphold the rights of all lower riparian states. After all, it should not be forgotten that the IWT is essentially a codification of the existing international customary law on water rights of upper and lower riparians, and its only real innovation is the provision of a dispute resolution mechanism. The law itself was derived from the customary law derived from the sharing of the Rhine by six countries and the sharing of the Danube by ten. It may be noticed that several countries are both upper and lower riparians at the exit and entry of these rivers into their territories. India itself is a lower riparian with respect to the Brahmaputra, which flows to it from China.

The suspension of the IWT over the 2025 Pehelgam incident shows India’s resentment at the failure of the IWT to allow India to treat the Indus as a river wholly within its own territory, like the Godavari. Though India has not yet developed the technical means of stealing Pakistan’s water (and thus destroying its agriculture), it has shown last monsoon that it can, and would, operate its dams like weapons, worsening the effects of floods by sudden releases, one of the useful things about the IWT was its robust communication mechanism, which allowed Pakistan to receive timely information about Indian hydrology. That mechanism is now also suspended, and last year's experience with embassy-Foreign Office communication was hardly a success.

Pakistan must make other countries realize through this seminar that for its own narrow reasons, India is creating precedents for upper riparians, and that this must be stopped. The most dangerous precedent is that it has suspended a treaty without any exit clause, and is in practice being allowed to get away with it. It is being allowed to rip up settled law on upper and lower riparian relations, and is not even facing the anger of lower riparians. Indeed, it has recently been given special status by the European Union, even though it has a high concentration of lower riparians.