At the heart of the recent war scare between Pakistan and India is not merely the Pehelgam massacre. India merely used that as an excuse for announcing a suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty. The whole world failed to see the connection between seeking retribution for an act of terror and holding an entire nation’s water supply hostage. At last, the head of the World Bank, which is a party to the IWT, Ajay Banga, has spoken on the issue, saying that there is no provision for the treaty to be suspended, unless Pakistan and India agree on a treaty. Mr Banga’s statement is especially important because the World Bank is a party to the IWT, in the sense that it has a role to play in arbitration proceedings if the two countries disagree.
Mr Banga is President till 2028, and could have been expected to take the Indian view, being the son of an Indian Army lieutenant-general. However, the IWT is seen as one of the World Bank’s successes, and he had to stick with the corporate view, which coincides with Pakistan’s. Actually, the IWT did not really break any new ground, and merely put into words the international customary law on the sharing of the waters between an upper riparian state and a lower riparian. It is symptomatic of the relationship between the two neighbours that it not only had to be put into a treaty, but that an arbitration process had to be made explicit, with a party acting as facilitator. It is interesting to note that there is dissatisfaction on both sides of the border with the IWT. If there are those Pakistanis who feel that Pakistan should not have given up the three Eastern rivers, there are Indians who want to scrap the IWT entirely. That would leave international customary law in place, a customary law which the IWT itself has helped shape of late.
Mr Banga’s statement was particularly significant for having been made in an Indian TV interview, and should serve as a salutary wake-up call to an Indian public which had been continually fed a diet of jingoistic rhetoric, and which must be brought from cloud-cuckoo-land into the real world. The Pakistan government has formally said that it intends to hold India to its treaty commitments, and India would do well to remember that this is not a piece of literalism, not Pakistan angling for diplomatic advantage, but Pakistan hanging on to something that is matter of life and death.
