India spent decades casting Pakistan as the region’s rule-breaker. A tribunal ruling handed Islamabad the chance to return the favour
For 65 years, even as India and Pakistan fought wars, severed diplomatic ties and traded nuclear threats, one agreement held: the Indus Waters Treaty, which governs the river system sustaining roughly 300 million people across the subcontinent.
That was until April last year, when New Delhi suspended the pact in the aftermath of a deadly militant attack on tourists in Kashmir that it blamed on Islamabad.
Now, an international tribunal has ruled that it should have done no such thing – handing Pakistan an unexpected win in the two countries’ long and bitter rivalry.
On August 31, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that Delhi had no legal basis for suspending the water-sharing agreement, adding that India must also limit construction on the Ratle Hydroelectric Plant being built in Kashmir.
The court’s five-member panel was unanimous: none of the grounds India cited justified suspending or terminating the agreement.
It was a clean sweep for Islamabad, which brought the case after Delhi froze cooperation on the Indus and its tributaries – vital rivers that irrigate Pakistan’s agricultural heartland.
A role reversal
India has long cast Pakistan as the region’s rule-breaker, accusing it of harbouring militants and flouting international norms. But last month’s ruling flips that script, observers say.
“This is particularly attractive to Pakistan, as it turns a long-standing Indian tactic upside-down,” said Daniel Markey, a senior fellow with the Stimson Centre think tank’s South Asia programme, adding that the tribunal’s decision gave Pakistan “a diplomatic opportunity to exploit”.
“Even if Pakistan is only partially successful, it will relish the chance to muddy the waters and claim some high ground,” he said, describing the ruling as another front in a rivalry now “playing out in different forums, including this tribunal”.
Within hours of the ruling being issued, Delhi had rejected it outright, insisting that its decision to hold the treaty “in abeyance” would stand.
Islamabad’s reaction was equally swift and considerably more triumphant, with Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar declaring on social media that the ruling “vindicates Pakistan’s consistent position that a binding international treaty cannot be unilaterally suspended or set aside”.
Delhi disputes the court’s right to rule at all, however, calling it “illegally constituted” because the Indus treaty specifically requires both parties to agree on how an arbitration panel is formed.
“India is challenging the authority of the mechanism,” said Uttam Sinha, a senior fellow at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in Delhi.
Describing the stand-off as a contest over “sovereignty vs consent”, Sinha said India’s ambition was not to “turn off Pakistan’s water” completely but to finally exploit its own treaty rights on hydropower, storage, irrigation and the like.
“For decades, India had treaty rights and provisions on paper but had not developed the infrastructure necessary to harness them fully,” he said.
Ayesha Siddiqa, a Pakistani political scientist and senior fellow at King’s College London’s Department of War Studies, said Delhi was trying to “hide behind a technicality”, having previously turned to the very same court when it suited its own interests – notably in the case of Kulbhushan Jadhav, an Indian national sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on espionage charges in 2017.
How can India now say that it will not comply? Politically, this will be very embarrassing
Ayesha Siddiqa, political scientist
“How can India now say that it will not comply?” Siddiqa asked. “Politically, this will be very embarrassing, though like the United States, it can refuse to honour the judgment.”
India’s actions are certainly not without precedent on the world stage.
Sriparna Pathak, an associate professor of international relations at O.P. Jindal Global University in India, points to the US’ 2019 exit from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty after Russia deployed a banned cruise missile system as one of several precedents for unilateral treaty suspension.
“States routinely invoke countermeasures … when they judge the other party’s conduct has destroyed the treaty’s object and purpose,” she said, citing a legal principle under which a fundamental shift in circumstances can void an agreement.
But Pathak is clear-eyed about what is really at stake. India has tied the treaty’s suspension to a demand that Pakistan “credibly and irrevocably” end its support for cross-border militancy – a condition that is political rather than legal.
“That is a political precondition, not a technical one,” she said. “Compliance with The Hague order would undercut that position.”
It is a dilemma India has long tried to avoid by keeping bilateral disputes, especially over Kashmir, out of international forums altogether – wary that outside mediation legitimises exactly the kind of “internationalisation” Delhi has spent decades resisting.
Weaponised water
Behind the legal arguments lies the reality that water has become a lever for coercion.
In June, India’s minister of water resources, C. R. Patil, vowed that “not a single drop” would flow to Pakistan – prompting Islamabad to accuse Delhi of “weaponising” a shared resource and to warn, as it had in April, that any attempt to block or divert rivers would be treated as an “act of war”.
For now, at least, the threat is mostly rhetorical. India’s existing infrastructure cannot yet shut off Pakistan’s water supply, according to Markey, nor can it “single-handedly cause flooding”.
But as Delhi expands its hydroelectric and water storage capacity, its leverage will grow – and so will the inherent risks.
Bigger Indian dams and barrages would create “a more likely target for Pakistani military attacks in the event of future India-Pakistan hostilities”, Markey said.
“A return to the negotiating table looks unrealistic at the moment, but it will be the wiser course of action over time,” he added. “Neither side will readily benefit from pulling water to the centre of their bilateral dispute.”
Sinha, meanwhile, resisted the idea of a looming “water war”, preferring instead to describe what was happening as the “strategic securitisation of water” – a contest fought not with weapons but with infrastructure, data, timing and design.
That contest is now unfolding across the Indus River system, a vast basin of Himalayan tributaries spanning China, India and Pakistan upon which hundreds of millions of lives depend – and the latest flashpoint in a deep-rooted, acrimonious rivalry.
Reference Link:- https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3367223/india-pakistan-water-row-deepens-after-hague-court-ruling