The crime: India has weaponized water. On April 23, 2025, after the Pahalgam terror attack, India unilaterally abrogated the Indus Waters Treaty—a treaty that had survived four full-scale wars and sixty-five years of unbroken hostilities between two nuclear-armed states.
Then came the threats. “We want to ensure that not a single drop of Indus water flows into Pakistan”, India’s water minister Patil said in April 2025. “No, [IWT] will never be restored”, India’s Home Minister Shah said a month later. Prime Minister Modi first said in 2016 and has since repeated that “blood and water cannot flow together”. India has acted on its threat. It stopped the flow of water in the Chenab River from the Baglihar Dam in May 2025. A senior Indian government official told the Indian Express that this was a “punitive action. By doing this we are demonstrating, even if the choke is for a short time, that we will take coercive action… Chenab river waters are flooding Punjab’s agricultural areas and Pakistan needs to realize that we mean to punish them on all fronts”.
Suffocation, punishment and coercion are thus the policy of India. Choking rivers. To punish and coerce 200 million people not for what they did, but for what their government is accused of without evidence. The Indian Home Secretary stated that India will “never” restore the IWT and that “we will take water that flowed to Pakistan to Rajasthan by building a canal. Pakistan will be starved of water that it has got unjustly”.
The government of India has publicly declared its intention to starve a neighboring population of water. Let it sit next to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which recognizes water as a basic human right. Leave it next to the Geneva Conventions. Let it stand next to any principle of civilized international behavior that mankind has built. Pakistan’s legal position is unassailably anchored in international law. The Court of Arbitration in The Hague noted in June 2025 that the treaty does not allow for unilateral termination and confirmed its jurisdiction. India’s response? It declared the court “illegal” and refused to participate. When a state loses the legal argument and responds by rejecting the right, that state has admitted its own guilt.
The UN Watercourses Convention of 1997 mandates fair and reasonable exploitation and no significant harm. Under Article 62 of the Vienna Convention, political tensions, including terrorism, do not constitute a fundamental change in circumstances that alters the treaty’s water-sharing purposes. The International Court of Justice decided precisely this in its 1997 Gabcíkovo-Nagymaros judgment on water rights in the Danube River between Hungary and Slovakia.
India’s weaponization of water could amount to collective punishment under international humanitarian law, prohibited under the Geneva Conventions and, because of the threat of mass starvation, potentially a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute. The case is made. The verdict, under any honest interpretation of international law, has already been written. India is damned. Weaponization of water is a crime beyond laws and treaties. Suspending the IWT attacks a living basin of rivers that 200 million Pakistanis depend on for their lives. It is not abstract statistics. It is farmers in Punjab whose wheat feeds a nation. These are mothers in Sindh whose children drink from canals fed by Himalayan snowmelt. These are fishermen whose entire livelihood is built around the river.
Prof James Scott wrote that rivers, in the long term, are alive: they are born; they change; they change their channels; they create new routes to the sea; they move both gradually and violently; they may teem with life; they may die a quasi-natural death; they are often maimed and even murdered. Indus and Jhelum and Chenab are alive. India is trying to kill these living beings. ‘Abeyance’ is not a technical question; it is a murder weapon that penetrates millions of Pakistani homes and pulls the trigger.
Robert Macfarlane also argues that rivers are alive. He cites the Te Awa Tupua Act of 2017 in New Zealand, which recognizes that the Whanganui River is not only alive but also a legal person, giving it the same legal status as a citizen. Prof Macfarlane insists that we stop using the word ‘it’ for rivers because this address reduces them to the status of things. Indus is nothing. Chenab is nothing. Jhelum is nothing. The rivers of the Indus basin are nothing. They are the soul of our land.
Pakistan calls on the international community – every state that has signed the UN Charter, every institution that claims to uphold the laws of nations – to act. To hold India accountable and uphold the principle that water cannot be weaponised. That water agreements cannot be dissolved by the stronger party because they want to stifle, punish and coerce. That 200 million Pakistanis are not a bargaining chip.
The Indus has flowed for ten thousand years. It has nurtured the Indus Valley Civilization—one of the oldest, most sophisticated human societies in history—long before Delhi existed. Professors Scott and Macfarlane understand something that Delhi’s warmongers do not: a river is a living thing, not a pipe. You cannot turn it on and off, as the political theater requires. There is no ownership of rivers, either in international law or in nature. The Indus basin rivers do not belong to India. The rivers belong to the millions of lives they sustain. And not just human life. Our understanding of rivers must be expanded to include tributaries, wetlands, floodplains, backwaters, eddies, periodic marshes and mangroves to the entire collection of life forms that depend on rivers for their existence.
India cannot put any river on hold. India cannot hold water hostage. India cannot starve a civilization to comply with them. India cannot use rivers as weapons. Pakistan has decided that we must protect our rivers. Pakistan will protect life and civilization. Our people and their armed forces have defended this land in four wars. We will fight India’s attempt at hydro-hegemony. We seek peace, but we will fight this war if it is forced upon us.
We will take this fight to international courts and councils, to the court of world opinion and to the conscience of citizens everywhere – until the weaponization of water is condemned and banned, international law is restored and justice flows as freely as the rivers that nourish the Indus civilization.
Quaid-e-Azam built a nation on this soil. But the rivers wrote, are writing this moment, and will write this earth’s autobiography with their flow. Let them flow.
The author is a former federal minister for foreign affairs and defence. This is an edited text of a speech delivered at the recent Indus Waters Treaty Conference in Islamabad. He tweets/posts @kdastgirkhan
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Pakinomist.tv’s editorial policy.
Originally published in The News
