New Delhi:
Pakistan will not get water from rivers that India has rights, said Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday and raised the rhetoric in a standoff over water access triggered by a deadly attack in IIOJK.
Pakistan’s most important legal officer replied in an interview with Reuters that Islamabad remained willing to discuss water sharing between the neighbors, but said that India should stick to a decades old treaty.
“Pakistan will have to pay a heavy price for any terrorist attack … Pakistan’s army will pay it. Pakistan’s economy will pay it,” Modi said at a public event in Rajasthan.
“Pakistan is willing to talk about or to tackle something, any concerns they may have,” Pakistan’s legal lawyer, Mansoor Usman Awan, told Reuters.
He said India had written to Pakistan in recent weeks, quoting population growth and pure energy needs as reasons for changing the treaty. But he said that all discussions should participate in accordance with the conditions of the treaty.
Islamabad maintains that the treaty is legally binding and no party can unilaterally suspend it, Awan said.
“As far as Pakistan is concerned, the treaty is very operational, functional and everything that India does, it does for its own price and danger in terms of building any hydroelectric projects,” he added.
The fluid’s truce between the countries has largely held. Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaiskankar said there was no current exchange of fire and “there has been some repositioning of forces accordingly”.
