India’s undeclared war

The Indus and its tributaries are Pakistan's arteries. Over 90 per cent of Pakistan’s agriculture relies on the Indus River System, which also powers dams and sustains wetlands and fisheries that are crucial for biodiversity and the well-being of coastal communities.

However, for more than 240 million Pakistanis, India’s water weaponisation could now be a visceral reality. Indian leadership hinting at intentions to ‘starve the people of Pakistan’ by cutting off the water supply as a long-term strategy started in 2016 but has been expedited in the wake of the Pahalgam incident.

Suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) was merely the opening salvo in India’s water warfare against Pakistan. What followed was the sudden, unannounced slashing of Chenab flows by up to 90 per cent via the Baglihar Dam, throttling Neelum River from the Kishanganga project and accelerated pursuit of storage dams like Pakal Dul and Ratle. The Ranbir Canal expansion was also announced just days after the Indo-Pak ceasefire, disguised as national development, evident from Union Minister C R Patil’s pledge to not let even ‘a drop of water’ from reaching Pakistan.

In this context, India’s potential filling of massive reservoirs risks leaving Pakistan without water for extended periods. During the dry season, India’s manipulation of timing and flow could also be a calibrated suffocation of Pakistan’s agrarian heartland. Moreover, the potential withholding of critical flood data, as reported by former Indian Indus Waters commissioner Pradeep Saxena, highlights that in a time of climate crisis, where South Asia is grappling with dire threats from glacial melting and unpredictable monsoons, India is exacerbating environmental fragility for political advantage.

Although this is not an isolated incident, it is the culmination of a long-standing Indian practice of hydro-aggression against its neighbours. India’s predatory riparianism extends from the Farakka Barrage, which diverts the Ganges’ flow during the dry season to devastate Bangladesh, causing desertification, salinity intrusion, crop failures, and fisheries collapse, to the coercive hydro-politics imposed on Nepal.

India’s proposed $168 billion National River Linking Project, aiming to reroute 37 rivers, signals an ambition for total regional hydrological control, pursued without consultation and underscored by its refusal to ratify the UN Watercourses Convention.

If India’s hydro-aggression persists, it would undermine global transboundary water systems, empowering upstream aggressors, a concern India had flagged at the start of the year. Ironically, a few months later, it was India who decided to weaponise water against Pakistan, constituting a gross violation of fundamental human rights.

Notably, the UN General Assembly explicitly recognised water as a human right in 2010. International Humanitarian Law (IHL) also categorically prohibits attacks on water resources and infrastructure, as Pakistan’s health minister, Mustafa Kamal, emphasised at the World Health Assembly. India’s water warfare would also violate the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition on collective punishment and could constitute a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute.

In light of the illegality of India’s water weaponisation, Pakistan’s stance is unequivocal: blocking or diverting water would constitute an act of war. Pakistan’s civil and military leadership have also drawn a red line by warning that Pakistan could have destroyed Indian dams in response to attacks on Neelum-Jhelum, highlighting the lethal seriousness with which the state views this existential threat. Pakistan’s national security officials have sent a clear message to Indian policymakers that the country would use the full spectrum of its national power to defend its water rights for years and decades. To dismiss these statements as hyperbole is to ignore the fact that this is a question of Pakistan’s survival. Pakistan’s response, therefore, is not warmongering; it is the imperative of self-preservation.

Moving ahead, Pakistan should accelerate its efforts to assert its hydrological sovereignty. Developing strategic storage and hydropower infrastructure on the Chenab, Jhelum, and Indus is paramount. This serves dual purposes: enhancing water security through regulation, mitigating floods and droughts, generating clean energy, and establishing accrued rights under international law. However, the path forward demands more than just Pakistani resolve; it requires urgent international intervention. The UN Security Council, having recognised water as a catalyst for cooperation, must live up to its responsibility. In this regard, Pakistan’s stance at the UNSC must resonate: India’s weaponisation of water is unacceptable and cannot be tolerated.

Although the guns on the Line of Control have fallen silent, India’s strangling of Pakistan’s rivers remains an act of sustained violence against more than 240 million people. Pakistan’s warnings represent a rational response by a nation confronting an engineered genocide, perpetrated not by terrorists but by Indian policymakers.

The world must act decisively to defuse this ticking water bomb, for India’s water warfare imposes a grim logic: when a nuclear-armed state threatens another’s very survival, the result would be not only massive regional destruction but also the global normalisation of water as a weapon of mass disruption. The taps of water diplomacy in South Asia are closing; world leaders must wrench them open before the only flow left is that of blood.

The writer is a research assistant at the Centre for Aerospace & Security Studies (CASS), Islamabad. He can be reached at: cass.thinkers@casstt.com