NEW DELHI:
Pakistan will not obtain water from the rivers on which India has rights, said Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday, rising rhetoric in a confrontation about access to water caused by a deadly attack in Iiojk.
The legal director of Pakistan, in an interview with Reuters, replied that Islamabad was still willing to discuss the exchange of water among the neighbors, but said that India must comply with a treaty of decades.
“Pakistan will have to pay a heavy price for each terrorist attack … Pakistan’s army will pay it. Pakistan’s economy will pay it,” Modi said in a public event in Rajasthan.
“Pakistan is willing to speak or address anything, any concern they may have,” Pakistan’s attorney general, Mansoor Usman Awan told Reuters.
He said that India had written to Pakistan in recent weeks, citing population growth and clean energy needs as reasons to modify the treaty. But he said that any discussion would have to participate under the terms of the treaty.
Islamabad argues that the treaty is legally binding and no part can suspend it unilaterally, Awan said.
“With regard to Pakistan, the treaty is very operational, functional and anything that India does, at its own cost and danger in regard to the construction of any hydroelectric energy project,” he added.
The high fire between countries has remained largely. India’s Foreign Minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, said there were no current fire exchanges and “there has been some repositioning of forces accordingly.”
