The crime: India has turned water into a weapon. On April 23, 2025, following the Pahalgam terrorist attack, India unilaterally put on hold the Indus Waters Treaty, a treaty that had survived four large-scale wars and sixty-five years of unbroken enmity between two nuclear-armed states.
Then came the threats. “We will ensure that not a single drop of Indus water flows into Pakistan,” Patil, India’s water minister, said in April 2025. “No, [IWT] “It will never be restored.” said India’s Home Minister Shah a month later. Prime Minister Modi first said in 2016 and has repeated since then 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 Indian Express that this was a “punitive action”. By doing this, even if the strangulation is for a short time, we show that we will take coercive measures…The water of the Chenab river irrigates the agricultural lands of Punjab, and Pakistan must realize that we intend to punish them on all fronts.”
To suffocate, punish and coerce is thus the policy of India. Choking rivers. Punishing and coercing 200 million people not for what they did, but for what their government is accused of without any evidence. The Indian Home Minister stated that India will “never” restore the IWT and that “we will take the water that was flowing towards Pakistan to Rajasthan by building a canal. Pakistan will be left without water that it has been getting unjustifiably.”
The Indian government has publicly declared its intention to deprive the neighboring population of water. Let’s leave it together with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which recognizes water as a fundamental human right. Leave it next to the Geneva Conventions. May it stand alongside all the principles of civilized international conduct that humanity has built. Pakistan’s legal position is indisputably based on international law. The Hague Court of Arbitration noted in June 2025 that the treaty does not provide for a unilateral suspension and reaffirmed its jurisdiction. India’s response? He declared the court “illegal” and refused to participate. When a state loses the legal argument and responds by overruling the court, that state has confessed its own guilt.
The 1997 United Nations Watercourses Convention requires equitable and reasonable use and no significant harm. Under Article 62 of the Vienna Convention, political tensions, including terrorism, do not constitute a fundamental change of circumstances that alters the purpose of the water-sharing treaty. The International Court of Justice ruled precisely this in its 1997 Gabcíkovo-Nagymaros ruling on the rights to the waters of the Danube River between Hungary and Slovakia.
India’s use of water as a weapon could amount to collective punishment under international humanitarian law, prohibited by the Geneva Conventions, and, due to the threat of mass famine, potentially a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute. The case is done. The verdict, according to any honest reading of international law, has already been written. India is doomed. The use of water as a weapon is a crime that goes beyond laws and treaties. To put the IWT on hold is to attack a living river basin on which 200 million Pakistanis depend for their lives. These are not abstract statistics. These are farmers from Punjab whose wheat feeds a nation. These are mothers from Sindh whose children drink from canals fed by the melting of the Himalayas. These are fishermen whose livelihood is based exclusively on the river.
Professor James Scott wrote that rivers, in the long term, are alive: they are born; they change; they change the channel; they forge new routes to the sea; they move gradually and violently; they can overflow with life; they can suffer an almost natural death; They are frequently mutilated and even killed. The Indus, the Jhelum and the Chenab are alive. India is trying to kill these living beings. ‘Suspension’ is not a technical issue; It is a murder weapon that enters millions of Pakistani homes and pulls the trigger.
Robert Macfarlane also maintains that rivers are alive. He cites New Zealand’s Te Awa Tupua Act 2017, which recognizes the Whanganui River as not only living but also a legal person, giving it the same legal status as a citizen. Professor Macfarlane insists that we stop using the word “it” to refer to rivers because that approach reduces them to the state of things. The Indus is not a thing. The Chenab is not a thing. The Jhelum is not a thing. The rivers of the Indus basin are not a thing. They are the soul of our soil.
Pakistan calls on the international community – every State that has signed the United Nations Charter, every institution that claims to uphold the laws of nations – to act. Hold India accountable and uphold the principle that water cannot be used as a weapon. That the water treaties cannot be dissolved by the strongest party because they want to suffocate, punish and coerce them. Those 200 million Pakistanis are not bargaining chips.
The Indus has flowed for ten thousand years. It has nurtured the Indus Valley civilization – one of the oldest and most sophisticated human societies in history – long before Delhi existed. Professors Scott and Macfarlane understand something that the Delhi warmongers don’t: a river is a living thing, not a pipe. It cannot be turned on and off as political theater demands. There are no property titles over rivers, neither in international law nor in nature. The rivers of the Indus basin do not belong to India. Rivers belong to the millions of lives they support. And not just human life. Our understanding of rivers must be expanded to tributaries, wetlands, floodplains, backwaters, eddies, periodic mudflats and mangroves to the entire set of life forms that depend on rivers for their existence.
India cannot leave any river in abeyance. India cannot hold water hostage. India cannot starve a civilization into compliance. India cannot use rivers as weapons. Pakistan has decided that we will protect our rivers. Pakistan will protect life and civilization. Our people and their armed forces have defended this soil in four wars. We will fight India’s attempt at hydrohegemony. We seek peace, but we will fight this war if it is imposed on us.
We will take this fight to international courts and councils, to the court of world opinion, and to the consciences of citizens around the world, until the use of water as a weapon is condemned and outlawed, 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 with their flow the autobiography of this soil. Let them flow.
The author is a former federal minister of foreign affairs and defence. This is an edited text of a speech given at the recent Indus Waters Treaty Conference in Islamabad. He tweets/posts @kdastgirkhan
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of PakGazette.tv.
Originally published in The News
