India pronounced the decision earlier than producing proof acceptable to anybody exterior its personal official narrative
The author is a public coverage analyst based mostly in Lahore. She will be reached at durdananajam1@gmail.com
Pakistan and India have spent almost eight a long time proving how completely different they’re. But beneath the politics lies an older reality: each nations emerged from the identical geographical and civilisational area. Partition gave that area two states, not two unrelated histories. Our languages nonetheless lean into each other. Our meals carries the identical aromas. Our music recognises itself throughout the border. Even our quarrels have the intimacy of a household argument that has gone on for too lengthy.
The Indus belongs to this shared geography. It travels by mountains and valleys that existed lengthy earlier than both nations appeared on a map. It nourishes fields with out asking which anthem is performed close by. That’s the reason India’s choice to position the Indus Waters Treaty “in abeyance” after the Pahalgam assault was so reckless. New Delhi tied the way forward for a water settlement to its allegation that Pakistan supported cross-border terrorism. In doing so, it turned a river system sustaining thousands and thousands into an instrument of political stress.
The assault at Pahalgam was horrifying. Twenty-six lives have been misplaced. However accusation can’t turn out to be judgment merely as a result of it’s repeated loudly. Pakistan denied involvement and proposed an impartial and credible worldwide investigation. India selected navy motion as a substitute.
India pronounced the decision earlier than producing proof acceptable to anybody exterior its personal official narrative. That narrative has since confronted uncomfortable questions. When Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim was pressed on whether or not Pakistan’s alleged function constituted state terrorism, he stated his counry’s intelligence companies had supplied no such info. Equally, at a current press convention, the Pakistani navy introduced a person whom, it stated, India had recognized as related to Pahalgam and later claimed to have killed. The contradiction will not be a minor element. It goes to the guts of India’s case: who was investigated, what was established, and the way might navy punishment precede an impartial dedication of duty? These questions can’t be drowned out by tv graphics and patriotic slogans.
Pakistan’s personal previous is difficult. There have been insurance policies on militancy that broken the nation and gave others motive for suspicion. However historical past can’t be used as everlasting proof towards a nation. Pakistan as we speak is itself bleeding from terrorism. In accordance with figures launched by Pakistan’s navy, the nation’s law-enforcement and intelligence companies carried out 75,175 intelligence-based counterterrorism operations in 2025, whereas over 1,200 civilians and members of law-enforcement companies have been killed.
There’s an irony right here that India shouldn’t be allowed to miss. The Hindu god Indra is worshipped because the breaker of Vritra’s maintain – the divine pressure that struck down the ability obstructing the waters and launched the rivers for humanity. Water, in that sacred reminiscence, was not the property of the strongest. Its launch was an act of order, justice and life. What, then, ought to one name a politics that celebrates Indra for liberating the waters however applauds a authorities for threatening to withhold them? This isn’t an argument borrowed from Pakistan. It’s a reminder drawn from India’s personal non secular inheritance. A civilisation can’t worship the liberator of rivers and, in the identical breath, glorify the politics of their obstruction.
India remembers Indra because the liberator of waters. But its current rulers communicate of rivers as if they have been possessions to be withheld when politically handy. A civilisation can’t have a good time the liberating of water in scripture whereas applauding its weaponisation in state coverage.
The Indus Waters Treaty was signed in 1960 not as a result of Pakistan and India trusted one another, however as a result of they didn’t. Its genius lay in accepting hostility as a truth and nonetheless creating guidelines robust sufficient to guard strange life from that hostility. The treaty survived wars, damaged diplomatic relations and a long time of bitterness. It saved working as a result of each nations understood that water couldn’t be made hostage to each disaster.
India now claims the appropriate to set that understanding apart unilaterally. However the treaty comprises no provision permitting one celebration merely to droop it. In June 2025, the Court docket of Arbitration held that India’s declaration of “abeyance” didn’t have an effect on the courtroom’s competence and that the treaty stays in pressure till each nations exchange or terminate it by a duly ratified settlement. New Delhi rejected the courtroom’s authority.
That is what majoritarian energy usually does: it errors energy for entitlement. India’s bigger financial system, navy weight and upstream place could give it leverage, however they don’t give it ethical possession of the Indus.
The politics is short-sighted in one other approach. India can’t sever Pakistan from South Asia with out denying the geography to which India itself belongs. The 2 nations could have separate flags, however they share a local weather system already below extraordinary stress. Glaciers are retreating, rainfall is changing into much less predictable, floods are intensifying and populations are rising. That is exactly the second when cooperation ought to deepen – not when water needs to be added to the arsenal of retaliation.
The Indus has flowed by empires that when imagined themselves everlasting. It outlived all of them. The query will not be whether or not the river will proceed in direction of the ocean. It is going to. The query is what sort of folks will stay alongside its banks: neighbours who understood that survival required restraint, or rivals who found too late that geography can’t be defeated.
