Everyone in Pakistan, with a few exceptions, will disagree with me when I characterise the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) as more of a tragedy than a lifeline for the Indus Basin’s people and ecology. The IWT was an artefact of its times, when Pakistan felt chronically – and, in retrospect, unreasonably – threatened by India’s potential to stop water flows into Pakistan. Out of that paranoia, and an ambition for infrastructure-based development – both impulses that sadly persist – Pakistan signed the IWT in 1960.
Even at the time of its signing, General Ayub Khan, its chief proponent and the president of Pakistan – who had acted against the advice of his country’s political parties and technocrats – acknowledged that there was “no cause for rejoicing”, only “cause for satisfaction that a possibly very ugly situation had been averted.” That ugly situation was India halting water flows into Pakistan. This eventuality was not founded in science or in any understanding of hydrology or geography – and it still is not.
India had the capability to stop any canals flowing into Pakistan, and it did halt the flows of the Upper Bari Doab and Dipalpur canals in April 1948. Canals are human-made, and the ability to open and shut them is obvious, unlike with naturally flowing rivers. Natural rivers flow not only on the surface but also below it. In the 1950s, we did not fully understand surface groundwater dynamics, though we do in academia today. Unfortunately, that knowledge has not reached Pakistan’s water institutions, not due to incompetence but because they are run by civil engineers rather than scientists or hydrologists.
India also had the potential to significantly degrade water flows into Pakistan from three rivers – the Ravi, Sutlej and Beas, all tributaries of the Indus and defined in the IWT as the “Eastern Rivers” – not through storage but diversion. Through the IWT, Pakistan handed India the formal right to do so. Article II of the IWT states: “All the waters of the Eastern Rivers shall be available for the unrestricted use of India.” India built the Bhakra, Pandoh and Nangal Dams on the Sutlej, the Pong Dam on the Beas, and the Indira Gandhi Canal from Harike Barrage to siphon massive amounts of Sutlej water to the state of Rajasthan. India needed to do this because it had millions of hectares of arable land in want of water, and it could do this because Pakistan gave it the formal right to. Under the IWT, Pakistan surrendered to India its right to equitable apportionment of the three rivers in the Indus Basin that mattered most to India in terms of economic potential.
For the “Western Rivers” – the Jhelum and Chenab, and the Indus itself – Article III(2) of the IWT states that “India shall be under an obligation to let flow all the waters of the Western Rivers” except when these are put to “domestic use”, meaning household and municipal consumption; “non-consumptive use”, where water is not removed from the system; “agricultural use”; and “generation of hydro-electric power”.
It is the three Western Rivers that are causing the most anxiety in Pakistan after the unilateral – and illegal – suspension of the IWT by India after the Pahalgam attack. This act is illegal because the World Bank is a guarantor of the IWT and India has not written anything to it, because the IWT can only be modified or revoked by the consent of both countries, and because there is no provision for its suspension. But let us leave that aside for now.
A brief look at the map and any familiarity with the geography of the headwaters of the three Western Rivers will quickly reveal that there are no significant plain, irrigable lands in Kashmir or Ladakh – the headwater areas under Indian control – that could be irrigated with any economic or technical rationality. That rules out India constructing barrages to syphon these headwaters off. Hydro-electric dams are essentially waterfalls that release water for electricity generation, with no meaningful impact on substantial water flows in the mainstem rivers. They may affect the timing of flows, but the size of the storage reservoirs required to realise this makes it simply not viable for India to sufficiently dam these headwaters given the area’s seismic activity and the silt loads in the three Western Rivers.
Over 90 percent of the Indus River’s flow originates in Pakistani territory before reaching Tarbela Dam, Pakistan’s key facility for the storage and regulation of its vital Indus waters. The Jhelum starts at Chashma Verinag in the south-eastern Kashmir Valley, and there are no viable damming sites on its main stem in India-controlled territory before its waters reach Pakistan. The only potential site is the Uri gorge, where a dam a few hundred feet high would submerge all of the Kashmir Valley – effectively ending the Kashmir dispute. Additionally, there is no substantial need for irrigation in the Kashmir Valley, as it is already water-rich.
The Chenab emerges from its mountain gorge and almost immediately enters Pakistan at Marala, with little arable land around its headwaters. People may talk about building tunnels and canals at right angles to the natural drainage to take its waters to Indian Punjab, but any canal running across drainage will be breached quickly, as seen with the Kachhi Canal in Pakistani Punjab. Any tunnel would be destroyed by the high debris loads in the Chenab – as with the tunnel collapse in 2014 at the Neelum–Jhelum Hydropower Plant.
Geography has provided Pakistan with water security that it has failed to recognise, instead indulging in paranoid fantasies of India cutting off its river waters. The fanatic attachment to hydro-control in India and hydro-vulnerability in Pakistan is almost comical. Pakistan has built all the infrastructure it could with IWT funding, and no one can take it away. Today, groundwater supplies 80 percent of crop water in the country’s fresh groundwater zone. That is where Pakistan’s water security lies – not in the IWT.
The most perverse part of the IWT is its stipulation in Article IV obligating Pakistan to receive all the industrial and agricultural waste water from upriver in Indian Punjab through the Hudiara, Kasur, Salimshah and Fazilka drains. That toxic water poisons Pakistan’s land, people and groundwater, and it is the most tragic gift of the IWT.
If India, with its suspension of the treaty, has given Pakistan a window to renegotiate the IWT, perhaps sealing off those drains might be a place to start. The second step might be to reassert Pakistan’s right under international and customary law to the equitable and ecological flows of the three Eastern Rivers. And perhaps Pakistan need not worry about the Western Rivers. Geography and hydrology will not let anyone take them away from it.
The article appeared in the himalmag