'Not a single drop of water': Could India’s threat trigger a war with Pakistan?

ISLAMABAD: For centuries, the five rivers of Punjab weren't resources to be managed, they were forces to be known, stories to be reckoned with. The Chenab, land of lovers. The Jhelum, land of warriors. The Ravi, land of people of honor. These weren't categories on a map. They were identities.

Nobody who read Heer Ranjha in 1766 imagined that three hundred years later, two nuclear-armed states would be threatening each other with the same water.

In April 2025, after the Pahalgam attack, India placed the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), the sixty-five-year-old agreement governing how these rivers are shared, in “abeyance.” 

The word sounds technical, but it isn't. 

"Abeyance" doesn't appear anywhere in the treaty. There is no pause button. Even the World Bank's own president said so: There is no provision in this treaty for one country to suspend it unilaterally.

The IWT, signed in 1960 and brokered by the World Bank, took an unusual approach to sharing water. It didn't divide the volume; it divided the rivers themselves. 

Three eastern rivers, the Ravi, Sutlej, and Beas, went entirely to India. Three western rivers, the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab, were allocated almost entirely to Pakistan. 

Together, Pakistan's three rivers carry roughly 80% of the entire system's water. This is what grows Punjab's wheat, Sindh's cotton, and fills the taps in Lahore and Karachi.

The need for this treaty arose as early as 1948, just months after partition, when India suspended flows through two canals into Pakistani Punjab. 

For five weeks, nearly 80% of cultivable land went dry. That wound is what created the treaty. 

For 65 years, through three wars, it held. Then came Pahalgam, and everything changed.

The immediate question everyone asked was the obvious one: Can India actually cut off Pakistan's water? 

The short answer is no. But the full answer is: not yet. 

Around 147.6 million acre-feet flows into Pakistan from these rivers every year. India's entire permitted storage under the treaty is 3.6 million acre-feet: 2% of annual flow. 

According to experts like Danish Mustafa, the terrain where these rivers cross into Pakistan is steep, volatile, and largely unsuitable for the kind of massive diversion infrastructure the threat implies. 

India's existing dams were built to generate electricity, not to withhold water, and you can't do both simultaneously without sabotaging your own power grid.

But that's the present. The future is more complicated.

In May 2026, India approved a tunnel to move water from the upper Chenab into the Beas, a river that belongs to India. The volume is small, but the precedent is big. 

Moving water between basins is one of the treaty's clearest red lines, and India has explicitly linked this project to the suspension. Cross one red line and the next gets easier. 

The Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled against India in May 2026, reaffirming real limits on its hydropower projects. 

India said it doesn't recognize the court's authority, meaning it doesn’t accept the verdict either. 

More importantly, what was lost as a result of the treaty’s suspension wasn’t water, it was the coordination that made the system work. 

Hydrological data sharing has stopped. Flood warnings that used to come commissioner-to-commissioner now arrive late.

Pakistan's farmers aren't exactly shut off from water, but they’re exposed to unpredictability — which, across a growing season, can be just as devastating.

India is already fast-tracking four major hydropower projects on the Chenab — Pakal Dul, Kiru, Kwar, Ratle, and Sawalkote. 

Tenders have been issued. But in a move that may have backfired legally, according to former caretaker law minister Ahmer Bilal Soofi, by placing the IWT in abeyance India has withdrawn the very protection international law gives to dams in conflict — because a civilian structure loses that protection the moment it serves a military objective. 

India's own water minister declared on record that not a single drop of water will go to Pakistan. 

And under international law, it is evidence of belligerent intent, which means India may have just handed Pakistan the legal justification to strike its own dams.