On 19 June, at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, India’s delegation made an admission that deserved far more scrutiny than it received. Confronted once again with international concern over its conduct in Jammu and Kashmir, New Delhi’s representative dismissed the Indus Waters Treaty as “outdated,” arguing that a six-decade-old technical arrangement could not remain permanently fixed while the world around it changed. Stripped of its diplomatic gloss, this was a confession: India no longer considers itself bound by one of the most durable peace instruments in modern history, and it no longer feels obliged to pretend otherwise.
For sixty-five years, the Indus Waters Treaty governed the rivers that sustain nearly a quarter of a billion people across Pakistan’s agricultural heartland. Brokered by the World Bank and signed by Jawaharlal Nehru and Ayub Khan in 1960, it survived three wars and decades of hostility precisely because both governments understood that water, unlike territory, could not be allowed to become a weapon. That understanding collapsed after the April 2025 attack in Pahalgam, when India unilaterally suspended its participation in the treaty, a decision with no foundation whatsoever in the treaty’s own text. No security clause exists permitting suspension over unproven allegations. No provision allows one party to simply walk away because the political mood in New Delhi has shifted.
What has followed is more troubling than the suspension itself. In May, the Court of Arbitration, the very dispute-resolution mechanism India agreed to when it signed the treaty, issued its second consecutive ruling against New Delhi, finding that its water-control ambitions on the western rivers exceed what the treaty permits. India’s response was neither compliance nor a legitimate appeal, but a declaration that the tribunal was illegitimate, followed by construction proceeding as though the ruling did not exist. Weeks earlier, it had already approved the Dulhasti-II hydropower project on the Chenab, a river reserved for Pakistan’s use, while arbitration on precisely this question remained pending. A state that accepts a tribunal’s jurisdiction only when convenient, and discards it the moment a verdict goes against its interests, cannot credibly present itself as a defender of the rules-based order it so often invokes against its neighbours.
This is not an isolated lapse in treaty discipline. It is the same selective legalism that has defined India’s approach to Kashmir since 1948, when UN Security Council Resolutions 47 and 91 promised the Kashmiri people a plebiscite to determine their own political future. Those resolutions remain unimplemented seven decades later, set aside by an India that insists Kashmir is purely an internal matter even as it invokes international forums whenever doing so serves its narrative. The pattern holds steady: international law is treated as a shield when useful and an irrelevance when binding. A country that rejects arbitral rulings on water cannot be trusted to honour Security Council resolutions on sovereignty, and a country that ignores the latter has little claim to respecting the former.
The human cost of this approach is not abstract. Water security in the Indus basin underpins food production, livelihoods, and the basic survival of communities far removed from any battlefield. To convert that lifeline into diplomatic leverage is to punish an entire population for a conflict it did not create, a practice that sits uneasily beside any serious commitment to proportionality. It is also self-defeating. Treaties endure not because they are convenient but because both parties accept that abandoning them costs more than honouring them. By demonstrating that even an agreement as resilient as the Indus Waters Treaty can be discarded at will, India has weakened the architecture of predictability on which regional stability, and any future settlement on Kashmir, ultimately depends.
Pakistan has consistently called for a resolution of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute grounded in international law, United Nations resolutions, and the right of its people to determine their own future. India’s conduct on the Indus Waters Treaty, far from being a separate matter, is the clearest evidence yet of why that call remains necessary. A state unwilling to honour a water treaty it freely signed offers little assurance that it will ever honour a settlement on Kashmir it has never wanted to reach.
Muhammad Ibrahim Bhatti is a graduate of BS International Relations from the International Islamic University Islamabad and a Research Assistant at the Kashmir Institute of International Relations (KIIR).
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