On June 4, Pakistan said what most analysts had been thinking for over a year: India is weaponizing water.

The trigger was a pair of infrastructure projects on the Chenab River — a ₹2,352 crore (US$246 million) tunnel to divert surplus Chenab water into the Beas basin in Himachal Pradesh, and a ₹268 crore sediment bypass at the Salal Dam in Jammu — both to be executed by India’s National Hydroelectric Power Corporation.

Pakistan’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Tahir Andrabi, said the projects were confirmation that New Delhi “seems to weaponize water,” adding that they carry dangerous implications not only for Pakistan’s economy but also for regional stability and international peace and security.

What India has set in motion since placing the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) in abeyance in April last year is much more than a bilateral water dispute. Rather, it is the systematic dismantling of the cooperative architecture that governed South Asia’s most critical shared resources for over six decades.

And it is being replaced with something more naked and dangerous: the assertion that water is an instrument of state power to be allocated, withheld and redirected according to the upstream sovereign’s political calculus.

The consequences of that assertion will not stop at the India-Pakistan border. They will flow downstream into Bangladesh, upstream into Nepal and outward into every transboundary water negotiation on earth.

To understand the scale of what has been destroyed, one must recall what the IWT actually represented.

Signed in 1960 after nine years of World Bank-brokered negotiation, the treaty allocated the western rivers — Indus, Jhelum, Chenab — to Pakistan, and the eastern rivers — Ravi, Beas, Sutlej — to India.

The IWT survived three full-scale wars, the nuclear tests of 1998, the Kargil conflict, the 2001 Parliament attack, the 2008 Mumbai massacre and the 2019 Pulwama bombing.

Its survival reflected a genuine, if unsentimental, recognition on both sides that some frameworks are too fundamental to sacrifice at the altar of domestic politics. US President Dwight Eisenhower, present at the treaty’s signing, called it “one bright spot in a very depressing world picture.”

India blotted out that bright spot on April 23 last year, one day after the Pahalgam terror attack killed 26 tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir. Soon thereafter, hydrological data-sharing stopped.

The Permanent Indus Commission went dark. And within weeks, India had conducted reservoir flushing operations at Salal and Baglihar dams without notifying Pakistan.

India then launched Operation Sindoor on May 7 last year, striking nine targets in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. A ceasefire was reached three days later. But while the shooting stopped, the water dispute did not.

By December, Pakistan’s foreign ministry was formally reporting that Chenab flows had plunged to 870 cusecs between December 10 and 16 — against a historical minimum for that period of over 4,000 cusecs, a drop of nearly 80%. Satellite imagery confirmed a significant reduction followed by a sudden increase in the surface area of the Baglihar reservoir.

The two Chenab projects announced in recent weeks are consistent with this trend. Since the IWT’s suspension, India has fast-tracked the Pakal Dul, Kiru, Kwar, Ratle, Dulhasti Stage-II and Sawalkote projects, a ramped up portfolio of infrastructure on rivers that the treaty designated for Pakistan’s unrestricted use.

The Chenab-Beas diversion tunnel is the most structurally significant among these because it does not merely harness the Chenab’s flow for run-of-river power generation, but it also physically transfers water out of Pakistan’s allocated western river basin into an eastern basin that is entirely India’s to use as it sees fit. The tunnel effectively redraws the hydraulic partition of 1960.

The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague has ruled against India twice — in August last year and again on May 15 this year, when it issued a supplemental award on pondage limits at Ratle and Kishanganga, affirming that the treaty places substantive limits on India’s water-control capability on the western rivers.

India has categorically rejected both rulings, calling the court illegally constituted and its awards null and void. The legal architecture intended to resolve exactly this kind of dispute is being demolished by the same country that helped design it.

Pakistan’s position — that the treaty remains fully in force and that India’s abeyance declaration is unlawful — may be correct, but in the absence of enforcement mechanisms, it is a paper shield.

What Pakistan now confronts is an upstream state with vastly greater economic capacity, a decisive conventional military advantage demonstrated in May last year and a government that has made water nationalism part of its electoral identity.

Pakistan’s water storage covers roughly 30 days of river flow. Its agricultural sector accounts for 80% of irrigation and nearly a quarter of GDP. Nearly 11 million Pakistanis were in acute food insecurity in 2025.

When the Chenab’s timing is manipulated — water withheld during sowing season, released without warning during harvest — the consequences are often severe.

To be sure, this is not merely an India-Pakistan issue and conflict. Bangladesh shares 54 rivers with India. And the 1996 Ganga Water Sharing Treaty — governing dry-season flow allocations at the Farakka Barrage — expires in December this year.

India has indicated that it will not renew the treaty in its current form and is seeking to renegotiate on modified terms. The new Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led government in Dhaka has publicly linked the entire trajectory of India-Bangladesh relations to the outcome of negotiations over an equitable replacement.

In the Bangladeshi delta, reduced upstream flow means salinity intrusion, disrupted agriculture, degraded fisheries and the accelerating advance of a coastal crisis that climate change is already making catastrophic.

The farmers of Pakistan’s Punjab and the farmers of Bangladesh’s northwest are not in their daily experience connected. However, in the hydraulic logic now unfolding across South Asia, they are living the same story.

Nepal, further upstream and differently positioned, is living a version of it too. It sits on roughly 40,000 megawatts of untapped hydropower potential and a set of water agreements with India — the Koshi, Gandak, and Mahakali treaties — that Nepali critics have, for decades, described as arrangements that formalize Indian extraction of Himalayan hydraulic resources while constraining Kathmandu’s ability to monetize them on its own terms.

The IWT’s collapse strengthens the hand of those in Kathmandu who argue that Chinese investment in Nepali hydropower infrastructure is preferable to Indian investment, which comes with structural dependencies and a pattern of asymmetric benefit-sharing.

China has been delighted to oblige. And this is where the regional picture becomes not merely complex but structurally vertiginous, because directly above all of this — above Nepal, above Bangladesh, above the entire Gangetic plain, above the Indus basin itself — China is building what will be the world’s largest dam on the Brahmaputra in southern Tibet. The $168 billion project, targeting completion in 2033, will give Beijing unparalleled hydraulic leverage over India and Bangladesh.

India’s response has been to announce a $77 billion initiative to build more than 200 dams in Arunachal Pradesh — territory that China claims as part of southern Tibet — in a hydropower arms race that mirrors, in the Brahmaputra basin, exactly what India is doing to Pakistan in the Indus basin.

The symmetry is precise while the irony is total. India claims sovereign upstream rights over Pakistan while simultaneously claiming equitable downstream entitlements against China.

It invokes its right as the upper riparian to divert western rivers away from Pakistani agriculture, while relying on the principle that upstream states must protect downstream flows to challenge Chinese dam-building above the northeastern Indian state of Assam.

The doctrinal contradiction is not merely philosophical. It is the operational logic of a region in which every state is upstream of someone and downstream of someone else, and in which the collective failure to establish cooperative governance is producing a cascading series of unilateral assertions that ultimately make every state less secure.

What makes this cascade so difficult to arrest is not a shortage of legal frameworks or technical solutions. It is the domestic political economy of water nationalism, which in every South Asian country produces vocal constituencies for confrontation and systematically marginalizes voices for cooperation.

In India, redirecting water from rivers allocated to Pakistan in 1960 resonates with a Hindu nationalist narrative that views the partition settlement itself as unjust. In Pakistan, water becomes the site of existential victimhood and the justification for military spending and a stronger nuclear posture.

In Bangladesh, Farakka and the Teesta are perennial symbols of India’s indifference to the downstream needs of Bangladesh. In Nepal, the Koshi Agreement is a textbook case study in hydro-hegemony.

Each domestic politics generates its own self-reinforcing logic, while technical experts who understand the genuine mutual dependence at stake are routinely drowned out. The very crises that make cooperation most necessary are the ones that make it most politically impossible.

Beneath all of this, and accelerating every dimension of it, is a climate emergency. The Himalayan glaciers — the freshwater reserve that feeds the Indus, the Ganges, and the Brahmaputra simultaneously — could lose up to two-thirds of their volume by 2100. River flows will peak mid-century as melt accelerates, then decline permanently as the ice runs out.

Every dam India is building now to capture current meltwater will become a more fiercely contested piece of infrastructure as total basin flows shrink in the decades ahead. The geopolitical competition today is, in part, a race to lock in hydraulic infrastructure before the basin’s long-term carrying capacity falls — a race in which winning now means that someone else loses everything tomorrow.

The lesson being taught in the Indus basin — that a sufficiently powerful state can suspend its transboundary water commitments by declaring a security emergency, reject binding international arbitration with impunity, and build infrastructure that permanently alters downstream hydrology while the international community watches in silence — will not be confined to South Asia.

It is already being studied in Cairo, in Ankara, in Addis Ababa and in every capital that sits upstream of a weaker neighbor and downstream of a stronger one.

The World Bank, which is a signatory to the IWT and played a decisive mediating role in its negotiation, has issued no meaningful response to the treaty’s systematic dismemberment. The precedent hardens with every passing month of institutional silence.

What is needed — and what does not exist — is a multilateral water governance architecture that incorporates China, binds upstream rights to downstream obligations across the full Himalayan system, accounts for glacial retreat and shifting monsoon patterns, and treats Himalayan water as a regional common on which hundreds of millions of people across multiple states rely.

The Chenab is running on the basis of a political decision made in New Delhi. The Padma is running on a treaty that expires in six months. The Brahmaputra is running under what will be China’s and world’s largest dam. And the glaciers that feed them all are melting and running out.