A dam on the Indus river system, in Reasi in Jammu and Kashmir.
| Photo Credit: PTI
On November 30 1960, the Lok Sabha witnessed an extraordinary debate. The debate was initiated by Congress MP Iqbal Singh from Punjab as Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru looked on. Within seconds, the exchange took a curious turn as several members from the ruling Congress party, who were present in the hall to debate the newly signed Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), began to criticise the Nehru government.
Most surprisingly, during the 150-minutes long discussion, the strongest criticism to the treaty came from the Congress MPs from Punjab and Rajasthan — the two States that were part of the Indus-waters network. H.C. Mathur of the Congress took to the floor and gave out the bitterest criticism, saying the treaty would adversely affect Rajasthan. Iqbal Singh, who started the debate, argued that the treaty would affect food production in Indian Punjab. As Prime Minister Nehru waited for his chance to rise to the defence of the treaty that was signed by him and Gen. Ayub Khan of Pakistan on September 19, 1960, members termed the Indus Waters Treaty “appeasement and surrender to Pakistan”. Asoka Mehta of the Congress argued that the country had been betrayed by those who were supposed to defend its interests.
The members of the ruling party that had been overseeing nearly 12-year long river water dispute that began soon after Partition of British India, were upset about the fact that Pakistan would get ₹83 crore in foreign exchange (to be financed by the World Bank) as part of the execution of the treaty. Rising to the defence of the treaty, Nehru described the critics as “narrow-minded” and said, the agreement was arrived at after “long and bitter negotiation” between the two sides mediated by the World Bank. Three weeks later, the Indian Parliament ratified the IWT.
The IWT did not have an exit clause. Article XII (3) and (4) provide for modification of treaty provisions through a “duly ratified treaty”, which will replace the present one with the condition that it cannot be abrogated unilaterally. The main treaty provisions were that India has the exclusive rights over the eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas and Sutlej) with a combined average annual discharge of 33.8 million Acre Feet (MAF) and Pakistan has exclusive rights over the three western rivers (Indus, Jhelum and Chenab) with annual discharge of 135.6 MAF. As per the treaty, India has the right to store a volume of 3.6 MAF of water.
The “long and bitter negotiation” that Nehru referred to began soon after the Partition of India that led to several lasting problems between the two countries. The problem first flared up in 1947-48 in the backdrop of the first India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir. While the war over Kashmir was the main focus in the first year of the existence of two newly separated entities, the sub-text of this conflict was visible in the clashing narrative over sharing of the waters of the Indus through the canal system built in Punjab during the British colonial period. Water historians say when India halted water of the Indus, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan arrived in New Delhi, leading to the 1948 agreement. The water dispute, however, did not disappear, and played out as part of the larger network of issues that defined the India-Pakistan relationship ever since.
While starting from 1951-52 India became a parliamentary democracy with a stable political leadership, Pakistan began a tentative journey towards the future plagued by language problem, rivalry between the West and the East Pakistan and lack of participatory democracy at home. These power rivalries exploded on the surface in the late 1950s when East Pakistan-origin Gen. Isqander Mirza became the President of the struggling country.
World Bank mediation
Mirza scrapped the constitutional dream of Pakistan and prohibited political parties only to be deposed weeks later by Gen. Ayub Khan. The Pakistan that came to the table to conclude the Indus Waters Agreement under the mediation of World Bank chief Eugene Black was therefore a military-ruled state that was in a hurry to prove its domestic critics wrong by resolving certain congenital problems that its political leaders had failed to solve in the previous decade. A settlement of the Indus dispute suited the Nehru government politically as that would remove one of the major festering problems with Pakistan and prove Nehru’s critics wrong. A solution suited the Pakistani general as well as the scholarly Indian PM.
Ayub Khan threw a grand welcome for the Indian team and put up a show of internal normalcy at the time of the signing ceremony in Karachi. Nehru travelled across Pakistan and visited Murree, Nathiagali, Rawalpindi and Lahore and both leaders agreed that eradication of poverty was the common goal of both sides. Yet, within weeks of signing the IWT, Gen. Ayub Khan delivered a provocative speech in Muzaffarabad saying, Indo-Pakistan relation would not stabilise “till the Kashmir issue is resolved”.
The second test of the IWT came during 1965 Indo-Pak. war when the focus was on Kashmir. Following the Tashkent Accord, Ayub Khan sprang a surprise with the construction of the Mangla dam, the world’s largest earthen dam that was inaugurated in 1967 promising to supply water to more than 3 million acres of land and generate 600,000 KW of electricity. It was obvious that the poverty eradication scheme that Ayub Khan had discussed during the signing of the Indus Waters Treaty was the idea that powered his plans for the massive Mangla project. One problem with the Mangla dam was that the major part of the project fell in the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. In effect, the dam would not violate the sovereignty of India as envisioned in the IWT but in reality it trampled on India’s sovereignty in Kashmir. The Parliament in India took up the construction of Mangla dam and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi responded that India’s sovereign rights over Pakistan-occupied Kashmir were not diminished by the construction of the Mangla dam. On the other hand, the dam and its perceived benefits for west Pakistan fuelled the allegations of bias towards West Pakistan further alienating East Pakistan that ultimately led to the 1971 war and creation of Bangladesh.
Water a weapon
In the twenty-first century, China’s move to build mega dams in the Himalayas, which revived the prospects of use of water as a weapon among riparian states and the spike in cross-border terrorism from Pakistan, triggered talks of a review of the treaty. In the backdrop of the 2016 arrest of former Indian navy official Kulbhushan Jadhav on charges of supporting terrorism in Balochistan and the cross-border terror attacks in Pathankot and Uri in January and September 2016, India completed the Kishanganga dam in Kashmir and pushed ahead with the Ratle hydel power project on the Chenab despite Pakistan’s displeasure. The matter could not be resolved by the World Bank.
In 2023, India invoked the relevant treaty provisions to request a bilateral modification of the treaty that Pakistan declined. Before putting the Indus Waters Treaty ‘in abeyance’ on April 23, 2025, India in 2024 had indicated that its patience over the IWT was fast running out when it called off all meetings of the Permanent Indus Commission demanding that teams from both sides should meet and discuss the 2023 proposal for modification of the treaty. Post-Pahalgam attack, Indian declaration on holding the treaty ‘in abeyance’, however, has turned the clock back to where it began — a broken India-Pakistan relation as it was in the late 1940s.
Published – April 27, 2025 01:30 am IST
