Re-reading the water treaty

TWO senior officials, one each from Pakistan and India, have laid their arguments before an international readership. Dr. P.K. Saxena, former Indian Commissioner for Indus Waters, published a two-part indictment of the Indus Waters Treaty in May 2026, now circulating through Indian embassies worldwide. Syed Mehar Ali Shah, Pakistan’s serving commissioner, replied in Dawn on June 16. Both men know the IWT’s text better than most people today. Read together, their exchange is the most technically precise public debate on the Indus since the IWT was signed. It is also, ultimately, a debate between two officials who are both looking backwards. The rivers they are arguing over are not the rivers that existed in 1960. What India has argued: Saxena’s argument rests on a single, blunt thesis: India negotiated in good faith and paid for it for 65 years. Pakistan delayed acceptance of the 1954 World Bank proposal by four years, developing new uses on the western rivers throughout, and walked away with 80 per cent of the system’s water. India then wrote a cheque for £62 million to finance the infrastructure that made Pakistan’s allocation work. No other upper riparian has surrendered the larger share of a river system and then paid the downstream state to use it. The operational grievance is just as direct. Every major Indian hydropower project on the western rivers, Baglihar, Kishenganga, Pakal Dul, Tulbul, has faced prolonged Pakistani challenge. Pakistan privately acknowledged flood-moderation benefits of these projects while publicly blocking them, then packaged the obstruction as a water war narrative and marketed it internationally against a state that had not committed a single treaty violation in 65 years, including through three wars. A treaty, Saxena concludes, cannot hold when one party bears all the obligations and the other collects all the benefits. Abeyance is not the wrong decision at the wrong time. It is the only decision the arithmetic permits. How Pakistan