Weaponizing water: How India turned the Indus Treaty into a tool of strategic coercion

Muhammad Waleed Akhtar On 23 April 2025, one day after the Pahalgam attack killed 26 civilians in Indian illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIo JK), India announced that the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 would be held in abeyance with immediate effect. Sixty-five years of water-sharing arrangements, arrangements that had survived three wars, multiple military crises and sustained bilateral hostility, were suspended by a single diplomatic declaration. Home Minister Amit Shah stated the treaty would never be restored and that water would be diverted for Indian use. Pakistan called it an act of war. The Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled that the treaty remains legally binding regardless. India rejected the ruling and boycotted subsequent proceedings. What followed was not merely a diplomatic dispute. It was the deliberate deployment of water as a weapon against 300 million people downstream who had no part in the attack that triggered it. The Indus Waters Treaty’s vulnerability to this kind of coercion is rooted in geography that its 1960 architects never fully resolved. The three western rivers allocated to Pakistan under the treaty, the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab, all flow through IIoJK before crossing into Pakistan. The headwaters of 80 percent of Pakistan’s irrigated agriculture originate in or pass through a disputed territory under Indian military administration. Every hydropower project India has constructed in IIoJK on these rivers is simultaneously an electricity asset and a strategic lever. That lever has been built systematically. The Kishanganga project on the Jhelum tributary delivers 330 megawatts and diverts water under a design the Permanent Court of Arbitration only approved subject to mandatory minimum downstream flows of 9 cubic metres per second. The Baglihar dam on the Chenab delivers 900 megawatts across two stages. The Ratle project, 850 megawatts, remains under construction and under active arbitration. Pakal Dul at 1,000 megawatts and Sawalkot