Beyond abeyance: rethinking the future of IWT

India's placing of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) in "abeyance" has no legal justification. A neutral expert process and, more recently, the Court of Arbitration at The Hague reaffirmed that the 1960 treaty remains in force and rejected the notion that India can unilaterally suspend it. Pakistan has welcomed these decisions, while India has rejected them.

The result is a paradox: the treaty remains legally in force but has become increasingly dysfunctional in practice.

The Permanent Indus Commission, the principal bilateral mechanism for implementing the treaty, has not held a formal annual meeting since 2022. Its commissioners are required to meet at least once a year to facilitate communication, information exchange and cooperation. The disruption of this vital mechanism has made technical disagreements harder to manage.

Even before declaring the treaty in abeyance in 2025, New Delhi had sought its modification, issuing notices to Pakistan in 2023 and 2024. Pakistan has also challenged the design of Indian run-of-river dams on the western rivers, seeking arbitration under the treaty to resolve these disputes. A more constructive approach would have been for both countries to address these differences through bilateral negotiations.

Some experts point out how the IWT's rigid division of the rivers has encouraged a narrow, zero-sum approach to water rather than fostering genuine basin-wide cooperation. Yet, Pakistan is understandably wary of abandoning or renegotiating the treaty, especially when India is now unwilling to cooperate within its existing framework.

IWT does contain an underused mechanism for expanding cooperation. Article VII recognises that India and Pakistan have a "common interest" in the optimum development of the rivers and provides for further cooperation by mutual agreement. This offers a framework for addressing issues the original treaty did not adequately anticipate, including groundwater management, water quality and climate change.

India and Pakistan could also negotiate memoranda of understanding and technical protocols alongside the IWT without necessarily reopening its core provisions.

The division of the six rivers under the IWT in 1960 provided an imperfect but durable framework for managing India-Pakistan water relations. But the treaty was not designed to address the challenges facing the Indus Basin in the twenty-first century.

The Indus Basin is changing. Climate change is altering precipitation and snow and glacier melt patterns, increasing the risks of both flooding and water stress. The Indus delta has also suffered from reduced freshwater and sediment flows, contributing to significant ecological stress.

Climate monitoring, glacier observation and flood forecasting are practical and mutually beneficial areas of cooperation that do not require either country to resolve its broader political disputes first.

The immediate priority should be restoring the treaty's institutional machinery, including resumption of regular meetings of the Permanent Indus Commission, and restoring routine data exchange and inspections. This could set the stage for initiating discussions on climate-proofing the treaty and ensuring its long-term sustainability.

India cannot afford to view itself simply as an upstream riparian dealing with a downstream Pakistan. With the Indus originating in Tibet and its tributaries flowing through both countries, the health of its rivers, glaciers and associated ecosystems affects both. India is thus a co-riparian within a shared and increasingly stressed Indus basin.

International actors, including the United States, should encourage both countries to preserve the treaty framework rather than allow water cooperation to become another casualty of their broader security tensions. Using a water treaty as leverage in a separate security dispute risks undermining one of the few institutional mechanisms that has endured repeated crises between the two nuclear neighbours.