Pakistan, India and the betrayal of South Asian identity

Pakistan and India have spent nearly eight decades proving how different they are. Yet underneath the politics lies an older truth: both countries emerged from the same geographical and civilisational space. Partition gave that space two states, not two unrelated histories. Our languages still lean into one another. Our food carries the same aromas. Our music recognises itself across the border. Even our quarrels have the intimacy of a family argument that has gone on for too long.

The Indus belongs to this shared geography. It travels through mountains and valleys that existed long before either countries appeared on a map. It nourishes fields without asking which anthem is played nearby. That is why India's decision to place the Indus Waters Treaty "in abeyance" after the Pahalgam attack was so reckless. New Delhi tied the future of a water agreement to its allegation that Pakistan supported cross-border terrorism. In doing so, it turned a river system sustaining millions into an instrument of political pressure.

The attack at Pahalgam was horrifying. Twenty-six lives were lost. But accusation cannot become judgment merely because it is repeated loudly. Pakistan denied involvement and proposed an independent and credible international investigation. India chose military action instead.

India pronounced the verdict before producing evidence acceptable to anyone outside its own official narrative. That narrative has since faced uncomfortable questions. When Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim was pressed on whether Pakistan's alleged role constituted state terrorism, he said his counry's intelligence agencies had provided no such information. Similarly, at a recent press conference, the Pakistani military presented an individual whom, it said, India had identified as connected to Pahalgam and later claimed to have killed. The contradiction is not a minor detail. It goes to the heart of India's case: who was investigated, what was established, and how could military punishment precede an independent determination of responsibility? These questions cannot be drowned out by television graphics and patriotic slogans.

Pakistan's own past is complicated. There were policies on militancy that damaged the country and gave others reason for suspicion. But history cannot be used as permanent evidence against a nation. Pakistan today is itself bleeding from terrorism. According to figures released by Pakistan's military, the country's law-enforcement and intelligence agencies conducted 75,175 intelligence-based counterterrorism operations in 2025, while over 1,200 civilians and members of law-enforcement agencies were killed.

There is an irony here that India should not be allowed to overlook. The Hindu god Indra is worshipped as the breaker of Vritra's hold - the divine force that struck down the power obstructing the waters and released the rivers for humanity. Water, in that sacred memory, was not the property of the strongest. Its release was an act of order, justice and life. What, then, should one call a politics that celebrates Indra for freeing the waters but applauds a government for threatening to withhold them? This is not an argument borrowed from Pakistan. It is a reminder drawn from India's own religious inheritance. A civilisation cannot worship the liberator of rivers and, in the same breath, glorify the politics of their obstruction.

India remembers Indra as the liberator of waters. Yet its present rulers speak of rivers as though they were possessions to be withheld when politically convenient. A civilisation cannot celebrate the freeing of water in scripture while applauding its weaponisation in state policy.

The Indus Waters Treaty was signed in 1960 not because Pakistan and India trusted each other, but because they did not. Its genius lay in accepting hostility as a fact and still creating rules strong enough to protect ordinary life from that hostility. The treaty survived wars, broken diplomatic relations and decades of bitterness. It kept working because both countries understood that water could not be made hostage to every crisis.

India now claims the right to set that understanding aside unilaterally. But the treaty contains no provision allowing one party simply to suspend it. In June 2025, the Court of Arbitration held that India's declaration of "abeyance" did not affect the court's competence and that the treaty remains in force until both countries replace or terminate it through a duly ratified agreement. New Delhi rejected the court's authority.

This is what majoritarian power often does: it mistakes strength for entitlement. India's larger economy, military weight and upstream position may give it leverage, but they do not give it moral ownership of the Indus.

The politics is short-sighted in another way. India cannot sever Pakistan from South Asia without denying the geography to which India itself belongs. The two countries may have separate flags, but they share a climate system already under extraordinary stress. Glaciers are retreating, rainfall is becoming less predictable, floods are intensifying and populations are growing. This is precisely the moment when cooperation should deepen - not when water should be added to the arsenal of retaliation.

The Indus has flowed through empires that once imagined themselves permanent. It outlived them all. The question is not whether the river will continue towards the sea. It will. The question is what kind of people will live along its banks: neighbours who understood that survival required restraint, or rivals who discovered too late that geography cannot be defeated.