1 week Ago By Firstpost
When the dastardly Pulwama attack took place in February 2019, Bharat responded with the audacious airstrikes against terrorist training camps in Balakot. The action was unprecedented. But over the years, the government realised that Balakot might have conveyed a strong message to Islamabad that any act of terrorism emanating from Pakistani soil won’t go unpunished.
Still, it wasn’t enough to dismantle the overall jihadi infrastructure in that country. On April 23, in the wake of the Pahalgam attack that led to the killing of 26 people, the government decided to suspend the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, among a few other diplomatic decisions. The treaty is unique in the way that it is the only water agreement in the world that has conceded the “doctrine of restricted sovereignty” in the Indus basin comprising six main rivers—Indus, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej.
Of the six rivers, the treaty, quite generously, gives Pakistan complete authority over the three westernmost rivers—Indus, Jhelum and Chenab—contributing 80.52 per cent of annual flows in the Indus basin. The remaining three rivers are allotted to Bharat, contributing merely 19.
48 per cent of the annual flows. By any standard of the term, this has been the most generous water treaty ever offered to any country. (Pakistan, for instance, gets 90 times more water than Mexico’s share under a 1944 treaty with the United States.
) Bharat hoped that its generosity would push Pakistan towards a good-neighbourly path and stop sponsoring terrorism. Delhi was trying to buy peace by offering water. But Islamabad instead returned the favour with blood—a lot of blood.
What’s little known is that the Indus Waters Treaty was the outcome of an American bullying: The then US administration had coerced the then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, into signing this deal. Former diplomat Rajiv Dogra recounts in his seminal book, Where Borders Bleed , how at the time of Partition, Mohammed Ali Jinnah “replied caustically that ‘he would rather have deserts in Pakistan than fertile fields watered by the courtesy of Hindus’, when Cyril Redcliffe advised the two countries at the meeting of the Boundary Commission in Lahore in July 1947 to have joint management of the vast network of canals that ran through Punjab. By the autumn of 1947, informs Dogra, Jinnah had climbed down from his ‘not-needing-Hindu-water’ stand.
And by 1954, when the World Bank, under the American prodding, proposed that three main eastern rivers (Sutlej, Beas, Ravi) be reserved for Bharat, and the three western rivers (Indus, Chenab and Jhelum) should be for Pakistan’s use, the then Pakistani President, Ayub Khan, in his book Friends Not Masters believed this was “tantamount to asking for the moon”! Bharat’s financial difficulties in the late 1950s, writes Dogra, “provided the US a platform to put pressure on Nehru. What persuasion could not achieve was easily obtained through financial influence. The foreign exchange requirements of the Second Five Year Plan plus the financial strain of importing food due to drought-like conditions made India turn to the US and the World Bank for loans”.
In this backdrop, James Langley, the then American ambassador in Pakistan, suggested to Washington: “Both Pakistan and India are edging closer and closer to bankruptcy and India in particular is in financial terms becoming more desperate daily. The USA is thus in a position to put conditions on loans to make Nehru more amenable to a settlement with Pakistan.” Pakistan, thus, did get the moon! And in return, it gave nothing back to Bharat, except death and destruction in the name of jihad! This Pakistani policy of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds worked well till 2014.
It played its sinister game and Delhi kept forgiving and forgetting that. But post Pathankot, the Government of Bharat revised its Pakistan policy: Reciprocity became the buzzword, especially vis-à-vis Islamabad. For the first time, a country was made accountable for terrorism emanating from there.
By punishing Pakistan for terror originating on its soil, Bharat made its immediate western neighbour answerable for its acts of omission and commission. A new Lakshman Rekha was drawn and the politicians and generals of Pakistan had a rude awakening that this particular line could not be crossed without repercussions. There are enough historical precedents that show that any treaty signed under duress can be scrapped.
Also, Bharat can always cite the example of a country like China that has openly declared sovereignty rights over waters that flow through its territory. Why should Bharat follow a treaty that is exceptional in every word of the term? Moreover, post Pahalgam, new realities demand a new treaty. Meanwhile, the Modi government’s decision has received a mixed response.
While a large section of people have welcomed the move, some people question it, saying rivers are no ordinary taps that can be turned on and off as per one’s whims and fancies. What they don’t realise is that the government has been working on several projects on this front, especially in the past decade. One of them, Kishanganga Hydroelectric Project, built on a tributary of the Jhelum, was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in May 2018.
The 330 MW Kishanganga Project, located in Bandipora district of Jammu & Kashmir, is a run-of-river scheme. The project will provide a free power of 13 per cent to the Union Territory. Jhelum has another project, Tulbul Navigation Project, too which has been revived post-Uri attack in 2016.
While inaugurating Kishanganga, PM Modi also laid the foundation stone of the Pakal Dul Power Project in Jammu & Kashmir. Pakal Dul, with 1000 MW capacity, on completion, will be the largest Hydro Power Project in the Union Territory. Built on a tributary of a Chenab river, it is also the first storage project in Jammu & Kashmir.
Chenab has another project, Ratle Hydroelectric Project, which was revived in 2021 with an 850 MW capacity. The suspension of the Indus treaty is going to directly impact the lives of people in Pakistan, which is already a water-starved country. It relies heavily on the Indus for irrigation, with 80 per cent of its farming surviving on these waters.
Reduced water supply would immediately lower crop production, which would be catastrophic in a country where food inflation is already a big issue. What makes the situation worse is Punjab’s total and exploitative appropriation of Pakistani resources, including water. Authors Ashok Motwani and Sant Kumar Sharma write in their book, Indus Waters Story: Issues, Concerns, Perspectives : “Today, in Pakistan, except for Punjab and the regions adjacent to the upper Indus system, other parts, notably downstream Sindh, are simmering with discontent because the mighty Indus has almost vanished from their once fertile lands.
Large parts of Sindh province, which derives its name from the Indus (anglicised version of Sindhu) River, have turned barren and more may meet the same fate in the coming years. This has happened mainly because very little waters flow in the Indus today by the time it reaches the lower riparian Sindh and upper riparian Punjab appropriates them.” Such has been the Punjabi dominance that “perhaps, as part of Pakistan, the water rights of the Sindh province are afforded less protection than they were during the British period when the Indian Irrigation System ensured more fair apportionment of water”, as Motwani and Sharma write.
(One adds to this the overarching exploitation-cum-persecution of the Balochis and other tribals of the NWFP, and the total dissolution of the Pakistan project seems imminent.) The suspension of the Indus treaty is also important because it would particularly hurt the elites of Pakistan. The Chenab waters help irrigate vast tracts of land located east of Marala Barrage in Pakistan.
These large tracts of land are owned by the political-military elite of that country. Apart from the suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty, Bharat has decided to close the Attari Wagah border, cancel visa exemptions, expel Pakistani defence personnel, and also reduce the strength of the Indian mission in Islamabad. Pakistan, in retaliation, has announced that the 1972 Simla Agreement has been put in abeyance.
Bharat should be happy with the Pakistani decision, as the 1972 treaty was a sad reminder of Delhi’s political class squandering away all the gains its military had made on the battlefield. The removal of the Simla pact also takes away Islamabad’s façade of being interested in a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir issue, thus opening the doors for a renewed Indian effort to get back Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK). The time has come for Bharat to make a concerted effort to get POK back.
This will not just give the country its strategic depth in the region but also deliver Pakistan’s military-jihadi nexus a big jolt. Bharat’s post-Pahalgam strategy should begin from Indus and end in POK. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author.
They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views..
