The Indian government held high-level meetings on Friday, April 25, to draw up plans to implement its decision to suspend India’s participation in the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, following the terrorist killings on April 22 in India-controlled Kashmir by an offshoot of the ISIS-linked Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group, historically based out of Pakistan. A comprehensive plan was developed in those meetings to “ensure that not a single drop of water flows into Pakistan from India,” until the terrorist infrastructure is cleaned up, India’s Minister of Water Resources C.R. Patil announced afterwards.
Among the responses to this from the Pakistani side are explicit threats by a government minister to use nuclear weapons against India, if the water is actually cut. Both Pakistan and India are nuclear weapons powers.
The Indus Waters Treaty allocates the rights of the two countries for use of the waters of the six major rivers of the Indus basin that they share. India is physically unable to cut off the flow of the three western rivers in the basin which the Treaty allocates principally to Pakistan, for reasons of geology and geography, as well as the time required to build canals, dams and reservoirs to divert the water. While unnamed Indian officials told various media that some such diversions could begin within months, Kushvinder Vohra, the recently retired head of India’s Central Water Commission, told NDTV that India could immediately stop sharing such water data with Pakistan as hydrological flows at various sites of the rivers flowing through India, withhold flood warnings and skip annual meetings under the Permanent Indus Commission headed by one official each from the two countries. “They will not have much information with them when the water is coming, how much is coming. Without the information, they cannot plan.”
