Rivers beyond rivalries: Rethinking the Indus Waters Treaty

https://arab.news/8tgat

Once celebrated as a shared lifeline between India and Pakistan, the vocabulary surrounding the Indus has changed. Increasingly, it has become militarized, with terms such as “strategic asset,” “weapon,” “deterrence,” “escalation” and even “battlefield” creeping into discussions on the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, the agreement governing the sharing of the basin’s rivers.

More unsettling is the ease with which some now speak of “choking,” “starving,” “cutting off water supplies” or “turning off the tap.” Such language turns water into a weapon and obscures the truth: the Indus sustains some 300 million people, countless animals and entire ecosystems on both sides.

Political leaders have only amplified this rhetoric, and the language has become increasingly macabre. “Blood and water cannot flow together,” proclaimed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “Either our water will flow through it, or their blood,” warned Pakistan People’s Party chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari.

No treaty survives on legal clauses or hydrology alone. It endures because it is underpinned by trust, precisely what is missing between India and Pakistan today. - Zofeen T. Ebrahim

No treaty survives on legal clauses or hydrology alone. It endures because it is underpinned by trust, precisely what is missing between India and Pakistan today.

Beneath the militarized rhetoric lies a deeper impulse: to conquer, possess, control and dominate what was never meant to belong to one nation........

© Arab News Pakistan