The July 2025 ruling of the Supreme Court of India is more than a legal document—it is a watershed moment in South Asia’s ecological history.

For decades, both India and Pakistan have treated their rivers as instruments of politics, their mountains as mere construction sites, and their people as passive recipients of donor narratives and governmental neglect.

With rare candor, Justices J. B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan shattered this illusion by pointing to the unvarnished truth: the Himalayas are collapsing under the weight of reckless human intervention, and unless immediate action is taken, entire regions like Himachal Pradesh may vanish from the map.

This ruling is a humiliation for the Modi government, which has long celebrated hydropower projects in Occupied Jammu and Kashmir as symbols of national pride, but in truth, they are tools of political coercion against Pakistan. The dams built there serve neither the valley’s residents nor the wider Indian population in need of cheap, sustainable electricity. They are built not for light bulbs in Indian homes but for headlines in nationalist speeches.

For over a decade, Pakistan’s climate discourse has been hijacked by opportunists masquerading as experts. Some non-government organizations (NGOs) operator, armed with borrowed jargon—resilience, adaptation, carbon footprints, sustainability—paraded themselves on donor circuits, but produced neither serious research nor engineering blueprints. Their idea of climate activism was writing donor reports, attending five-star conferences, and reciting clichés about “climate justice”. When Sindh was submerged by floods in 2022 or when Balochistan’s aquifers dried up, these “experts” were missing. They had no hydrological data to present, no embankment plans, no reforestation schemes—only press releases.

Worse, they turned the deeply technical issue of water security into a reckless political campaign by calling for a revision of the Indus Waters Treaty. They neither understood Himalayan hydrology nor the ecological consequences of dam-building, yet they marketed this idea aggressively abroad. And tragically, it was........

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