The Indus Waters Treaty allocates the Eastern Rivers primarily to India and the Western Rivers primarily to Pakistan (with limited Indian uses), rather than establishing equal joint ownership of the entire basin, and India’s past record includes uninterrupted water flows even during wars. 

India placed the Treaty in abeyance after the April 2025 Pahalgam terrorist attack as a sovereign security measure conditioned on Pakistan credibly ending support for cross-border terrorism, not as formal termination or a response to ordinary technical disputes. 

The response rejects claims of unlawful unilateralism, arguing that parallel dispute proceedings initiated by Pakistan violated the Treaty’s graded settlement sequence, that data-sharing obligations must be read from the text, and that reciprocity requires addressing both water cooperation and security accountability.

This is a response to the article “Shared Rivers Cannot Become Instruments of Political Pressure” by Mr Umair Khan, published in Eurasia Review on August 12, 2026. The article presents Pakistan’s position on the Indus Waters Treaty as though it were the settled legal and factual position. That account is incomplete and materially misleading. It attempts to frame India’s decision to hold the Treaty in abeyance as a unilateral weaponisation of water, while omitting the Treaty’s actual allocation structure, the security context of Pakistan-sponsored cross-border terrorism, and the serious procedural dispute over parallel mechanisms initiated under the Treaty. What follows is a fact-based response.

The Treaty is not based on equal sharing

The Indus Waters Treaty does not establish a general principle that India and Pakistan jointly own or equally share every river in the basin. The Treaty makes a carefully negotiated allocation: the Eastern Rivers — Ravi, Beas and Sutlej — are allocated to India for unrestricted use, while the Western Rivers — Indus, Jhelum and Chenab — are allocated to Pakistan, subject to India’s rights to their waters for domestic, non-consumptive, agricultural and limited hydroelectric use, all governed by the technical conditions the Treaty prescribes. Among these are run-of-the-river hydroelectric projects, which do consume water permanently but merely use the flow to generate power before returning it to the........

© Eurasia Review