The author says monsoon flood blame aimed at India does not fit the Indus Waters Treaty: India’s allowed run-of-the-river projects have little live storage and cannot hold and dump a monsoon pulse. India, the piece says, still sends flood warnings.

Much of the water that floods Pakistan is said to come from rivers wholly inside Pakistan (Kabul, Swat, Panjkora, Kurram). 2022 PDNA work by the World Bank and others is cited for mud homes on floodplains, forest loss, and silted barrages—not Indian releases.

Pakistan’s own 2010 Supreme Court flood inquiry found huge riverbed encroachment in Sindh; later building in banned river corridors is called a hydraulic blockage. The argument: fix drains, floodways, and deforestation instead of pointing upstream.

Each monsoon, as devastating floods spread across Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan, Pakistan’s political establishment and sections of its media revive a familiar accusation: India has released water, withheld hydrological data or deliberately manipulated flows from upstream. The claim may serve an immediate political purpose, but it does not withstand scrutiny. The physical behaviour of the Indus basin, the engineering limits imposed by the Indus Waters Treaty, and Pakistan’s own official inquiries point to a more complex reality—one in which extreme rainfall, internal river systems, encroachment on floodplains, neglected drainage and weak disaster governance play a far greater role than any alleged Indian design.

Begin with the treaty itself. The run-of-the-river design that India is permitted to construct is a hard engineering constraint. These projects possess negligible live storage. They cannot impound a monsoon deluge and unleash it at a moment of India’s choosing. When a cloudburst or glacial surge strikes the........

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