India has walked out of the Indus Waters Treaty. A treaty that survived three wars has effectively been junked by the Modi government. The medium to long-term impact of this decision will wreck Pakistan’s already dilapidated economy. Pakistan’s agricultural and energy sectors will take an unimaginable beating soon. India’s message to GHQ Rawalpindi and Islamabad is clear: your decades-long campaign of training and sponsoring terrorists has led us to shut your “hookah-paani."

In October 2024, I had reported that there was growing angst within the Government of India over the Indus Waters Treaty. Back then, an emerging view in the corridors of power was that the water-sharing treaty has been detrimental to Indian interests for decades, while being overly accommodative of Pakistan. This, despite the fact that Pakistan has used all resources at its disposal to bleed India using terrorism and a strategy of “a thousand cuts". It must be mentioned here that the treaty accorded more than 80 per cent of the total resources in the Indus River Basin to Pakistan, apart from financial aid to build infrastructure on western Punjab’s rivers.

Six months later, the deed is done. India has laid the ground to choke Pakistan off water supplies that sustain it as a country. However, there is some scepticism over what the ramifications of such a move will be in the long term. After all, couldn’t China theoretically do the same with rivers flowing........

© News18