I have written about the Chenab's pulses, the sharp surges and sudden troughs that turn a Himalayan river into a regulated instrument. Those pulses are a story about timing: who controls when water arrives, and whether a farmer's warabandi turn will find the channel full or empty. What India is now building in Himachal Pradesh is a different story entirely. It is a story about territory. A tunnel does not manipulate when water arrives. It decides which river system the water belongs to.

At roughly 3,000 metres in Lahaul-Spiti, India is boring an 8.7-kilometre tunnel through the Great Himalayan watershed. When it emerges, it will carry water from the Chandra and Bhaga, the upper tributaries of the Chenab, westwards through a 113-kilometre canal into the Beas basin. The Chenab is a Western River, allocated by the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty to Pakistan. The Beas is an Eastern River, allocated to India. A tunnel that moves water from one place to another does not merely change a river's course. It challenges the Treaty’s central architecture.

The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 did not divide water by percentage. After nearly a decade of World Bank-facilitated negotiations, it divided entire river systems. The three Eastern Rivers (Sutlej, Beas, and Ravi) went to India for unrestricted use. The three Western Rivers (Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab) went to Pakistan. India's limited rights on the Chenab are explicitly restricted to four narrow uses, each confined, in the Treaty’s own words, to the drainage basin thereof. The Beas basin is not the Chenab's drainage basin. A transfer from one to the other is not a matter of operational interpretation. It is a category the Treaty does not contain.

The Chenab carries roughly 35 million acre-feet of water annually. The proposed Link Canal would divert less than 1 million........

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