Asif Mahmood
India’s attempt to defend its decision to place the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance rests on a fundamental legal misconception: a state cannot acquire a power simply by announcing that it has one.
In his Newsweek article, India’s Ambassador to the United States, Vinay Mohan Kwatra, presents New Delhi’s position as though the suspension of the Treaty were a legitimate response to Pakistan’s alleged conduct. But political dissatisfaction, however strongly expressed, does not by itself create a legal entitlement to disregard a treaty. The real issue is not whether India is unhappy with Pakistan. It is whether international law permits India to unilaterally suspend an agreement that remains legally binding. The answer is far more complicated for New Delhi than Kwatra’s article suggests.
The text of the Indus Waters Treaty itself presents the first obstacle. Article XII(4) provides that the Treaty continues in force until terminated through a duly ratified treaty between the two governments. There is no clause giving either side an unrestricted unilateral power to place the agreement in “abeyance.” India cannot manufacture such a power through political declaration when the Treaty contains no such provision.
Nor can allegations of terrorism automatically alter that legal position.
India has repeatedly linked its decision to the Pahalgam attack and alleged Pakistani involvement. But an accusation is not the same thing as an established fact. Pakistan offered a joint investigation and subsequently indicated that it was prepared to have the matter examined by an independent forum. India rejected those proposals. The UN Special Rapporteurs, moreover, observed that India had not supplied credible evidence establishing Pakistan’s responsibility.
That distinction is crucial. International law cannot operate on the principle that an allegation, once made by one state, becomes sufficient legal justification for punitive action against another. If that were accepted, any government could accuse another of responsibility for an attack and then declare itself entitled to disregard its treaty obligations. The result would be a system in which legal commitments survive only for as long as political relations remain convenient.
That is not international law. It is the law of unilateral discretion.
There is another dimension to the dispute that the Ambassador’s argument largely overlooks. The Indus Waters Treaty does not exist in isolation from the broader international legal regime governing international rivers and transboundary water resources.
Water is not an ordinary commodity. For hundreds of millions of people, it is directly connected with food production, health, livelihoods and economic survival. That is why international law has developed a substantial body of principles concerning the equitable and reasonable use of shared water resources, the prevention of significant harm and cooperation between states sharing international watercourses.
The legal framework extends well beyond the Treaty itself. The UN Watercourses Convention, the UNECE Water Convention, the Helsinki Rules, the Stockholm Declaration, the Dublin Declaration, Agenda 21, the Mar del Plata Action Plan, the Protocol on Water and Health and other international instruments and declarations have contributed to the development of international norms relating to water. Some of these principles have acquired wider significance as customary international law.
The Ambassador therefore cannot reduce the dispute to a simple bilateral disagreement in which India may exercise whatever leverage it possesses upstream.
The institutional structure of the Indus Waters Treaty presents another difficulty for India’s position. The Treaty establishes mechanisms for addressing disagreements and disputes. Those mechanisms exist precisely because relations between states may deteriorate and because disagreements may become politically charged. The purpose of an international legal agreement is not to function only when both parties are satisfied with one another.
Pakistan has continued to rely on the Treaty’s dispute-resolution mechanisms. India, by contrast, has refused to participate in the Hague-based Court of Arbitration proceedings. But refusing to appear before an adjudicatory body does not make the underlying legal process disappear. Nor can a state invalidate an international proceeding merely by declining to participate in it.
The same principle applies to international inquiries. If India possesses decisive evidence linking Pakistan to the Pahalgam attack, the appropriate course is to place that evidence before an impartial investigative mechanism. That would allow the evidence to be tested rather than converted into a political justification for unilateral action.
The same should apply to competing allegations of a false-flag operation. Such claims should be investigated, not resolved through competing political narratives.
There is also a serious weakness in India’s much-repeated argument that it controls approximately 80 percent of the waters while Pakistan receives roughly 20 percent. The figures may sound impressive in political speeches, but they obscure the actual nature of the Treaty and Pakistan’s dependence upon the Indus river system.
For Pakistan, water security is not merely a question of how many cubic kilometres of water arrive over the course of an entire year. The timing and continuity of those flows are equally important. Agriculture operates according to seasons. Irrigation systems require predictable supplies. Hydropower generation depends on river flows. Food production, rural employment and millions of livelihoods are consequently tied to the reliability of the system.
A disruption at the wrong time can therefore cause damage that cannot be adequately described through an annual percentage.
This is why the attempt to portray the dispute as an argument over “80 percent versus 20 percent” is fundamentally incomplete. The issue is predictability, continuity and security of supply, not merely arithmetic.
For Pakistan, the Indus system is inseparable from national economic and human security. Any attempt to manipulate transboundary flows can therefore have consequences extending into agriculture, food security, employment, energy production and broader economic stability.
The implications of India’s position are consequently much larger than the India-Pakistan dispute.
Treaties are the infrastructure of international order. States enter into them precisely because they need commitments that remain reliable even when circumstances become difficult. If a government could unilaterally place a treaty in abeyance whenever political relations deteriorated, the credibility of international agreements would be seriously weakened.
That would be an especially dangerous precedent in a world where states increasingly depend upon shared rivers, seas, natural resources and interconnected ecosystems.
India’s conduct also raises a broader question about the meaning of a rules-based international order. What happens when a state rejects an agreed dispute-resolution mechanism, declines to participate in adjudication, disregards international scrutiny and then announces that its own political decision should prevail?
The answer cannot be that non-participation itself defeats the law.
International legal procedures are not optional simply because one party finds their outcome inconvenient. A state cannot make an international dispute disappear by refusing to enter the courtroom. Nor can it transform a political decision into a legal right by repeatedly describing it as one.
The Ambassador’s argument therefore fails at its most important point. The issue is not whether India has legitimate security concerns. States plainly have the right to protect themselves and investigate attacks against their citizens. The issue is whether those concerns permit India to bypass the legal obligations it voluntarily accepted.
That proposition requires something more substantial than political assertion.
If India believes that the Treaty has become legally unsustainable, it should make its case through the legal mechanisms available to it. If it believes Pakistan is responsible for terrorism, it should present the evidence to an impartial investigative process. If it believes the Treaty itself permits unilateral suspension, it should identify the provision that grants that power.
Until then, the language of “abeyance” changes nothing about the underlying legal reality.
A treaty does not cease to bind because one party is dissatisfied with the other. International law cannot be reduced to the preferences of the stronger state. And the stability of international agreements cannot depend upon whether governments happen to remain on friendly terms.
The Indus Waters Treaty is therefore about much more than water between India and Pakistan. It is a test of whether treaty obligations retain their meaning when political circumstances become hostile.
If India’s interpretation is allowed to become the norm, the damage will not stop at the banks of the Indus. It will send a much wider message: that international commitments can be set aside by unilateral declaration whenever political circumstances make them inconvenient.
That is precisely the kind of precedent a rules-based international system was created to prevent.