India has so far, refused to reconsider its decision to hold the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) in abeyance but the fact is that it cannot completely stop the flow of rivers into Pakistan, given the current infrastructure that it has, according to a report on Al Jazeera channel website.
But experts caution that even a small diversion or blockage could hurt Pakistan, if India were to manage to stop the flow of the Indus Basin rivers. They warn that any such move could set the stage for a full-fledged war between two countries.
In April, India said it was walking out of the IWT after gunmen killed 26 tourists in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu Kashmir (IIOJK). A day later, Pakistan’s National Security Committee (NSC) rejected the “unilateral” move, warning that “any diversion of Pakistan’s water is to be treated as an act of war”.
The 85-page IWT brokered by the World Bank and signed in 1960 is different from most global water treaties that share water according to their total volume of flows. On the contrary, the IWT divides the rivers – three eastern rivers to India and three western rivers to Pakistan.
The treaty was a “hydraulic partition” that followed political partition, Majed Akhter, senior lecturer in geography at King’s College London told Al Jazeera. “It was needed to resolve issues of the operation of an integrated irrigation system in Punjab,” he added.
However, Akhter pointed out that water sharing between the neighbours is linked to their dispute over Kashmir. “Territorial control of Kashmir means control of the waters of the Indus, which is the main source of water for the heavily agrarian economies” of Pakistan and India, he added.
