NEW DELHI:
Pakistan will not get water from rivers over which India has rights, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Thursday, upping the rhetoric in a standoff over water access triggered by a deadly attack in IIOJK.
Pakistan’s chief legal officer, in an interview with Reuters, responded that Islamabad remained willing to discuss water sharing between the neighbours but said India must stick to a decades-old treaty.
“Pakistan will have to pay a heavy price for every terrorist attack … Pakistan’s army will pay it. Pakistan’s economy will pay it,” Modi said at a public event in Rajasthan.
“Pakistan is willing to talk about or to address anything, any concerns they may have,” Pakistan’s Attorney General, Mansoor Usman Awan, told Reuters.
He said India had written to Pakistan in recent weeks, citing population growth and clean energy needs as reasons to modify the treaty. But he said any discussions would have to take part under the terms of the treaty.
Islamabad maintains the treaty is legally binding and no party can unilaterally suspend it, Awan said.
“As far as Pakistan is concerned, the treaty is very much operational, functional, and anything which India does, it does at its own cost and peril as far as the building of any hydroelectric power projects are concerned,” he added.
The ceasefire between the countries has largely held. Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said there were no current exchanges of fire and “there has been some repositioning of forces accordingly”.
