The most dangerous consequence of India placing the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance will probably not be a dry riverbed appearing across Pakistan tomorrow morning. New Delhi lacks the reservoirs, canals and diversion works required to stop the western rivers at will. The nearer danger is the disappearance of predictability: water passing through the territory […]
Indus
Weaponising the Indus!
Undoubtedly, the strategic landscape of South Asian hydro-politics is undergoing a dangerous transformation. I visited the Jinnah Convention Center in Islamabad to attend an international seminar on the Indus Waters Treaty on 30th June. The event brought together global thinkers, international legal experts, and state practitioners to dissect a shared crisis: India’s unilateral decision to […]
Indus Red Line
Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar’s keynote address played in Brussels came wrapped in the language of international law, but its message was unmistakable. Every passing day comes as yet another piece of evidence that India is no longer merely testing the limits of the Indus Waters Treaty but trying to change the facts of the basin […]
Indus Disputes Demand a Treaty-First Reset
Fresh global evidence from the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) strengthens the case for resolving Indus basin issues strictly under the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), calling for a reversion to the treaty’s mechanisms and a refrain from unilateral actions that undermine international water agreements. IEP’s 2025 Ecological Threat Report describes the IWT as a […]
Weaponising the Indus
President Asif Ali Zardari’s words at the Doha summit were uncharacteristically, albeit necessarily, blunt: India’s attempt to “weaponise water cannot and will not succeed.” The statement captured the mood of an anxious nation that understands the stakes. Eighty per cent of Pakistan’s surface water originates upstream in India, and nine in ten Pakistanis live in […]
Western Delta of the Indus River
Recently I filmed a vast tract of a flat estuary surface. It was at low tide and the sound heard when the boats engine shut, was unusual. Popping sounds, as if a thousand fish had risen to the surface. Fish starved of oxygen, gulping at the surface for air, simultaneously. Koi in an over populated, […]