The Indus Treaty didn’t fail Bharat, the Nehruvian state did

A Hindi news channel recently flashed dramatic visuals of dry Pakistani reservoirs, shrinking canals and parched fields. The anchor triumphantly declared that Pakistan had been left high and dry because Bharat had finally “turned off the tap” after placing the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance.

For me, however, this was more a case of what Pakistan wanted the world to see. The spectacle reminded me of a familiar Pakistani performance from more than 70 years ago. In 1953, British politician HA Marquand was driven to Lahore and shown the Grand Canal, bone dry. His Pakistani guide solemnly claimed that Bharat had cut off Pakistan’s waters. Marquand, however, later learnt that the canal had merely been closed for its annual desilting.

The anecdote has endured because it captures Pakistan’s propaganda playbook perfectly. Few countries have weaponised victimhood as effectively. And nowhere has that strategy yielded greater dividends than over the Indus.

In the early 1950s, Pakistan internationalised the water dispute with remarkable success, winning Western sympathy. As author Uttam Kumar Sinha notes in Trial by Water: Indus Basin and India-Pakistan Relations, Jawaharlal Nehru became “increasingly exercised about India’s honour and reputation being constantly sullied by Pakistan”. Pakistan’s first foreign minister, Zafrullah Khan, repeatedly accused Bharat before the UN Security Council of turning off the waters of the rivers flowing into Pakistan. “Every drop of water,” he thundered, “means drinking water for cattle and for men, men’s food and sustenance.” Much of the West readily embraced the narrative. The Times of London even accused Delhi of pursuing two foreign policies: “One, directed towards Pakistan, was perceived as reliant on military strength and unwillingness to compromise, while the other, directed towards the rest of the world, was seen as grounded in moral power and accommodation.”

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Ironically, Pakistan’s most persuasive diplomat remained a suspect at home. Zafrullah Khan was an Ahmadiyya — reason enough to be distrusted in a state that aspired to become Qila-e-Islam, a citadel of Islam.

Without straying any further, it can safely be said that Delhi signed the Indus Waters Treaty in 1960 under relentless Western pressure and driven by Nehru’s desire to occupy the moral high ground. Ever since, critics have argued that the country surrendered 80 per cent of the Indus waters.

That, however, is only half the story.

Nehru might have viewed the Indus Treaty as an act of magnanimity that could anchor regional peace, but the same cannot be said about the Indian negotiators, who had a clear objective in mind. Here, it must be reiterated that interpreting the 4:1 ratio of water distribution in favour of Pakistan as one-sided concession would be a simplistic assessment, given the geographical realities of the Indus, especially its western rivers. These rivers enter the plains of Pakistan through deep mountain gorges in Kashmir; thus, building diversion dams or canals in the upstream mountainous terrain to irrigate Indian lands was not geographically or economically feasible at the time.

The Indian negotiators were not bargaining over percentages. What mattered for them was strategic control. They worked towards securing for the country exclusive rights over the eastern rivers — the Ravi, the Beas and the Sutlej — which were the lifeline of Punjab and Rajasthan. More importantly, they also retained substantial rights over the western rivers — the Jhelum, the Chenab and the Indus.

As Sinha notes, “India’s primary focus was on the eastern rivers, given the development requirements of East Punjab and Rajasthan. The Indian negotiators, working like beavers, ensured that the provision ‘for the exclusive use and benefits’ of the eastern rivers remained with India, while they were also successful in altering Pakistan’s provision for the exclusive use and benefits of the western rivers to their advantage.”

As per the Treaty: “India can irrigate annually 70,000 acres from the Indus, 400,000 acres from the Jhelum, and 231,000 acres from the Chenab, over and above the uses as on April 1960, and can impound, for specified purposes, 3.0 MAF on the tributaries of the Western rivers and 0.6 MAF on the Chenab main, apart from storage in small tanks for flood control in the Jhelum main.”

Pakistan accepted these terms because Bharat’s negotiators arrived armed with superior hydraulic expertise, meticulous basin mapping and, as Sinha writes, “thorough accounting for every cusec of water”.

The 1960 Treaty, therefore, should not be seen as Delhi’s strategic mistake. The mistake happened afterwards, when successive governments failed to exercise the rights the Treaty had already secured.

Pakistan, meanwhile, turned Article IX of the Treaty into a permanent instrument of obstruction. Every major Indian project — Salal, Tulbul, Baglihar and Kishanganga — became mired in objections, arbitration and endless delays. Reservoirs were never built. Hydropower remained unrealised. Delhi recognised Islamabad’s strategy but lacked the will to call its bluff.

All this resulted in Bharat storing barely 0.8 million acre-feet against an entitlement of 3.6 million. Of more than 11,400 MW of hydropower potential on the western rivers, only about 3,000 MW could be harnessed. Billions of cubic metres of water from the Ravi and Sutlej still flow into Pakistan — not because the Treaty requires it, but because Bharat never built the infrastructure the Treaty expressly permits.

Now, this is not the Treaty’s failure. It is the Indian state’s failure. More precisely, it is the failure of the Nehruvian state. For decades, Delhi possessed the rights but lacked the resolve.

Pakistan simultaneously cultivated another myth: that its water insecurity was Bharat’s responsibility. In reality, nearly 65 per cent of the Indus basin lies within Pakistan or territory under its control. Its water crisis is driven by inadequate storage, wasteful irrigation, groundwater depletion and chronic mismanagement. Islamabad, with its canny propaganda playbook, ably supported by the West, has turned its domestic failure into Delhi’s conspiracy to deny Pakistan its due.

With the dismantling of the Nehruvian order, especially since 2014, it was only a matter of time before Pakistan’s bluff was called. Placing the Treaty in abeyance, therefore, was not an act of aggression. It was an assertion of sovereignty. No state is obliged to preserve indefinitely the spirit of an agreement when the other party systematically weaponises its procedures. Islamabad repeatedly invoked the Treaty not to protect legitimate rights but to prevent Delhi from exercising its own.

Then, there’s another aspect about treaties: they aren’t — and should not be — indefinitely frozen in history. The Bharat of 2026 bears little resemblance to the Bharat of 1960. Its population has multiplied, water demand has surged and climate uncertainty has deepened. Above all, Pakistan’s persistent use of terrorism has shattered the assumptions on which the Treaty rested: that “this agreement would pave the way to settlement on other problems”, as Nehru had hoped in his interactions with ND Gulhati, Bharat’s chief negotiator for the Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan and the World Bank during the Nehru administration.

The real problem, therefore, was never the Indus Treaty. It was the governing philosophy that followed. A state obsessed with international approval, hesitant to exercise sovereign rights and convinced that unilateral restraint was a virtue even when it became strategically self-defeating, turned a well-negotiated Treaty into a strategic liability.

The Indus Treaty did not fail Bharat. The Nehruvian state did. By taking a tougher stance on the issue, the Modi government is attempting to do what the Nehruvian state should have done decades ago: either ensure that the Treaty was implemented in its true spirit or, if it had become an instrument of obstruction and obfuscation for Pakistan, abandon it.

(The writer is the author of ‘Bharat Rising: Dharma, Democracy, Diplomacy’ and ‘Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History’. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)