India reviews Indus water pact to turn heat on Pakistan

Blood & water can’t flow together, cautions Modi.

“Blood and water cannot flow together,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Monday as he met top officials to review a 56-year-old river water-sharing treaty with Pakistan. The PM’s strong message came as India weighs its options to hit back at Pakistan after the September 18 terror attack in Kashmir’s Uri.

The meeting decided to “exploit to the maximum” the waters of Pakistan-controlled rivers, including the Indus, Chenab and Jhelum, that flow from India, as per the Indus Water Treaty. The move comes as pressure grew on India to scrap the pact and corner Pakistan after terrorists backed by it killed 18 Indian soldiers, heightening tension between the two nuclear-armed neighbours.

India’s move to build dams and use the waters in areas of hydro power, irrigation and storage will pressure Pakistan, and may also be welcomed by the people of Jammu and Kashmir — rocked by anti-India protests since early July over militant commander Burhan Wani’s killing — who say the treaty is not fair to them.

The meeting also decided to set up an inter-ministerial task force to go into the details and working of the treaty with a “sense of urgency”, senior government sources said. “The PM’s message was that ‘rakt aur paani ek saath nahin beh sakta’ (blood and water cannot flow together),” a government source said.

Attended by national security adviser Ajit Doval, foreign secretary S. Jaishankar, the water resources secretary and senior PMO officials, the meeting noted that a meeting of the Indus Water Commission can “take place only in an atmosphere free of terror”. The commission has held 112 meetings so far.

Under the treaty signed by then PM Jawaharlal Nehru and then Pakistan President Ayub Khan in September 1960, the waters of six rivers — the Beas, Ravi, Sutlej, Indus, Chenab and Jhelum — were to be shared between the two countries. India had said last week that “it (the treaty) cannot be a one-sided affair”.

Noting that India, a high riparian state, has been very “generous” to Pakistan as a “goodwill” gesture, a government source said a “tough situation” has emerged after the terror strike, and it was “an appropriate time” to review the treaty. “We have not exploited the western rivers fully,” the source said, adding that India would exercise its legal rights under the treaty.

The scrapping of the treaty — off the table for now — will mean millions of acres of parched farmland in Pakistan, and similar actions from China on the river Brahmaputra. Pakistan has, as it is, been complaining about not receiving enough water, and has gone for international arbitration in a couple of cases.

Asked if China would react to India’s decision, sources said Beijing was not a party to the treaty, and noted that it was already building dams on the Brahmaputra, the waters of which are shared by India and China.