India Puts the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty on Hold – Ambassador Kwatra Blames Pakistan’s Terrorism

New Delhi’s decision to keep the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance has sparked a fresh round of diplomatic sparring, and the Indian ambassador to the United States, Vinay Kwatra, has laid out why, in a piece that ran in Newsweek.

Kwatra opens with a stark observation: the treaty was signed “in a spirit of goodwill and friendship,” yet Pakistan has spent half a century chipping away at that goodwill. In his view, the treaty’s suspension is not a new move by India – it is simply an acknowledgment of what Pakistan’s conduct has already done.

The timing, he points out, is anything but coincidental. Just a day after a gruesome attack on tourists in Pahalgam, Jammu & Kashmir – an assault claimed by the Pakistan‑trained Lashkar‑e‑Tayyiba that left 26 civilians dead – New Delhi announced the treaty would be held in abeyance. “Terror and talks cannot go together,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said, and Kwatra echoes that sentiment, adding that “terror and trade cannot go together… water and blood cannot flow together.”

Kwatra does not mince words about Islamabad’s response to the treaty over the decades. He lists the wars of 1965, 1971 and 1999, followed by a litany of cross‑border terror attacks – from the 2001 Parliament siege to the 2008 Mumbai carnage, the 2016 Uri and Pathankot strikes, the 2019 Pulwama bombing, and most recently the Pahalgam massacre. “Over 40,000 civilians in India have been killed because of Pakistan’s persistent terror campaign,” he writes.

Beyond the violence, the envoy accuses Pakistan of a more subtle sabotage: endless bureaucratic delays and institutional obstructionism whenever India proposes a hydro‑project that falls under the treaty’s provisions. He cites the 2012 strike on the Tulbul Navigation Project as a concrete example of how kinetic attacks have thwarted India’s treaty‑based rights.

The original agreement, signed in 1960, split the six major rivers of the Indus Basin. India got the three eastern rivers – about 20 % of the basin’s flow – while Pakistan received the three western rivers, holding roughly 80 % of the water. Kwatra notes that this structural asymmetry has long limited India’s ability to tap its own water potential, yet India honoured the pact despite the odds.

In a recent conference in Islamabad, Pakistan protested India’s move and even threatened war if its demands on the river system were not met. Kwatra dismisses such bluster as “a standard policy option for Islamabad to distract from its internal problems.” He concludes that any genuine cooperation from Pakistan would first require it to dismantle the terror infrastructure it has built.

For now, the treaty remains on pause, a symbolic gesture that reflects the broader mistrust between the two neighbours. As Kwatra puts it, the question isn’t whether water can be shared, but whether the parties can ever share it without the shadow of terror hanging over the conversation.