After the India-Pakistan War in 2025, the revival of the water-sharing treaty largely depends on Pakistan.

On May 15, 2026, the Court of Arbitration at The Hague issued a further award on the water storage permitted at Indian hydroelectric projects on the western rivers of the Indus basin. India rejected it as null and void, restating its position that the tribunal is illegally constituted and that the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty remains in abeyance. The response was consistent with a position New Delhi has held without deviation since April 2025: a treaty built on good faith cannot oblige one party to perform in full while the other sponsors violence against it.

India placed the treaty in abeyance on April 23, 2025, a day after gunmen killed 26 people at Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir, most of them tourists. A four-day conflict between India and Pakistan followed two weeks later. India’s suspension was explicitly conditional, stating it would hold until Pakistan credibly and irrevocably abandoned its support for cross-border terrorism, which New Delhi has evidenced through active operations of militant groups from Pakistan’s territory. On July 3, 2026, India’s External Affairs Ministry reaffirmed that the measure would remain until that condition was met.

The treaty’s own preamble grounds it in goodwill and friendship. India argues that sustained hostility erodes that foundation, and that cooperative obligations flowing from it cannot be insulated from the other side’s conduct. New Delhi frames the step narrowly: it has withdrawn cooperative goodwill, while leaving the physical flow of water intact.

The record India brings to that argument is unusually consistent. Signed on September 19, 1960, under the auspices of the World Bank, the treaty allocated the three eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej) to India and the three western rivers (Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab) to Pakistan. Pakistan receives roughly 80 percent of the basin’s annual flow. India, though the upper riparian, accepted tight limits on storage, irrigated area, and the design of run-of-river projects on the western rivers, and it paid £62 million ($174 million in 1960) towards the canal infrastructure that carried water to Pakistan after partition.

India honored those terms despite engaging in wars with Pakistan in 1965, 1971, and 1999, as well as during the terror attacks on its Parliament in 2001 and Mumbai in 2008 by groups supported by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Water flowed uninterrupted throughout. Pakistan, for its part, used the treaty’s dispute machinery to delay Indian projects it could not otherwise halt. Objections forced a lower dam and reduced storage at Salal. The Tulbul navigation project was frozen for decades. Kishenganga, Ratle and Baglihar were each drawn into prolonged proceedings that raised costs and slowed construction. India’s case is that it has given the treaty six decades of good faith, only to be met with obstruction.

India’s rejection of the Hague rulings rests on a specific reading of the treaty’s own procedure. Its objection is procedural, concerning which forum the treaty authorizes, and New Delhi says it remains willing to be bound by the mechanism the treaty actually prescribes. Article IX sets out a graduated, sequential process. Differences go first to the Permanent Indus Commission, then to a neutral expert appointed by the World Bank for technical questions, and only then to a Court of Arbitration for genuine questions of legal interpretation. The steps are meant to run in a strict order.

On the Kishenganga and Ratle projects, India requested a neutral expert. Pakistan pressed instead for a Court of Arbitration on substantially the same questions. India maintains that running both forums at once, on the same dispute, breaches the treaty and creates the risk of contradictory findings, which the sequence was designed to prevent. On that basis, New Delhi treats the court as improperly constituted, has declined to appoint arbitrators or to appear, and regards its awards as void from the outset. In January 2025, the neutral expert found himself competent to decide the differences over the two projects, which India cited as proof that the correct forum was already handling the dispute.

India has suspended cooperation while maintaining supply. It has paused hydrological data-sharing, meetings of the Permanent Indus Commission, and its engagement with the dispute mechanism. It has not diverted, dammed, or blocked the western rivers, whose waters continue to reach Pakistan. This step is calibrated and, on India’s account, reversible the moment that its condition is met.

India has kept the water flowing while withholding goodwill. By contrast, Pakistan’s response has increasingly turned to threats; its defense minister has described any interference as an act of war, and its army chief warned that Indian dams could be struck with missiles. A non-forcible and reversible measure has therefore been met with the language of force, which sits uneasily with the claim that Pakistan approaches the treaty as a partner in good faith.

India’s broader aim is to renegotiate the original treaty. It served formal notices under Article XII(3) in 2023 and 2024 seeking to modify provisions that had been overtaken by six decades of demographic growth, changing energy needs, and climate-driven variability in the basin. Pakistan has thus far declined to engage substantively on these requests. The abeyance raises the cost of that refusal and ties the treaty’s cooperative machinery to an end to cross-border violence.

The treaty was built to keep water above politics, but that design assumed reciprocal good faith, and it is that assumption, rather than the flow of any river, that India argues has failed. Restoring the cooperative mechanisms lies largely within Pakistan’s power. It can address the security conduct that prompted the suspension and return to the table on modifying the treaty’s provisions. Until it does, India’s position is unlikely to soften. A treaty cannot function as a one-way obligation, binding on the party that keeps faith and unenforceable against the party that does not. India has, in effect, asked that the pact be read as the reciprocal bargain it was always meant to be.

About the Author: Vlad Paddack

Vlad Paddack is a fellow at Nightingale International and a senior analyst at AKE International, specializing in Eurasian security and political affairs, with a particular focus on the intersection of energy and geopolitics. He completed his undergraduate studies in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He earned his master’s degree at the Graduate Institute of Geneva, where he wrote his thesis on energy security in Kazakhstan and Georgia.

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