IWT violation by India risks global water order

Former Punjab Irrigation Minister Sardar Mohsin Khan Leghari said on Tuesday that

RAJANPUR, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 21st Jul, 2026) Former Punjab Irrigation Minister Sardar Mohsin Khan Leghari said on Tuesday that

India's suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty had undermined not just Pakistan's

water rights but the legal foundation underpinning hundreds of river-sharing agreements

worldwide, warning that the precedent New Delhi was setting could one day be turned

against it.

Talking to APP, Leghari said the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab were not merely three

rivers but the lifeline of tens of millions of Pakistani farmers, sustaining the wheat,

rice and cotton that feed a population of 250 million.

He recalled that India announced in April, 2025, that it was "holding in abeyance"

the 1960 treaty, a move he described as a unilateral attempt to strip the rule of law

from a river system that had underwritten over six decades of peace between two

nuclear-armed neighbors who have fought three wars.

The former minister argued the move had no legal footing, mentioning that treaty

requires mutual consent of both parties for any amendment or termination. He said

the Court of Arbitration at The Hague had rejected India's position three times,

in June 2025, August 2025 and May 2026, with New Delhi each time dismissing

the court as "illegal" and its rulings as "void." That pattern, he said, was itself

evidence that India had no legal argument left, only denial, and it was Pakistanis

who were paying the price of that denial.

Leghari pointed to the floods of August 2025, when the Chenab, Ravi and Sutlej

rose simultaneously in what he called the worst flooding since 1988, affecting

more than four million people in Punjab and killing over 300. Families settled for

years along the dry bed of the Ravi near Lahore, holding valid land documents

and utility connections, were suddenly swept up in the deluge because the treaty's

early-warning mechanism had been suspended months earlier, he said. The treaty,

he argued, had not merely divided water; it had created the conditions on which

people built their lives, and India had knocked out that foundation.

He said the stakes extend far beyond South Asia.

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More than 300 trans-boundary

water treaties exist worldwide, governing the Nile among Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia,

and the Danube among European nations, all resting on the same principle India

had now challenged: that a powerful upstream state could not walk away from

a water treaty on political pretext. If India succeeds in breaking that principle

unchecked, he warned, it opens the door for any upstream country seeking to

weaponize a river against a weaker downstream neighbor. Pakistan's legal fight,

he said, was therefore a fight for the water law of the entire world.

Leghari argued India should look in the mirror, since the very principle it was applying

against Pakistan today could be applied against it tomorrow by an upstream country

of its own. India itself sits downstream on rivers originating beyond its borders,

he observed, and by establishing that upstream states may suspend water treaties

on grounds of security concerns, India was handing any such upstream neighbor

precisely the justification it would need to do the same to India. This, he said, was

not merely a moral contradiction but a strategic blunder: the shield India was breaking

for use against Pakistan was one it would need for itself tomorrow.

He said Pakistan's strength lies in law, not force, and that its position had now been

upheld three times by international arbitration, with the World Bank, as guarantor of the

treaty, confirming that no unilateral suspension was permissible under its terms.

He urged Pakistan government to convert that legal and moral standing into sustained

diplomacy, by rallying other downstream states, raising the issue at international forums,

and presenting its case on the basis of facts and data.

India, he said, had tried to stop a river, but rivers could not be suspended by decree,

nor can the principle that had held the world's water treaties together for nearly seventy

years. Pakistan's land, its farmers and the sanctity of international law, he said, were

all being tested at once, and history ultimately sides with nations that stand firmly on

truth and their rights, he concluded.