Khurram Dastgir urges global action against India’s ‘weaponization of water’

ISLAMABAD, Jun 30 (APP): Former Federal Minister Engineer Khurram Dastgir Khan on Tuesday urged the international community to hold India accountable over “weaponization of water”, arguing that New Delhi’s decision to put the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance and subsequent actions violated international law and threatened the lives of millions dependent on the Indus Basin.

Dastgir was speaking at the closing session, titled “Indus Waters Treaty as an Enduring Legal and Institutional Framework,” of the international seminar on “Indus Waters Treaty 2026: An Instrument of Peace and Regional Stability.”

Beginning his address with a quote by American writer Henry David Thoreau that “the life in us is like the water in the river”, Dastgir said he had come to argue for “living rivers” and to “prosecute those who threaten a civilization, who have contempt for international law and who choke rivers to punish and coerce humanity.”

He said India had “weaponized water” by unilaterally putting the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance on April 25, 2025, despite the agreement having survived four full-scale wars and 65 years of hostility between two nuclear-armed neighbours. Referring to remarks made earlier during the seminar, he maintained that the concept of placing the treaty in abeyance had no legal basis because it did not exist in the treaty.

Dastgir said the announcement was followed by repeated public statements by Indian leaders. He quoted the Indian water minister as saying that “not a single drop of Indus water” would flow into Pakistan, Home Minister Amit Shah as declaring that the treaty would “never be restored”, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi as repeating his earlier remark that “blood and water cannot flow together”. He added that External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar had also recently stated that the treaty would not be restored.

Dastgir listed measures taken after the treaty was put in abeyance. He said India stopped sharing hydrological data and flood warnings within two days, announced a three-pronged strategy to deny water from the western rivers, closed the Baglihar Dam gates, reducing the Chenab’s flow by 90 per cent, shut the Salal Dam gates, flushed the Chenab reservoir in May 2025, and had continued taking measures over the past year to stop and divert water from the western rivers.

He said India released water from dams on the Ravi, Chenab and Sutlej rivers without advance warning during August and September 2025, affecting nearly 4.7 million Pakistanis through flooding.

Citing an unnamed senior Indian government official quoted by The Indian Express, Dastgir said the temporary stoppage of water in the Chenab had been described as “a punitive action” intended to demonstrate coercive measures and to punish Pakistan “on all fronts”.

“This is the policy of the Government of India — choke, punish, coerce,” he said, arguing that around 200 million Pakistanis, as well as the flora and fauna sustained by the river system, were being punished for allegations against their government.

Referring again to Amit Shah, Dastgir said the Indian minister had also declared that water flowing to Pakistan would be diverted to Rajasthan through a canal and that Pakistan would be “starved” of water.

He said the statement amounted to a declared intention to deprive a neighbouring population of water, a fundamental human right recognised under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and should also be viewed in light of the Geneva Conventions and the principles of international conduct.

On the legal front, Dastgir said Pakistan’s position was firmly grounded in international law. He cited the Court of Arbitration’s June 2025 finding that the treaty did not permit unilateral abeyance and that the court had reaffirmed its jurisdiction, while India had declared the court illegal and refused to participate.

He also referred to Article 62 of the Vienna Convention, saying political tensions, including terrorism, did not constitute a fundamental change of circumstances capable of altering the treaty’s water-sharing purpose.

He cited the International Court of Justice’s 1997 Gabcíkovo-Nagymaros judgment as closely corresponding to Pakistan’s case and also referred to the 1997 UN Water Convention, which, he said, required equitable and reasonable utilisation of shared waters and prohibited significant harm.

Dastgir argued that the weaponization of water could amount to collective punishment prohibited under international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions, while threats of mass starvation could potentially constitute crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute.

Referring to recent remarks by Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar, he said India’s 17 projects in the Indus river system could provide New Delhi with the tools for “hydro-hegemony”.

He said Pakistan’s legal case was strong but argued that the issue went beyond legal obligations, describing the treaty as more than a bureaucratic arrangement.

According to him, placing it in abeyance amounted to an attack on a living river basin on which 200 million Pakistanis depended, including farmers, mothers, children and fishermen whose livelihoods were sustained by the rivers.

Drawing on environmental scholarship, Dastgir cited Yale professor James Scott’s description of rivers as living entities that are born, evolve and may be “maimed and even murdered”.

He argued that threatening the Indus system was not merely a treaty violation but a threat against a living river basin whose destruction would affect millions of people.

He also referred to Cambridge scholar Robert Macfarlane’s argument that rivers should be regarded as living beings, citing legal recognition granted to rivers in Canada and New Zealand’s 2017 Te Awa Tupua Act, which recognised the Whanganui River as a legal person. “The Indus is not stuff. The Chenab is not stuff. The Jhelum is not stuff. The rivers of the Indus Basin are not stuff. They are the soul of our soil,” he said.

Calling on the international community to act, Dastgir urged all states that had signed the UN Charter and institutions claiming to uphold international law to defend the principle that water could not be weaponized, that water treaties could not be unilaterally dissolved by the stronger party, and that the lives of 200 million Pakistanis were not bargaining chips.

He said the Indus had flowed for 10,000 years and had sustained the Indus Valley Civilization long before modern capitals existed.

He argued that rivers did not belong to any one country but to the millions of lives they sustained and said their protection required preserving the entire ecosystem, including tributaries, wetlands, floodplains, marshlands, Sindh’s mangroves, fish, silt, reed beds and migratory birds.

Concluding his address, Dastgir said India could neither put rivers in abeyance nor hold water hostage or starve a civilization into compliance.

He said Pakistan would protect its rivers, life and civilization, while pursuing its case through international courts, international forums and global public opinion until, in his words, the weaponization of water was condemned, international law restored and justice allowed to flow as freely as the rivers that nurture the Indus Civilization.