Islamabad has not seen this kind of diplomatic and political frenzy in years. In the months since India put the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) in abeyance, following the Pahalgam terror attack and the launch of Operation Sindoor, Pakistan has been summoning envoys, writing urgent letters to the United Nations, rushing delegations to world capitals, and activating every possible international forum.
The scale is unprecedented: eight high-level foreign visits, eight major international conferences, more than ten legal actions and at least seven domestic political mobilisations in barely nine months. The message is clear: India has struck Pakistan at its most sensitive pressure point.
The decision by New Delhi on April 23, 2025, just a day after 26 people were massacred in Pahalgam by Pakistan-linked terrorists, was not merely a technical treaty move. It was a strategic signal. For the first time since 1960, India formally linked the future of the Indus Waters Treaty to Pakistan's continued use of terrorism as a tool of state policy. The message was blunt: normal cooperation cannot coexist with abnormal hostility.
For Pakistan, the shock was immediate and profound. The country is almost entirely dependent on the Indus river system. Around 80 to 90 percent of its agriculture depends on these waters. Its storage capacity is barely enough for about 30 days of river flow. Both its major dams, Tarbela and Mangla, are already near dead storage levels. In strategic terms, this is not just an environmental vulnerability; it is an economic and political Achilles' heel.
That explains the near-panic response from Islamabad. Within days, Pakistan's National Security Committee declared water a “vital national interest” and warned that any disruption would be treated as an “act of war.” Parliament passed resolutions. Pakistani Senate committees issued alarmist statements. The entire diplomatic corps in Islamabad was summoned for emergency briefings showcasing alleged “Indian violations” and “abnormal river flows.”
Internationally, Pakistan launched a full-spectrum campaign to “internationalise” the issue. The United Nations Security Council, the UN General Assembly, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, climate and glacier conferences, the World Bank—no forum was left untouched. Pakistani diplomats organised special events under banners like “Weaponising Water,” while official letters flooded multilateral institutions warning of “humanitarian catastrophe” and “240 million lives at stake.”
At the same time, Islamabad accelerated legal action in The Hague and other arbitration mechanisms, hoping judicial pressure could succeed where diplomacy might not. The objective is clear: force India to reverse its decision and restore the treaty to business-as-usual, without Pakistan having to fundamentally change its own behaviour. And that is where the core contradiction lies.
India's position is not that the treaty has been torn up. It has been kept in abeyance, with a clearly stated political condition: Pakistan must credibly and irreversibly dismantle its terror infrastructure and abandon terrorism as an instrument of state policy. This demand did not emerge in a vacuum. It follows decades of attacks traced back to Pakistan-based groups, from the 1993 Mumbai blasts to 26/11, Uri, Nagrota, Pathankot, Pulwama and now Pahalgam.
Yet, instead of dismantling this infrastructure, Pakistan has seen a string of public rallies by Lashkar-e-Taiba-linked fronts, open recruitment drives by Jaish-e-Mohammed, and even announcements of new jihad brigades, including a women's wing. Some of these events took place months after Operation Sindoor. The contradiction is glaring: Islamabad demands strict treaty compliance from India while allowing globally designated terrorist organisations to operate openly on its own territory.
Unable or unwilling to address this core issue, Pakistan has focused on narrative warfare. Its diplomats now routinely claim India has “broken” or “renounced” the treaty. But India's position is legally and politically different: the treaty is suspended in operation, not scrapped, and its revival is linked to a change in Pakistan's conduct.
The sheer intensity of Pakistan's response betrays the depth of its anxiety. This is not routine diplomatic signalling. The numbers tell their own story: eight major foreign tours by top leaders, eight international conferences, more than ten legal and quasi-legal proceedings, and a cascade of domestic political resolutions and emergency sessions, all for a single issue.
Strategically, India's move has changed the terms of the debate. For decades, Pakistan assumed that the Indus Waters Treaty was untouchable, insulated from the broader state of relations. That assumption is now gone. The water issue has been explicitly linked to terrorism, and that linkage has exposed how asymmetric the dependence really is.
In the end, this is no longer just a dispute about rivers and treaties. It is about leverage, accountability and the cost of using terrorism as state policy. Pakistan's diplomatic blitz may be loud and global, but it also reads like an admission of vulnerability. When India pressed the Indus lever, it did not just create a legal dispute—it hit a strategic nerve that Islamabad cannot afford to ignore and does not yet know how to escape.
