ISLAMABAD, May 25: The government officials rejected on Saturday Indian threats of scrapping Indus Water Treaty as highly suspect in content both from legal and technical standpoint.
Officials say the threat of Indian water resources minister to curtail water supplies to Pakistan was a hoax prompted by his country’s war hysteria and could not be taken to mean that India had decided to use water as a weapon.
Senior government officials said what the Indian minister was reported to have suggested as a “diplomatic action” against Pakistan amounted to a blatant violation of an international treaty. Officials of the foreign ministry in Islamabad said scrapping the treaty could not be treated as diplomatic or legal recourse available to India but would be tantamount to a declaration of war.
When contacted, Foreign Office spokesman Aziz Ahmed Khan termed the statement made by the Indian minister as “irresponsible,” and said at a time when focus ought to be on defusing tensions between the two countries such hostile rhetoric was highly regrettable.
The spokesman refused to speculate as to the fate of the meeting of the Permanent Indus Commission in New Delhi next week, hinting that the government was not willing to officially respond to the belligerent Indian rhetoric in the same terms.
“It is all in the realm of speculation and it is not productive to react on such statements,” said another foreign ministry official, when asked to comment on the Indian threat to withdraw from the treaty. “The treaty was made foolproof with in-built safeguards, and contains no renunciation clause.”
Analysts familiar with the Indus Treaty said it would be difficult for India to backtrack from the treaty which was an international instrument. “It is not easy for a country to unilaterally withdraw from an international treaty for which the World Bank stands as the guarantor,” observed a former diplomat.
The ‘Final Provisions’ stated in Article XII of the treaty stipulate that neither of the two parties could at any time modify or terminate the water-sharing arrangement unilaterally. The only option available is to modify or terminate the agreement by way of a subsequent treaty and its ratification by the two countries.
Legal experts point out that international law forbids using water as a weapon as such an act is considered a crime against humanity. This point was also made by the former Indian water resources secretary last week who was quoted in the Indian Express daily, saying: “India would be blamed for going against protocols of the 1949 Geneva Convention, which clearly say that “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited and includes drinking water installations, supplies and irrigation works.”
He also warned that India would create suspicions in the minds of friendly neighbours that “treaties are not sacred.” Besides Pakistan, India has signed water-sharing agreements with Nepal and Bangladesh which came into force in 1996.
A well-known Indian lawyer, A.G Noorani, in his article ‘A treaty to keep’ in the Frontline magazine, wrote: “Forbidden even during armed conflict, use of water as a weapon in diplomacy is a far graver offence.” He argues that Article 8(b)(xxv) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court lists as a war crime “intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival.”
Warning of international repercussions of a unilateral revocation of the Treaty by India, Noorani notes: “it would activate the UN Security Council” and evoke a reaction from the World Bank and the six countries — Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Britain and the US — which provided money for the Indus Basin Development Fund.
According to Pakistan’s former finance minister Dr Mubashir Hasan’s calculation, reduction of waters from the Indus system to Pakistan by one per cent would threaten 1.4 million people in Pakistan with starvation.
“India cannot build dams to overnight attain the capacity of withholding Pakistani waters,” maintain technical experts. “The only way for India to make Pakistan ‘beg for every drop of water’ is to inundate a large part of India. Even for that India would need a structure for diversion of waters,” said one expert.
At present there is no man-made obstruction on any of the three rivers allotted to India. India’s own former water resources secretary conceded in his interview with the Indian Express that there was nothing India could do immediately and building storages on rivers flowing into Pakistan, if the treaty was abrogated, would still take 10 to 15 years.
This is the first time the Indus Water Treaty has become a subject of so much speculation. Senior officials at the ministries of foreign affairs and water and power say it is unprecedented in the history of the treaty that has held good for almost 42 years and survived two wars between the two subcontinent rivals.
