WHEN word spread that the Modi government had decided to put the Indus Waters Treaty on pause, it sent a quiet tremor through South Asia. For more than 60 years, this agreement, crafted with the World Bank’s help, has outlived wars, political crises, and deep mistrust between two nuclear neighbours. To suspend it now, in the aftermath of the Pahalgam incident, shakes an already fragile region and its most precious shared resource: water.

The treaty was straightforward in principle, even if complicated in practice. Pakis­tan was given the western rivers — the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab. India took the eastern ones — the Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej. Four crossborder drainage channels — Hudiara, Fazilka, Kasur, and Saleem Shah — were identified to handle natural runoff. But over the decades, that neat arrangement slowly fell apart. Those four drains multiplied into more than 20, carrying ind­ustrial waste and untreated sewage into Pakistan. The Ravi and Sutlej, once living rivers, have for years resembled open sewers, poisoning aquifers and farmland across Punjab.

And then nature stepped in.

This year’s intense monsoons and sudden upstream releases pushed the Ravi and Sutlej back to life. Rivers long dismissed as ‘dead’ surged again, flowing all the way to Panjnad. The floods have been brutal: homes washed away, families uprooted. Yet hidden inside the destruction is an uncomfortable truth: these rivers still remember where they once flowed.

Pakistan’s most immediate response is the legal one. Unilaterally suspending a treaty is a serious breach of international norms. Sudden water releases, especially when mixed with toxic drainage, come dangerously close to turning water into a wea­pon, something international humanitarian law explicitly warns against. Islam­abad has every right to approach global forums, seek arbitration, and demand compensation for environmental and human harm.

Floodwaters can be steered into wetlands, abandoned lakes, and depleted aquifers.

But legal processes crawl. Rivers don’t.

There is another path — quieter, riskier, but potentially transformative. Pakistan can use this moment not only to protest, but to adapt. To reclaim what has been slipping away for decades: its rivers.

For the first time in years, water is flowing again through the Ravi and Sutlej into Panjnad. This isn’t just a flood; it’s a brief reopening of the region’s natural circulatory system. A fleeting chance to flush out decades of accumulated pollution from riverbeds left dry and decaying.

Instead of letting this water rush aimlessly to the sea, or cause more destruction, Pakistan can guide it. Floodwaters can be steered into wetlands, abandoned oxbow lakes, and depleted aquifers, places that once held water before upstream controls starved them. Managed well, this flow can dilute the heavy metals and toxins carried through the Hudiara and Fazilka drains. Given room, nature can do what diplomacy has failed to enforce.

The narrative needs to shift too. While the Foreign Office prepares its legal arguments, the Ministry of Water Resources should think bigger — call it a “Great Rech­arge.” Water, when wielded as a weapon, often turns back on the wielder. In trying to exert pressure, India has unintentionally revived the eastern rivers. If Pakistan invests now in diversion channels, recharge basins, and holding reservoirs, it can rebuild ecological corridors along the Ravi and Sutlej that were written off long ago.

There is something deeply symbolic about watching the Sutlej touch the Chenab and the Indus again. It evokes a landscape older than borders.

Let the lawyers debate clauses and conventions in distant rooms. On the ground, every drop of this water should be used.

Those who bel­ieve that without a treaty India could simply divert all the waters of both the eastern and wes­tern rivers overlook a basic rea­lity: inter­nati­onal law does not allow it. Even in the absence of a bilateral treaty, upper and lowerriparian sta­t­es are bound by global norms. The Helsinki Rules on the Uses of the Waters of Inter­national Rivers and the UN Water­courses Convention (1997) establish clear principles of equitable and reasonable use and no significant harm. These frameworks have shaped water-sharing behaviour across the world.

The total volume of water of these rivers is nearly 200 billion cubic metres. It’s not feasible for India to hold such a volume of water without risking reservoir-induced seismicity, especially when most of its states — either the origin or course of these rivers — are highly seismically active.

India may have stepped back from cooperation. But the rivers haven’t. They are flowing again — briefly, stubbornly — waiting to be reclaimed not as weapons, but as lifelines. The 2025 floods in the eastern rivers have proven it.

The writer is an expert on climate change and development and founder of the Clifton Urban Forest, Karachi.

Published in Dawn, December 28th, 2025