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Saadat Hasan Manto, one of South Asia’s best fiction writers, published a short story about a village in Pakistan’s Punjab province a decade ago. The plot revolved around rumours of an Indian plan to “shut down” water to Pakistan by closing off rivers that irrigated the province’s crops.

Who can close a river, it’s a river, not a drain, responds to that cliche in the 1951 film Yazid.

That theory is now on test, 74 years later — with implications for two of the world’s most populous nations that are also nuclear-armed neighbours.

In April 2025, after gunmen killed 26 civilians, almost all tourists, in an attack in Indian-administered Kashmir, New Delhi blamed&nbsp, armed groups that it said were backed by Pakistan for the violence.

India made the announcement to leave the six rivers in the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), a six-decade-old transboundary water treaty. The treaty is a lifeline for more than 270 million people, most of whom live in Pakistan.

Pakistan’s National Security Committee (NSC), the nation’s top security institution, rejected the “unilateral” move, warning that “any diversion of Pakistan’s water is treated as an act of war” a day after India made the announcement.

In the weeks that followed, India and Pakistan engaged in an intense&nbsp, four-day conflict in May, during which both countries exchanged missile and drone strikes, before US President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire between them.

But though the guns have fallen silent, for now, the neighbours have both launched diplomatic campaigns aimed at convincing the world about their narratives.

India has also refrained from revising its decision to declare the IWT invalid. &nbsp, On June 21, Amit Shah, India’s home minister and the man widely considered as the second-in-command to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, declared the treaty would remain suspended permanently.

It won’t ever be rebuilt,” he declared. International treaties cannot be annulled unilaterally, but we had the right to put it in abeyance, which we have done”, Shah told The Times of India, the country’s leading newspaper, in an interview.

“The treaty preamble mentions that it was for peace and progress of the two countries, but once that has been violated, there is nothing left to protect”, he said.

Even the possibility of water disruption poses an existential threat for Pakistan, a lower-riparian nation.

Blocking river flows threatens agriculture, food security, and the livelihoods of millions. According to experts, it might also trigger a full-fledged conflict between India and Pakistan.

So can India really stop Pakistan’s water? And can Pakistan do anything to mitigate that risk?

Given its current infrastructure, India is unable to completely stop the flow of rivers into Pakistan. But experts caution that even a small diversion or blockage could hurt Pakistan, particularly during the winter season. And Pakistan currently lacks the reservoirs necessary to manage the Indus Basin rivers’ flow if India were to manage to stop it from experiencing the crisis it would face.

A river that defines the region

The mighty Indus River, the 12th longest in the world, originates from Mount Kailash in Tibet at an elevation of 5, 490 metres (18, 000 feet).

Before entering Pakistan and traveling some 3, 000 kilometers (1, 864 miles) south to the Arabian Sea, it cuts through the picturesque but content Kashmir region.

In Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, the Indus is joined by its western tributaries – the Swat and Kabul Rivers – as it carves through mountainous terrain.

The five eastern tributaries of the river, the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej, meet at the fertile Punjabi plains.

These rivers flow through Indian-administered Kashmir and other Indian states before entering Pakistan.

This geographic dynamic, with India as the upper riparian state and Pakistan the lower state, has fed into long-standing distrust between the neighbours.

To be clear, Pakistan and India have historically experienced transboundary water conflicts, and historians have documented them since antiquity.

In the last half a century alone, Turkiye, Syria and Iraq have had disputes over water sharing due to the construction of dams on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

More recently, Egypt and Sudan are locked in a water dispute with Ethiopia, an upper-riparian state building a dam on the Nile, which has infected the two lower-riparian countries.

In South Asia itself, Bangladesh, India and Nepal have water-sharing disputes over the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna rivers system.

Partition’s lingering legacy

The two countries’ tensions over water are rooted in the subcontinent’s division in August 1947, when both countries reclaimed British colonial rule.

The region of Jammu and Kashmir, where the Jhelum originates and the Chenab flows, became a central point of conflict.

The division of Punjab’s irrigation system, which had operated as a single network under British rule, was another important issue. Canals, rivers and headworks were all intertwined, complicating water sharing.

A short-lived agreement held until March 1948, when India suspended water flow through two canals into Pakistan. Nearly 8% of Pakistani Punjab’s agricultural land was without water for five weeks as a result of the stoppage.

That early crisis inspired Manto’s Yazid and served as the catalyst for the Indus Waters Treaty.

After nine years of negotiations between India and Pakistan, the treaty [PDF] was signed in September 1960 thanks to the assistance of the World Bank.

According to Majed Akhter, senior lecturer in geography at King’s College London, the treaty was a “hydraulic partition” that followed political partition. &nbsp, “It was needed to resolve issues of the operation of an integrated irrigation system in Punjab, a province which the British invested heavily in and that was partitioned in 1947”, he told Al Jazeera.

However, Akhter noted that their dispute over Kashmir is also related to the neighbor’s water sharing. Both India and Pakistan control parts of the region, with China also administering two slices of Kashmir. However, Pakistan claims the entire Kashmir area in addition to the regions it controls through its ally China.

“Territorial control of Kashmir means control of the waters of the Indus, which is the main source of water for the heavily agrarian economies” of Pakistan and India, Akhter said.

India and Pakistan have fought three of their four wars over Kashmir, before the latest conflict in May.

Treaty that divided the rivers

The 85-page treaty has a unique layout. Unlike most global water treaties that share water according to their total volume of flows, the IWT divides the rivers.

The three eastern rivers – Ravi, Sutlej, and Beas – were allocated entirely to India, while the three western rivers – Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab – were reserved for Pakistan’s exclusive use.

However, India was permitted to construct “run-of-the-river” hydroelectric projects on Pakistan’s western rivers as long as they adhered to design restrictions intended to provide uninterrupted water flow.

The treaty also has a&nbsp, three-tiered dispute resolution mechanism.

The Permanent Indus Commission, a permanent bilateral body established under the IWT clauses and composed of one commissioner from each nation, is contacted if any technical issues arise.

If the commission can’t resolve any differences, the matter is then referred to a neutral expert under the supervision of the World Bank. If the dispute still remains unresolved, it can then be taken to the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA). The PCA, based in Hague, is an intergovernmental organization that pays nations to facilitate “facilitate arbitration and other forms of dispute resolution between states”.

Though the treaty has been in place for over six decades, this formal dispute resolution path has only been invoked in three cases, all involving Indian hydroelectric power projects on western rivers: Baglihar, Kishenganga and Ratle.

Before a neutral expert in 2007 delivered the case to India regarding Baglihar, a dam constructed on the Chenab, the project began operating a year later.

The Kishenganga project, built on the Jhelum, again faced resistance from Pakistan, which claimed the construction would impact water flow into Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

The matter was taken to the PCA, where a 2013 decision allowed India to divert water for power generation purposes, while ensuring that water flow towards Pakistan continued. Indian PM Modi officially inaugurated the project in 2018.

The Ratle hydroelectric plant, also being constructed on the Chenab, is the latest flashpoint between the two neighbours.

Pakistan has argued that the parties must first appear before a neutral expert, but India has countered by demanding Pakistan’s involvement in the conflict. However, with India now no longer adhering to the water-sharing treaty, a cloud hovers over&nbsp, the arbitration process, while construction on the project continues.

‘ Blood and water ‘

The IWT has withstanded significant pressures over its 65-year history, including nuclear tests by India and Pakistan, frequent military clashes, and deadly attacks in India that New Delhi has blamed on Pakistan-backed armed groups.

The April 2025 Pahalgam attack marked a breaking point. However, already long before that, there were indications of the fragility of the treaty.

In September 2016, following an attack on an Indian Army base in Uri, a town in Indian-administered Kashmir, that killed at least 18 Indian soldiers, India accused the Jaish-e-Muhammad, a Pakistan-based armed group that has carried out multiple attacks on Indian soil, of being behind the Uri strike.

Pakistan swiftly denied any involvement of its government, but India’s then-Home Minister Rajnath Singh branded Pakistan a “terrorist state” that supported “terrorists and terrorism groups”.

In response to growing pressure from India to stop the flow of water in Pakistan, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared, “Blood and water cannot flow at the same time.”

Nine years later, after India actually walked out of the treaty, former Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari issued a warning even more chilling than Modi’s original comment.

At a rally held in Sindh, a province whose name is derived from the Indus River (Sindhu in Sanskrit), he yelled, “The Indus is ours and will remain ours. Either our water will flow through it, or their blood.”

Symbolism or substance?

According to a number of water experts, Pakistan is more directly harmed by India’s suspension of the IWT.

Naseer Memon, an Islamabad-based environmental and water expert, called it a “political gimmick” designed to generate anxiety in Pakistan rather than alter water flows.

First, Pakistan considers international law to be in place. “Modi is trying to portray that he would stop Pakistan’s water immediately. But legally, he cannot decide anything about the IWT unilaterally”, Memon told Al Jazeera.

Ajay Banga, the Indian-American president of the World Bank, added that the IWT does not have a provision that allows a party to revoke the treaty at any time after India suspended it.

“There is no provision in the treaty to allow to be suspended. According to how it was created, either it needs to be eliminated or replaced. That requires the two countries to want to agree”, he said during a visit to New Delhi in May.

Geography and infrastructure also limit what India can do. These factors, according to Daanish Mustafa, a professor of critical geography at King’s College London, more so than policymakers on either side acknowledge. “The fanatic attachment to hydro-control in India and hydro-vulnerability in Pakistan is almost comical”, he told Al Jazeera.

The Sutlej, Beas, and Ravi are the only three rivers in the Indus Basin designated as being accessible to India only under the IWT.

Of the three rivers whose waters belong to Pakistan, the Indus passes briefly through Indian-administered Kashmir and Ladakh. But Memon, the Islamabad-based expert, said that topography in the region means that the river passes through areas that are snowy, with little space for any canal diversion or agricultural projects. Additionally, he claimed that there is not enough water in the area to allow India to build any project.

Indian hydroelectric projects on the remaining two rivers — the Kishenganga dam on the Jhelum, and Baglihar dam and the under-construction Ratle dam on the Chenab — have sparked concerns in Pakistan, which has protested against them under the IWT.

Islamabad claims that the projects could allow India to bring water into Pakistan and that the Kishenganga dam could also alter the course of the Jhelum. New Delhi rejects these allegations.

In reality, experts say that as with the Indus, India lacks the ability to divert water from the Jhelum, too. According to Memon, the river passes through densely populated areas of Kashmir, including Baramulla and Jammu, where it is frequented by Indians. Any plans to construct a dam there could put the population at risk of inundation.

The Chenab case is unique. Its waters “could be disturbed” by India, Memon said, though not in all seasons.

The expert says that the river has several potential sites where dams could be built. However, according to Memon, India won’t be able to store a lot of water during the summertime, when the flow of water is at its highest, because that could lead to flooding of the country’s own population living close to the project. To avoid that, India would need to allow water to flow downstream — into Pakistan.

Anuttama Banerji, a political analyst and water expert from New Delhi, concurred that India must only regulate the river’s release.

“The flow of the Chenab River can be regulated through dams and storage facilities, but India would need serious capital investment]for that]”, she said. “The threat won’t materialise for Pakistan in the immediate term”.

However, many experts caution that the mere fact that India is unable to stop the flow of water into Pakistan does not diminish Islamabad’s vulnerability in the future or the value of the IWT as a weapon for New Delhi.

‘ Real pressure point ‘

Even symbolic water flows by India could be harmed by Dan Haines, an environmental historian at University College London and the author of the book Rivers Divided: Indus Basin Waters in the Making of India and Pakistan.

Agriculture accounts for almost 25 percent of Pakistan’s gross domestic product (GDP) and employs more than 40 percent of the workforce.

“The Indian government announced the abeyance very quickly after the Pahalgam terrorist attack because it knows that water is a real pressure point for Pakistan. Haines remarked that water has a political bent.

In many ways, the recent fracture over river-sharing is precisely what the IWT had tried to insulate India-Pakistan relations from, say analysts.

The treaty explicitly sought to separate the water issue from politics, which India is attempting to do, according to Erum Sattar, a lecturer at Tufts University in terms of sustainable water management.

“Given Pakistan’s reliance on the waters of the Indus, it is absolutely the case that having the treaty hold in its present form is critical and vital to Pakistan”.

And Pakistan needs to prepare for a future where India might have the ability to hurt it more than it currently can, using water, said Ahmed Irfan Aslam, &nbsp, a lawyer by practice, and a former federal minister who oversaw portfolios including law, justice, water, climate change, and investment. Aslam has also represented Pakistan in international water disputes, including those involving the IWT.

“India does not have the capacity to stop rivers from flowing today. That does not, he said, mean they can’t eventually acquire or develop that strategy.

Memon, too, agreed that while India can’t block the Chenab’s flow into Pakistan in the summer, the dynamic changes when the weather does.

“The real concern, however, arises during winter when water flow reduces. And he claimed that if India were to develop storage or diversion projects, they might harm Pakistan’s wheat-growing winter crops. “Additionally, if there is a lean water flow in the summer season, the dams can also store water during that time as well, which could hurt Pakistan’s agriculture”.

Former Pakistani representative on the Permanent Indus Commission for Pakistan, Shiraz Memon (no relation to Naseer), expressed concern that upcoming Indian projects on the Chenab may ultimately harm Pakistan.

These projects — including the Ratle dam — “could hold water between 50 to 60 days during winter, which could be very damaging to Pakistan’s Punjab, which is entirely reliant on the Chenab River for its agricultural needs”, he told Al Jazeera.

How prepared is Pakistan for an India block on water flows?

Pakistan’s capacity for water storage is currently insufficient. The country has three major multipurpose reservoirs – Mangla, Tarbela, and Chashma – as well as 19 barrages and 12 inter-river link canals.

Together, these allow for the storage of roughly 15 million acre feet (AF) of water for four weeks. International standards recommend storage equivalent to at least 120 days.

To address the shortfall, Pakistan is building two major dams on the Indus River – Mohmand and Diamer-Bhasha – which are expected to increase capacity by another nine MAF upon their completion in 2028 and 2029, respectively.

Shehbaz Sharif, the prime minister of Pakistan, recently acknowledged the need for more storage and made a pledge to act. “The enemy has certain evil designs against Pakistan and wants to take steps against the water treaty. The government has chosen to build our water storage for that, Sharif said on July 1.

In effect, that sets up a race between India potentially developing the capability to actually block the flow of water into Pakistan if it wants to, and Pakistan building storage facilities big enough to reduce the risk of a forced water shortage.

Still, no matter how much storage capacity Pakistan builds, it won’t be enough to survive more than short-term disruptions to water flow, if India were to try to block rivers from entering into its neighbour’s territory.

Former Pakistani foreign affairs and defense minister Khurram Dastgir Khan claimed that India’s ability to divert or store water for the long term could cause the region to go to war.

“India’s threat is a genuine, existential concern”, Khan, a senior leader of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, told Al Jazeera. A civilisation exists in the Indus Basin. Flow of these waters has braced our environment and sustained development of Pakistan’s culture, arts, agriculture, and industry. But PM Modi and his ministers have threatened repeatedly to stop every drop of water flowing into Pakistan”.

The breakdown in any trust between the neighbors, according to Aslam, the other former minister, is what makes that threat particularly worrying for Pakistan.

“What you have right now is a situation in which we as Pakistanis feel that good faith is no longer there on the other side of the border”, Aslam told Al Jazeera during an interview at his residence in Islamabad.

However, Aslam acknowledged that the sentiment might be shared across borders. “Indians may have a similar view on this about Pakistan”, he conceded.

A new Indus Waters Treaty is possible.

For now, both sides have adopted hard-line positions. Pakistani officials called the IWT suspension an “act of war” and accused India of using water as a weapon, while New Delhi has rejected any reversal.

But analysts — and some Pakistani politicians — still hold out hope for diplomacy, or international legal intervention.

“India, we hope, and we expect, will act like a responsible state”, said Aslam. Two neighbors will eventually have to sit down to talk to one another and work out any issues that may arise.

Al Jazeera reached out to several Pakistani government officials – including the ministers for defence, information, and water – but received no responses about the government’s plan of action for a scenario when India actually is able to — and does — block the flow of water.

A senior military official, who was speaking on condition of anonymity, pointed out that Pakistan was already using international legal channels to make its case.

Since 2016, Pakistan has been protesting India’s hydroelectric projects on the Jhelum and Chenab at the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague. Last week, the PCA ruled that India’s decision to hold the IWT in abeyance did not impact its&nbsp, authority to adjudicate the case.

However, India has consistently rejected the PCA’s authority in the case, so it’s unclear whether New Delhi will accept any ruling from that court.

That effectively leaves Pakistan with two options: a military response, or a diplomatic solution.

The Indus waters are a “lifeline for Pakistan’s 250 million people,” according to the senior military official.

“We see this as an act of war, and if there is any action taken by the Indians which we deem harmful to our interest, we will respond”, the official told Al Jazeera. “Any act of war authorises us to deliver an appropriate, legitimate and befitting response at a time and place of our choosing”.

Given that the recent conflict has already slashed the amount of dialogue available, Banerji, a former fellow at the Washington-based Stimson Center, said any military response would be foolish.

“I believe Pakistan should also reassess the treaty and see where it can derive benefits from a modified treaty, as that can enable the treaty to acquire a new form that is mutually beneficial to both sides”, she said.

The geography professor at King’s College London, Mustafa, suggested that Pakistan could use India’s decision to leave the IWT to seek a new agreement, including by claiming some of the water from the eastern rivers that New Delhi currently fully controls.

Aslam said that although direct negotiations between India and Pakistan remain the most effective way forward, the current climate makes dialogue unlikely.

“As a measure of last resort, I think the]Pakistan] government has made its position very clear on this”, he said.