On April 22 five armed terrorists attacked Hindu tourists in Jammu and Kashmir, an Indian territory in the country’s mountainous and water-rich northwest bordered by Pakistan. One of India’s immediate responses to the attack, which killed 26 people, was alerting Pakistan that it would not abide by agreements in the 65-year-old Indus Water Treaty to share water from the region with its neighbor.
For its part, Pakistan rejected India’s decision to suspend the treaty and warned that any attempt to divert water allocated under the Treaty would be considered an “act of war.”
Among the water-driven flashpoints around the world the conflict along the border regions of India and Pakistan periodically heats up to ‘don’t touch’ temperatures. Now is one of those periods. The Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), signed in 1960, governs water relations in the shared river basin with water sourced from the Himalayas. Often cited as a model of exemplary cooperation in an often fractious bilateral relationship, the treaty gets stressed during times of political friction.
India uses the water for hydroelectric generation. Pakistan, one of the world’s most water scarce countries, needs it for irrigation. It’s not clear how or when the crisis ends but neither country appears anxious to fight a war over water.
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