by HASSAN ABBAS
The Indus Waters Treaty has been a failure — scientific, environmental and socioeconomic. It stood on a pillar made of political sand, which has collapsed. Let us brace ourselves for the reality that the IWT is no more; let’s rejoice and move on with the opportunities this situation has brought.
Surprisingly, neither India nor Pakistan was facing water shortages when the treaty negotiations started. It was triggered through political prejudice alone — India shut down the canals emanating from the head works now under its control (after Partition) but feeding irrigated land in Pakistan. It was a war crime according to the Rome Statute. The dispute was immediately hijacked by players of the Cold War. It was seen as an opportunity to prevent India from drifting into the communist bloc and Pakistan from becoming another Korea — were war to break out over the Kashmir dispute.
Based on this premise, David E. Lilienthal, the former head of Tennessee Valley Authority, proposed a ‘solution’ and wrote to Eugene Black, president of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), that there were business opportunities for the bank in the implementation of his proposal regarding the Indus Basin.
Lilienthal’s solution, however, defied science. First, it suggested that both countries build infrastructure to prevent the river waters from reaching the sea — a death sentence for the world’s sixth largest mangrove forest and the Indus Delta, which is an environmental system of global significance. Second, it supported an illusion of greening the deserts through canals.
The IWT allowed the complete shutting down of three large rivers, with no provision of environmental flows downstream, which was unprecedented. The final nail in the coffin was driven by letting India dispose of unlimited contaminants into the empty riverbeds of the Ravi and Sutlej flowing into Pakistan.
Neither India nor Pakistan was facing water shortages when the treaty negotiations started.
International water treaties are negotiated to safeguard the rights of lower riparian jurisdictions. Primarily, a treaty is needed to protect a lower riparian from excessive diversions upstream, which may reduce the flow downstream; extreme damming upstream, which disrupts the natural rhythms of flow downstream; and dumping polluted waste upstream, which contaminates the water quality and impacts the environment downstream.
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