The latest India-Pakistan crisis is moving beyond terrorism and military retaliation into something potentially more structural: water. India continues to hold the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) in abeyance following the April 2025 Pahalgam terrorist attack, maintaining that normal treaty cooperation cannot continue until Pakistan credibly ends support for cross-border terrorism. Pakistan denies responsibility for the attack and has warned that attempts to restrict its allocated river flows would be treated as a severe national-security threat. The dispute matters because the treaty, signed in 1960 with World Bank involvement, survived wars in 1965, 1971 and 1999 and decades of hostility. Pakistan’s dependence is particularly acute: the Indus basin supports most of the country’s irrigated agriculture, making water security inseparable from food security. The temptation for India is understandable. If Pakistan benefits from cooperation while India continues facing cross-border terrorism, why should New Delhi preserve every benefit of normal relations? But this raises a harder strategic question: should agreements governing basic shared resources survive precisely because political relations are hostile, or should those resources become leverage for changing hostile behaviour?
The Indian argument rests on a recognisable theory of reciprocity. International cooperation cannot reasonably require one country to fulfil obligations indefinitely while believing the other permits activity threatening its citizens. Treaties create benefits partly because both parties expect wider restraint. If Pakistan-based militant organisations continue carrying out attacks in India, New Delhi can argue that treating water cooperation as entirely separate from security allows Islamabad to enjoy the benefits of rule-based relations without bearing enough cost for failures elsewhere. Suspending cooperation therefore becomes a form of issue linkage: behaviour in one domain changes the benefits available in another. This can increase leverage because water matters to Pakistan far more than another diplomatic statement or cancelled meeting.
The problem is that leverage becomes most dangerous when it operates over something the other state considers existential rather than negotiable. Tariffs can be bargained over because governments can tolerate some reduction in trade. Water supporting agriculture and basic consumption is different. Pakistan cannot simply decide that Indus water has become too expensive and substitute another river system. When a resource has few substitutes, coercion can produce resistance rather than concession because the target believes accepting vulnerability today would leave it permanently exposed tomorrow. India therefore needs to distinguish between using the treaty’s suspension to create diplomatic pressure and attempting physically to deprive Pakistan of water at a scale threatening civilian life or food production. The first is coercive statecraft; the second would create far larger legal, humanitarian and escalation risks.
This is why the Indus Waters Treaty was politically remarkable in the first place. It did not require India and Pakistan to trust one another. It divided much of the river system in a way intended to reduce the number of decisions requiring continuous political cooperation. The treaty therefore represents a broader institutional principle: good agreements between adversaries are often designed not to create trust, but to make trust less necessary. The fact that it survived several wars is evidence of that institutional value. When relations deteriorated, both governments still possessed rules governing a resource too important to renegotiate during every crisis.
Turning water into security leverage risks changing that expectation. Pakistan may conclude that future dependence on Indian-controlled upstream flows is strategically intolerable and respond through accelerated dam construction, diplomatic internationalisation or more aggressive security planning. India could then interpret those responses as further hostility. The result resembles a security dilemma applied to natural resources: one side acts to reduce vulnerability, the other interprets the action as increasing threat and responds in ways that make both less secure.
Climate change makes this even more serious. Himalayan glaciers, changing precipitation and rising water demand will place greater stress on the Indus system over coming decades. India and Pakistan therefore need more rather than less technical cooperation on hydrology, flood warnings and infrastructure. A treaty written in 1960 may require modernisation as technology and climatic conditions change, but modernisation is different from abandoning the principle of predictable allocation. The rational long-term objective should be a stronger treaty capable of surviving twenty-first-century pressures, not a river system managed through repeated coercive crises.
There is also an important philosophical distinction between state responsibility and civilian liability. India can reasonably demand that Pakistan prevent armed groups from using its territory to attack Indians. But Pakistani farmers do not determine the behaviour of militant organisations or the Pakistani security establishment. Using essential civilian resources as punishment therefore creates a problem of collective responsibility. Liberal political thought generally rejects the idea that individuals should bear severe punishment simply because they belong to the political community whose government or armed actors committed a wrong. This does not mean economic pressure is always illegitimate; sanctions also impose indirect civilian costs. It means the severity and necessity of those costs should matter when judging proportionality.
Pakistan, however, should not use this humanitarian argument to evade its own responsibilities. Sovereignty gives Islamabad authority over Pakistani territory and therefore creates an obligation to prevent organisations operating there from generating repeated security crises with India. If the Pakistani state genuinely lacks complete control over militant networks, that is still a state-capacity problem requiring correction, not a permanent exemption from responsibility. India cannot be expected indefinitely to accept the argument that attacks originate from Pakistan but somehow remain politically unrelated to Pakistan.
The challenge is therefore constructing incentives that target the institutions capable of changing behaviour more directly. Financial sanctions against specific organisations, intelligence cooperation with third countries, diplomatic isolation of individuals, counterterrorism operations where legally justified and international pressure can impose costs with less risk of transforming water into another battlefield. India should preserve the option of renegotiating technical aspects of the IWT, particularly where existing rules constrain legitimate hydroelectric development, but the objective should be increasing Indian flexibility without making civilian water insecurity itself the instrument of deterrence.
The dispute also reveals something broader about India’s rise. Greater national power creates more tools of coercion: market access, water, technology, military capability and diplomatic influence. The question for a rising power is not simply whether it can use those tools but what kind of regional order it wants them to create. India often criticises larger powers when they weaponise economic dependence against weaker states. It therefore needs a principle explaining when its own use of asymmetric leverage is legitimate. Strategic autonomy becomes more credible when India applies standards to itself that it would want stronger states to apply when dealing with India.
This does not require unilateral restraint regardless of Pakistani behaviour. Rules survive only if violations carry consequences. But consequences should ideally strengthen incentives for compliance without destroying institutions whose continued existence benefits both sides. The Indus treaty is one of the very few bilateral mechanisms that survived almost the entire history of India-Pakistan hostility. Destroying it may create immediate leverage while removing a valuable piece of crisis insulation that will be difficult to reconstruct later.
The strongest Indian position would therefore combine firmness on terrorism with restraint over basic civilian water security. Pakistan should understand that cross-border terrorism imposes escalating diplomatic and economic consequences. India should simultaneously make clear that it does not seek to create famine or permanent civilian deprivation. Such a distinction protects both strategic credibility and international legitimacy.
The Indus dispute ultimately asks what institutions are for. Treaties between friends are relatively easy because goodwill already exists. The real value of international law appears when states dislike one another enough that predictable rules prevent every disagreement from spreading into every other area of their relationship. India and Pakistan may remain adversaries for the foreseeable future. That is precisely why keeping some boundaries around their rivalry is not weakness. It is one of the few mechanisms preventing each crisis from becoming larger than the one before it.
