For over six decades, the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) has stood as a singular triumph of postcolonial diplomacy: proof that law can transcend enmity, and cooperation can endure in the middle of wars and diplomatic paralysis. Brokered in 1960 under the World Bank’s auspices, the treaty apportioned the Indus Basin’s waters— granting India control over the eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas, Sutlej) while reserving the western rivers (Indus, Jhelum, Chenab) for Pakistan, subject to India’s limited, non-consumptive use. Even during armed conflict, the rivers flowed unimpeded across the Radcliffe Line, embodying the ideal that nature’s bounty must never be weaponized.

That fragile equilibrium was shattered in April 2025 when India’s government unilaterally declared the treaty “in abeyance.” This phrase is a legal fiction— foreign to the IWT and alien to public international law. India’s act is no mere technical breach; it is a flagrant assertion of hydropolitical coercion, an ecological provocation cloaked in legal sophistry, and a frontal assault on the rules-based order.

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, recognizes only narrow grounds for suspending treaties. Article 26 enshrines pacta sunt servanda: treaties must be performed in good faith. Article 60 permits suspension only for a material breach so grave as to frustrate a treaty’s object and purpose. India has offered no credible evidence of such a breach by Pakistan. Its invocation of “national security” is a transparent pretext. As the International Court of Justice held in Gabcíkovo-Nagymaros, necessity is “strictly circumscribed” and cannot be invoked where lawful alternatives exist or where the state’s own conduct contributes to the peril. 

India’s conduct also violates sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas— use your own property so as not to injure another’s. Since the Trail Smelter arbitration, this maxim has bound states to prevent transboundary harm. By threatening to disrupt Pakistan’s access to its lifeblood rivers, India risks precipitating humanitarian and energy crises in a country already facing acute water stress.

As jurists Stephen McCaffrey and Attila Tanzi emphasize, water-sharing treaties are not political conveniences but pillars of interdependence. McCaffrey’s The Law of International Watercourses warns that unilateral interference undermines not only trust but the legal architecture sustaining peaceful resource-sharing. Tanzi calls upstream assertions of hydro-sovereignty “legal nihilism”— a substitution of power for principle. Alan Boyle adds that treating international water law as optional invites retaliatory disruption, turning rivers into geopolitical weapons.

On June 27, 2025, the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) delivered its Supplemental Award in proceedings brought by Pakistan under Article IX of the IWT. The tribunal found no allowance for unilateral “abeyance” or suspension and reaffirmed its competence, holding such acts would fundamentally erode “the value and efficacy of the Treaty’s compulsory third-party dispute settlement process.” By reaffirming the IWT’s sanctity, the PCA underscored a vital principle: no state, however powerful, can suspend or reinterpret binding agreements to serve political ends.

India’s contemptuous rejection of the PCA’s Supplemental Award— branding it “illegal and void” and deriding the tribunal as a “so-called Court of Arbitration”— is emblematic of a broader disdain for international adjudication. In Marshall Islands v. India, New Delhi challenged jurisdiction to shield its nuclear arsenal from scrutiny; in the Enrica Lexie case, it resisted tribunal authority before reluctantly complying. This pattern reflects a posture that treats international law not as a system of mutual obligations but as a menu of optional commitments.

In South Asia, where Himalayan rivers sustain over a billion people, India’s precedent sets a dangerous tone. China’s dam-building along the Brahmaputra has already raised alarms in India and Bangladesh. Turkiye’s tightening grip over the Tigris-Euphrates system has strained relations with Iraq and Syria. Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam continues to fuel tensions with Egypt and Sudan. India’s abrogation of the IWT feeds directly into this global hydropolitical disorder— where law is recast as suggestion and power becomes the new water law. This gambit will not secure India; it will imperil South Asia and bring the specter of water wars closer to reality.