[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies.]

The signing of the treaty has stabilised hydropolitical relations between the two states for over six decades, based on the mutual approach of addressing water separately from other bilateral issues and emphasising technical reasoning. Recently, this balance has been strained as India departed from its longstanding position by linking transboundary water with the issue of cross-border terrorism in J&K. It is not merely a shift in political priorities but a paradigmatic transformation in how both states conceptualise water. Essentially, it makes water a strategic asset embedded within the national security framework of the two states that heightens Pakistan’s sensitivity to upstream development. In this context, the colonial and post-colonial origin of the treaty is not merely an ancillary historical detail but constitutes a critical analytical lens for understanding the present strain as a shift from the treaty’s foundational ethos. It reveals how the treaty’s durability was contingent on its technocratic insulation from ongoing hostilities between the two states, amidst the need for control of hydrological infrastructure and related socio-political structures. Therefore, recognising this historical trajectory of the treaty’s origin offers a deeper insight into the evolving hydro-political landscape of India and Pakistan.

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Conclusion

The signing of the Indus Water Treaty between India and Pakistan reflects precolonial influences in two ways: the continuation of colonial-era water management practices and the effect of anticolonial politics of communal nationalism. The colonial state had developed the water infrastructure to bring a larger population to settled agriculture so that the revenue from the vast arid land could be increased. Along with the development of irrigation systems, the colonial state had also introduced land settlement reforms that brought in the concept of private property. The British imperial state preferred standardisation of administration, both for an increase in productivity and for maintenance of social and political order. They developed standardised categories of land, customary practices, and measurement scales, as well as the population residing in the basin region. Further, the state’s exclusive control over water in the agrarian economy of an arid region had provided it with a crucial role in socio-political management of the society. Consequently, water became a tool integral to the colonial state to dominate the Indus basin region, particularly to legitimise its rule with the expansion of irrigation and agricultural productivity.

After the Partition of 1947, most of the territory that became Pakistan was part of the Indus basin. To maintain the social order by means of hydrocracy, it was important for the Pakistani state to control the Indus irrigation system. This scheme necessitated exclusive control over the irrigation system, which the Indus Water Treaty ensured by division of rivers rather than sharing water through volume. In fact, during the Indo-Pakistani negotiations, the issue of water was never divorced from the question of exclusive control over the territory and the population residing therein. Subsequently, the treaty provided Pakistan with exclusive control of three western rivers, but all those rivers flow from the Indian territories of J&K and Ladakh, which continue to contribute to the security anxieties of Pakistan. Thereby, the claim of Pakistan over J&K also emerged out of its intention for exclusive control over water along with the ideological angle that created the Pakistani state in the first place. In contrast, for India, J&K holds limited land for irrigation, but it has huge potential for hydroelectricity that the Indian state wanted to develop unrestrained by Pakistan. It provides a constraint to the hydro-political relations of the two states and signifies that settlement of the hydro-political relationship of India and Pakistan by means of the IWT was limited.

The exclusive control of each state over the entire flow of specific rivers strengthened the bureaucratic apparatus inherited from the colonial state. The social structure developed during colonial rule had reinforced pre-colonial inequalities, wherein certain social groups – categorised as agrarian and martial races – became dominant by means of access to private property in irrigable land and employment in the British Army. In the post-independence Pakistani state, the control of elites over irrigated land continued in the absence of provision for land reforms. Also, the recruitment of soldiers from agrarian groups in Punjab continued even though the majority population in newly created Pakistan were ethnic Bengalis. All this intertwined water with the security preoccupations of the Pakistani state. The communal politics of the colonial period between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League also contributed to the conflict over water between the two states. As the ideological differences developed during British rule became the state identities of India and Pakistan, negotiations over water were shaped by divided history instead of a common water basin.

Ankush Sharma is with the Department of Strategic and Regional Studies, University of Jammu, Jammu and Kashmir, India.