This is not a favor but an act of war which goes against Article 54 of the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, adopted in 1977 and accepted as customary international law binding on all states regardless of ratification, prohibits attacking, destroying, removing, or rendering useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population. The protocol names them specifically: drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works. The prohibition applies, in the protocol's own language, "whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive." The Rome Statute, under which war crimes are defined for the purposes of international criminal accountability, adds a further provision at Article 8: intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, is a war crime. Under Article 7, extermination is defined to include the intentional infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population, among which the statute explicitly counts the deprivation of access to food. India is not a party to the Rome Statute. It is party to the Geneva Conventions. And in May 2025, it fought a four-day armed conflict with Pakistan. What it did to the Indus Waters Treaty before, during, and after that conflict is documented in the record that follows.

Jameelan Nour Mohammed spent 200,000 rupees rebuilding her house in Sindh’s Dadu district after the 2022 floods took it. That was roughly $720 at the exchange rate of the time, and it was everything she had saved. The second flood came before she had saved anything else, and it took the rebuilt house too. By late last year she was living in her brother’s house, and when Amnesty International researchers came to Dadu to document conditions in flood-affected communities, she asked them a question she did not expect them to answer: “Why should I build it again and again, if the floods will come again in a year?”

She was right that they could not answer it. What she did not know, and what nobody in Islamabad’s water management bureaucracy has found a satisfying way to say in public, is that the odds governing that question changed significantly in April 2025, when India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty and stopped sharing the hydrological data that Pakistan’s flood forecasting systems depend on. The floods Jameelan Nour Mohammed is asking about have always come. The question has always been whether anyone downstream knew they were coming in time to do anything about it. That question, which the treaty existed to answer, is now decided by India on a case-by-case basis, communicated through whichever channel India finds appropriate, containing whatever level of detail India judges sufficient.

The Indus Waters Treaty, negotiated over a decade with World Bank mediation and signed in 1960, divided the six rivers of the Indus basin between the two countries: the three eastern rivers to India, the three western rivers, the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab, predominantly to Pakistan. The geography that made this division necessary is the same geography that made the treaty’s information-sharing provisions its most consequential element. The western rivers flow through Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir before they enter Pakistan. The headwaters of roughly 80 percent of Pakistan’s irrigated agriculture originate in or pass through territory under Indian military administration. A country whose entire agricultural water supply begins on the other side of a contested border, and whose 7,200 glaciers are losing mass at double the rate recorded before 2000, is a country for whom advance notice of what is building upstream is not a diplomatic amenity. It is the precondition for functional flood management.

The treaty recognised this. It required India to share hydrological data continuously: flow rates, reservoir levels, glacier melt readings, and crucially, flood warnings through the Permanent Indus Commission, the joint body established specifically to oversee the exchange. The Commission met regularly for 65 years, through three wars, Kargil, military crises that dissolved every other functioning bilateral institution, and a series of legal disputes that required arbitration at the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Whatever else was severed between the two governments, the Commission met and the data came through.

One day after the Pahalgam attack killed 26 tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir, India declared the treaty held in abeyance. The data exchange stopped. The Commission stopped meeting. India conducted reservoir flushing operations at Baglihar and Salal, its major hydroelectric projects on the Chenab, without notifying Pakistan, releasing surges of silt-laden water downstream followed by sharp drops in flow as the reservoirs refilled. A Pakistani official told Reuters that the first communication India sent after the suspension regarding flood conditions arrived through the Indian High Commission in Islamabad rather than through the Commission’s established channels, weeks into the monsoon season, with no detailed hydrological data included. India’s explanation, relayed to Reuters by an unnamed official, was that the information had been shared on humanitarian grounds.

The phrase repays attention. Pakistan’s entitlement to upstream hydrological data was established in an internationally brokered agreement, adjudicated through the treaty’s own mechanisms across six decades, and affirmed by the Permanent Court of Arbitration after India’s suspension. The World Bank president stated publicly that the treaty contains no provision for unilateral suspension and any modifications require the consent of both parties. The court ruled the treaty legally binding irrespective of India’s declaration. India boycotted the court’s subsequent proceedings. The data, when it arrived at all last monsoon season, came as a humanitarian gesture from a government that had decided its legal obligations no longer applied.

This matters as a category problem, not only a diplomatic one. A flood warning delivered as charity is withdrawn at the donor’s discretion. A flood warning delivered under treaty obligation is not. Pakistan’s Provincial Disaster Management Authority officials, running flood models for Punjab’s canal network in August 2025, were operating in the former arrangement. When India released water from Salal, Baglihar, and Ranjit Sagar without prior notice, the Chenab at Qadirabad and Khanki headworks reached outflows exceeding one million cusecs. The Punjab PDMA’s Flood Forecasting Division declared exceptionally high flood conditions simultaneously on the Chenab, the Ravi at Jassar, and the Sutlej at Ganda Singh Wala. An irrigation official told Dawn that water levels in previously abandoned riverbeds had reached volumes never recorded before. By early September, 881 people had died nationally from floods and landslides since the monsoon began, and 41 more had been killed in Punjab alone in the preceding ten days, with 2.4 million people affected in that province.

The context in which those numbers should be understood is the worst flood in Pakistan’s recorded history, which happened three years earlier, with the treaty intact and the Commission functioning. The 2022 floods affected 33 million people, killed 1,739, turned the Indus into a lake 100 kilometres wide at points in Sindh, destroyed 4 million hectares of agricultural land, wiped out 15 percent of Pakistan’s rice crop and 40 percent of its cotton crop, and produced economic losses the government estimated at $30 billion. Every early warning system the treaty provided was working. The PDMA had upstream data. The Commission had met. The preparation was still insufficient and the losses were still catastrophic. The 2022 flood is the baseline: what happens in Pakistan when the Indus moves badly and the data is flowing. Last monsoon, 881 people died in flood conditions that an irrigation official described as unprecedented, and the data was not flowing.

The treaty’s vulnerability to the situation India has created was a structural problem its drafters understood but could not resolve. The hydroelectric projects India has built in the years since the treaty was signed on the western rivers, Baglihar and Salal on the Chenab and Kishanganga on the Jhelum, are permitted under the treaty as run-of-the-river projects with constrained storage capacity. Pakistan contested the design parameters of both Baglihar and Kishanganga, arguing that the specifications gave India more capacity to accelerate, decelerate, or interrupt downstream flows than feasible power generation required. The disputes went to arbitration. India prevailed on the Baglihar design. The Kishanganga project was approved subject to a mandatory minimum downstream flow of 9 cubic metres per second.

What Pakistan’s engineers were arguing in those proceedings is visible now in the operating record since the suspension. Reservoir flushing at Baglihar, carried out without notification in May 2025, reduces downstream flow by up to 90 percent during the refilling phase. In December, Pakistan’s Ministry of Water Resources formally raised with India an extraordinary reduction in Chenab flows: hydrological monitoring at Marala recorded the river dropping to 870 cusecs for a sustained period, against a historical minimum for that time of year of between 4,018 and 4,406 cusecs. Satellite imagery taken five days apart showed the Baglihar reservoir surface area contracting sharply and then expanding again: the visual signature of a reservoir drained and refilled. Under the treaty’s provisions, India is not permitted to empty the dead storage of run-of-the-river plants on the western rivers. India offered Pakistan no explanation.

What happened last monsoon is not the obstruction of a single season. It is the replacement of a legal regime with an operational one, in which India’s hydroelectric infrastructure on the Chenab and Jhelum functions as flow-regulation capacity whose exercise is constrained only by India’s own judgment. The treaty’s dispute resolution architecture, the three-tier mechanism of the Permanent Indus Commission, the Neutral Expert process, and the Court of Arbitration, was constructed precisely because the negotiators in 1960 understood that geography and mutual interest made conflict over these rivers certain, and that the alternative to legal management of that conflict was the conflict itself. India has not proposed an alternative legal framework. It has suspended the existing one and declined to participate in the proceedings that have ruled the suspension unlawful.

Adnan Khan, a farmer in Dera Ismail Khan who grows wheat, maize, and rice from the Indus system, told Pakistan Today: “We live by this water. If it stops, everything stops.” Khyber Pakhtunkhwa produces between 1.2 and 1.5 million tons of wheat annually against a provincial demand of 5 million tons, a gap Pakistan imports before any additional shortfall enters the calculation. The drought risk the suspension creates for Adnan Khan and farmers across the western river basin is real and well-documented, but it is a risk measured across seasons and years. The flood risk is measured in days, and in the time between a dam releasing water at capacity and that water reaching inhabited flood plains downstream with or without a warning.

Forty percent of the Indus system’s flow comes from Himalayan and Karakoram glaciers whose melt rate has doubled since 2000. Glacial lake outburst floods, where ice dams give way and release contained water bodies in hours, are increasing in frequency and are concentrated in the upper catchment. The data the Permanent Indus Commission was required to share covered precisely this range: snowpack measurements, reservoir levels, flow rates at upstream gauging stations. Without it, Pakistan’s flood managers work from domestic monitoring that ends at the Line of Control. They model risk from the Pakistani side of a catchment whose dynamics are determined largely on the Indian side.

The 2026 monsoon season begins in weeks. The glaciers above the western rivers are, by every measurement available, in a more advanced state of retreat than they were in 2022. Pakistan is among the ten countries most exposed to climate-driven extreme weather events, despite producing less than half a percent of cumulative global greenhouse gas emissions. The Permanent Indus Commission has not met in over a year. The Court of Arbitration’s ruling that the treaty remains binding sits uncontested in the legal record and unimplemented on the ground.

Jameelan Nour Mohammed’s question, why rebuild if the floods come again, assumes a version of uncertainty that is the ordinary condition of flood plains: the water will come sometime, you cannot know exactly when or how badly, you make your calculation and you rebuild or you do not. What has changed is not the flood’s certainty but the quality of the information available to anyone in its path. The Permanent Indus Commission existed to reduce that uncertainty by a specific, documented, negotiated amount: so much data, on this schedule, through these channels, so that downstream communities and their governments had the margin of preparation the geography would not otherwise provide.

That margin has been reclassified. It is now a gesture, available when India’s government determines that humanitarian considerations warrant it, transmitted through diplomatic channels that carry no data format requirements, covering whatever the sender chooses to include. The Amnesty International researchers who heard Jameelan Nour Mohammed’s question could not tell her whether the next flood will come this year or in three years, and neither can anyone else. What is now also true, and was not true before April 2025, is that the people responsible for warning her when it does come no longer have a legal right to the information required to do so.

The legal standards cited above are not aspirational. They are the codified minimum obligations of states engaged in or recovering from armed conflict toward the civilian populations on the other side. India suspended the treaty mechanism that provided Pakistan's flood managers with advance data on upstream water volumes. It conducted reservoir flushing operations at Baglihar and Salal without notification, releasing and then cutting off water flows across Pakistan's agricultural cycle. It withheld data during a monsoon season in which 881 people died. It sent one warning through diplomatic channels with no hydrological detail and described it as a humanitarian gesture rather than a legal obligation. The Chenab, which under Pakistan's treaty rights should never have dropped below 4,000 cusecs in winter, reached 870. The Permanent Court of Arbitration has ruled that the obligations remain binding. India has stopped attending the proceedings. The question the law raises and leaves unanswered is not whether these acts meet the threshold of the protocols and the statute. It is whether any institution with the authority to hold a nuclear-armed Security Council ally accountable will ask.

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