India’s decision to keep the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) in abeyance merely acknowledges what Pakistan’s conduct had already destroyed, India’s Ambassador to the US, Vinay Mohan Kwatra, has said, asserting that Islamabad spent decades eroding the “goodwill and friendship” on which the 1960 pact was founded.
In an article published in Newsweek magazine, Kwatra said the treaty was signed “in a spirit of goodwill and friendship”, but Pakistan had spent “half a century dismantling that goodwill and friendship”.
“It is worth remembering that the treaty's preamble declares it was concluded ‘in a spirit of goodwill and friendship’. Pakistan spent half a century dismantling that goodwill and friendship. The abeyance merely acknowledges what Pakistan's conduct had already destroyed,” he wrote.
Kwatra’s remarks come days after Pakistan hosted a conference protesting India’s decision to place the treaty in abeyance on April 23, 2025, a day after Pakistan linked terrorists killed 26 people, most of them tourists, in Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir.
The IWT, signed by India and Pakistan in 1960, gave India control over three of the six Indus basin rivers carrying roughly 20 per cent of the basin’s water, while Pakistan received rights over the rivers carrying about 80 per cent.
“That asymmetry stifled development for decades in Indian regions that could have benefited from better water rights. India honoured the treaty anyway,” Kwatra wrote.
He said Pakistan responded not with goodwill but through wars in 1965, 1971 and 1999, followed by decades of cross-border terrorism, citing the 2001 Parliament attack, the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the 2016 Pathankot and Uri attacks, the 2019 Pulwama attack and the 2025 Pahalgam attack.
According to Kwatra, Pakistan has also consistently obstructed India’s efforts to exercise its rights under the treaty by delaying or blocking India-initiated projects and resisting proposals to modernise the agreement.
“Pakistan also consistently blocked India's initiatives to renegotiate the treaty in light of six decades of technological change, which would have let India develop its hydropower potential,” he said.
“Bit by bit, Pakistan eroded India's faith that it could exercise its rights under the treaty, or hope for a better one suited to today's realities,” he added.
Kwatra said those advocating renewed dialogue between India and Pakistan either ignore the history of such initiatives or believe “that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is not insanity”.
Referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s position, he quoted him as saying: “Terror and talks cannot go together... Terror and trade cannot go together... Water and blood cannot flow together.”
Kwatra also argued that Pakistan’s water scarcity stems from domestic mismanagement rather than India’s actions.
“...the Government of Pakistan would do better to fix its dismal water productivity, than to stage conferences blaming India and issuing threats,” he said, adding that the practice of blaming India for every domestic failure had “grown old”.
“The world should say so, unequivocally,” he added.
(With inputs from PTI)