India’s Ambassador to the United States, Vinay Kwatra, has defended New Delhi’s decision to place the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) in abeyance, saying Pakistan had already undermined the agreement by eroding the trust and goodwill on which it was built.
According to a Hindustan Times report, in an opinion piece published in the US-based magazine Newsweek, Kwatra argued that the treaty’s suspension was not the cause of the breakdown in bilateral trust but a recognition of a reality created by Pakistan’s conduct over several decades.
“The treaty was built on 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.
His remarks come weeks after Pakistan reportedly hosted a conference in Islamabad criticising India’s decision to suspend the treaty. Referring to the event, Kwatra said a former Pakistani foreign minister had threatened war if Pakistan’s demands over the Indus river system were not met.
He described such statements as part of Islamabad’s “standard policy option” to divert attention from its domestic challenges.
Reflecting on the treaty signed in 1960, Kwatra noted that it allocated the three eastern rivers of the Indus basin to India and the three western rivers to Pakistan. While Pakistan received access to nearly 80 per cent of the basin’s waters, India retained about 20 per cent.
Despite what he described as an unequal arrangement, India continued to honour the treaty, he said. However, Pakistan repeatedly blocked New Delhi’s efforts to update the agreement to reflect technological advances and facilitate greater hydropower development.
“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,” Kwatra wrote.
The ambassador also dismissed calls for renewed talks between India and Pakistan, arguing that past dialogue had failed to deliver lasting results.
“Those advocating talks between India and Pakistan have not taken note of the history of these talks in the past or they must believe that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is not insanity,” he wrote.
Reiterating India’s position, Kwatra quoted Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying: “Terror and talks cannot go together… Terror and trade cannot go together… Water and blood cannot flow together.”
He also rejected Pakistan’s accusations that India was acting as a “water aggressor”, arguing that Pakistan’s water shortages were largely the result of poor domestic management rather than India’s actions.
According to Kwatra, only about 40 per cent of the water available in Pakistan reaches agricultural fields, while more than 30 per cent is lost during transit and the remaining water flows unused into the sea.
India placed the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance a day after the April 22, 2025 terror attack in Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir, in which 26 people, 25 Indians and one Nepali citizen, were killed. Indian authorities said the attack was carried out by Pakistani and Pakistan-trained terrorists linked to the designated terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
