Key facts
- Pakistan minister warned India: 'We will cut off those hands' over Indus Waters Treaty
- Pakistan's Indus commissioner wrote to Indian counterpart multiple times over Chenab fluctuations
- India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty following the Pahalgam terror attack
- Treaty, signed in 1960, governs water-sharing of six rivers between India and Pakistan
Pakistan's minister issued a dramatic warning to India on Monday, declaring 'we will cut off those hands' that seek to interfere with the Indus Waters Treaty — the 1960 water-sharing agreement that governs the flow of six rivers between the two nations. The threat came as bilateral relations remain at their lowest ebb following the Pahalgam terror attack and India's subsequent suspension of the treaty.
Pakistan's Indus commissioner revealed that he had written to his Indian counterpart multiple times regarding fluctuations in the Chenab river, underlining that operational tensions on the ground are compounding the diplomatic standoff. The disclosures signal that water disputes, long considered a technical matter managed separately from political relations, have now been drawn fully into the broader conflict.
The Indus Waters Treaty, brokered by the World Bank and long held up as a rare example of durable India-Pakistan cooperation even through wars, allocates the western rivers — Indus, Jhelum and Chenab — primarily to Pakistan. India's suspension of its obligations, even temporarily, is seen in Islamabad as an existential threat to the country's irrigated agriculture.
The escalating rhetoric on both sides suggests that water is rapidly becoming the next flashpoint in an already volatile relationship, with implications that extend well beyond diplomacy into the daily lives of farmers on either side of the border.