Washington, Aug 2: India’s Ambassador to the United States, Vinay Mohan Kwatra, has said Pakistan spent decades undermining the spirit of goodwill and friendship that formed the foundation of the Indus Water Treaty (IWT), asserting that New Delhi’s decision to keep the treaty in abeyance merely acknowledges the reality created by Pakistan’s conduct.
In an article published days after Pakistan hosted a conference criticising India’s decision to suspend the treaty, Kwatra said the 1960 Indus Water Treaty was signed “in a spirit of goodwill and friendship,” but Pakistan steadily eroded that trust over the past several decades.
India placed the treaty in abeyance on April 23, 2025, a day after Pakistan-trained terrorists killed 26 people, mostly tourists, in the Pahalgam terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir.
“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,” Kwatra wrote.
The ambassador noted that under the treaty, India received control over three of the six rivers of the Indus basin carrying about 20 per cent of the basin’s water, while Pakistan was granted rights over rivers carrying nearly 80 per cent of the water.
Despite what he described as an unequal arrangement that limited development opportunities in parts of India, Kwatra said New Delhi continued to honour the treaty for decades.
He alleged that Pakistan responded with repeated military conflicts, including the wars of 1965, 1971, and 1999, along with decades of cross-border terrorism, citing the 2001 Parliament attack, 2008 Mumbai attacks, Pathankot and Uri attacks in 2016, Pulwama attack in 2019, and the Pahalgam terror attack in 2025.
Kwatra said Pakistan also obstructed India’s efforts to implement projects permitted under the treaty and consistently delayed or opposed proposals to modernise the agreement in line with technological advancements that could have enhanced India’s 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,” he said.
Referring to calls for renewed dialogue between the two countries, Kwatra said past experience showed that such efforts had repeatedly failed because of Pakistan’s continued support for terrorism.
Quoting Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he reiterated India’s position that “terror and talks cannot go together, terror and trade cannot go together, and water and blood cannot flow together.”
Kwatra further argued that Pakistan’s growing water scarcity stems primarily from poor domestic water management 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 blaming India for internal failures had become an outdated approach.
