Last month, Islamist gunmen — two of whom have been identified as Pakistani nationals — slaughtered 26 civilians in the Indian-administered part of divided Kashmir. It was a brutal attack, in which Hindu tourists, including one from Nepal, were singled out for slaughter. And yet, it was not surprising: Terrorist groups have long operated freely from Pakistani soil, with the tacit or explicit support of Pakistan’s powerful military.
What might be different this time is that India might have finally found a way to push back, including through military strikes on Pakistani terror camps — strikes that Indian officials said were “measured, responsible and designed to be non-escalatory in nature.” Despite the risks of tit-for-tat retaliation, India, as the stronger side, could escalate or de-escalate the conflict to its advantage.
However, the threat India faces is not coming from Pakistan alone. China has consistently provided diplomatic and strategic cover for India’s terrorism-sponsoring neighbor. For example, China’s government has repeatedly blocked UN sanctions against top Pakistani terrorists. After the latest attack, it praised Pakistan’s counterterrorism efforts, calling the country an “all-weather” strategic partner. The enemy of China’s enemy is its “ironclad friend.”
Illustration: Tania Chou
That leaves India wedged between two closely aligned nuclear powers, both of which claim sizeable swaths of Indian territory. Recent crises — from brutal Pakistani terror attacks to brazen Chinese land grabs in the Doklam and Ladakh regions — have highlighted just how acute a threat the Sino-Pakistani strategic axis poses to India.
During his 11 years in power, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi largely maintained a reactive security posture toward China and Pakistan, with little strategic deterrence to be seen. The Sino-Indian military standoff that was triggered in 2020 by Chinese encroachments on India’s Ladakh borderlands still has not been fully resolved.
However, this time, Modi has offered a calibrated and impactful response, pausing the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), the world’s most-generous water-sharing pact, which grants downstream Pakistan access to more than 80 percent of the Indus Basin waters. Brokered in 1960 by the World Bank, the IWT has long been hailed as a model of cross-border cooperation — one that China has not emulated. (Although its 1951 annexation of the water-rich Tibetan Plateau gave it control over the headwaters of Asia’s major rivers, China has refused to enter into a water-sharing treaty with any of its 18 downstream neighbors.)
However, treaties are built on mutual trust and good faith — or, as the IWT’s preamble puts it, “a spirit of goodwill and friendship.” While India has steadfastly adhered to the treaty for 65 years — even when it meant compromising development in its water-stressed regions — Pakistan has consistently acted in bad faith. For example, it has used the treaty’s dispute-resolution mechanisms to drag India repeatedly into international arbitration over minor engineering differences and obstruct India’s ability to use its rightful share of water. Last year, when India formally sought to update the IWT — to account for unanticipated fac tors such as climate change, groundwater depletion and population growth — Pakistan refused to negotiate.
Meanwhile, Pakistan has waged what is effectively a proxy war by terrorism against India. The 2008 Mumbai massacre, in particular, is still etched in India’s national memory. In fact, the latest killings occurred shortly after the US extradited a key Mumbai plotter to India. Pakistani Chief of the Army Staff Asim Munir recently fanned the flames of conflict by urging Pakistanis to teach their children that Muslims are “different from Hindus in every possible way.”
International law is clear: When a treaty’s fundamental conditions collapse, or one party persistently contravenes them, the other party has the right to suspend or withdraw from the agreement. For now, India has stopped short of blowing up the IWT, instead placing the treaty “in abeyance,” a term undefined in international law. Modi has thus retained strategic ambiguity, while sending a resolute message: Resource-sharing comes with conditions. That is a warning, not a rupture.
To be sure, Pakistan claims that suspending the IWT amounts to an “act of war,” and has retaliated by suspending all bilateral agreements, including the 1972 Simla treaty, which governs peaceful dispute resolution. However, that response not only ignores the reasons for India’s decision; it also misrepresents the impact.
India is halting data sharing, design approvals and inspections under the IWT, while opening the way for actions that Pakistani objections have obstructed, such as reservoir flushing and the desilting of riverbeds. However, it is not disrupting current water flows. In fact, India does not have the infrastructure to divert the major rivers flowing to Pakistan, and its storage capacity on those rivers is negligible. So, while India is imposing costs on Pakistan, in an attempt to hold its leaders accountable for state-sponsored terrorism, it is not punishing the Pakistani people.
The six rivers of the Indus Basin have sustained local civilizations for millennia, and they can continue to do so. However, no country could be expected to uphold a peacetime treaty while experiencing the consequences of an undeclared war. If Pakistan does not want India to turn off its taps by building new hydrological infrastructure, it must demonstrate a verifiable commitment to peace, arrest terrorist leaders, shut down terrorist training camps and end its support for cross-border violence.
Brahma Chellaney, professor emeritus of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
The Executive Yuan recently revised a page of its Web site on ethnic groups in Taiwan, replacing the term “Han” (漢族) with “the rest of the population.” The page, which was updated on March 24, describes the composition of Taiwan’s registered households as indigenous (2.5 percent), foreign origin (1.2 percent) and the rest of the population (96.2 percent). The change was picked up by a social media user and amplified by local media, sparking heated discussion over the weekend. The pan-blue and pro-China camp called it a politically motivated desinicization attempt to obscure the Han Chinese ethnicity of most Taiwanese.
On Wednesday last week, the Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an article by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) asserting the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) territorial claim over Taiwan effective 1945, predicated upon instruments such as the 1943 Cairo Declaration and the 1945 Potsdam Proclamation. The article further contended that this de jure and de facto status was subsequently reaffirmed by UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 of 1971. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs promptly issued a statement categorically repudiating these assertions. In addition to the reasons put forward by the ministry, I believe that China’s assertions are open to questions in international
The Legislative Yuan passed an amendment on Friday last week to add four national holidays and make Workers’ Day a national holiday for all sectors — a move referred to as “four plus one.” The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), who used their combined legislative majority to push the bill through its third reading, claim the holidays were chosen based on their inherent significance and social relevance. However, in passing the amendment, they have stuck to the traditional mindset of taking a holiday just for the sake of it, failing to make good use of
As strategic tensions escalate across the vast Indo-Pacific region, Taiwan has emerged as more than a potential flashpoint. It is the fulcrum upon which the credibility of the evolving American-led strategy of integrated deterrence now rests. How the US and regional powers like Japan respond to Taiwan’s defense, and how credible the deterrent against Chinese aggression proves to be, will profoundly shape the Indo-Pacific security architecture for years to come. A successful defense of Taiwan through strengthened deterrence in the Indo-Pacific would enhance the credibility of the US-led alliance system and underpin America’s global preeminence, while a failure of integrated deterrence would