Asserting India’s Indus leverage can end Pakistan’s unconventional war
New Delhi has allowed the Indus Water Treaty to hang like the proverbial albatross from its neck
mous March 2016 resolution calling for the treaty’s re-evaluation. Indeed, while chairing a September 2016 internal meeting on the IWT, Modi warned, “Blood and water cannot flow together.” Setting in motion the treaty’s reappraisal, an inter-ministerial committee of secretaries was established, and officials said that India would now assert all its rights under the IWT, including fully utilising its share of the allotted waters and expediting its long-delayed hydropower projects.
But two years later, India, alas, appears to have returned to the former state of affairs. The committee of secretaries, headed by the prime minister’s principal secretary, has fallen by the wayside. Apart from completing the small, 330-megawatt Kishenganga project after 11 years, India has shown little urgency on Indus Basin water projects. Even as Punjab and other states feud bitterly over water, India’s failure to adequately harness the resources of the three smaller rivers reserved for it results in Pakistan receiving substantial bonus waters. Just these extra outflows to Pakistan are many times greater yearly than the total volumes under the Israeli-jordanian water arrangement.
India’s zigzag policy is most apparent from the recent meeting of the Permanent Indus Commission (PIC). The IWT calls for the PIC to meet at least once a year. The previous PIC meeting, like the one before it, was convened after almost 12 months — on 29-30 this year. The next meeting was not due until 2019, yet India held a fresh PIC meeting just five months later.
The recent August 29-30 meeting, held in Lahore, marked the first bilateral engagement since the new military-backed Imran Khan government took office in Pakistan. With Pakistan’s international isolation deepening and its economy in dire straits, the military there is tactically seeking “peace” talks with India while still employing terrorists in a proxy war. Through such talks, it also hopes to legitimise the government it helped install through a manipulated election. But with India’s own elections approaching, talks with Pakistan will be politically risky for the ruling BJP.
The PIC discussions — and a prospective foreign ministers’ meeting in New York — illustrate how Modi’s government is seeking to engage Islamabad in other ways. In fact, India has given permission to Pakistan’s Indus commissioner and two other officials to shortly begin a tour of inspection of Indian projects in Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere. In the past, such a tour has been used to collect new information so as to mount objections to Indian projects. In keeping with its broader strategy to foment discontent and violence in J&K, Pakistan seeks to deny J&K people the limited water benefits permissible under the IWT.
While the US has dumped international pacts at will (from the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty to the Kyoto and Paris accords), India still clings to the world’s most-lopsided water treaty, adhering to its finer details, even as Pakistan refuses to honour the terms of the central treaty governing bilateral relations — the 1972 Simla peace pact. Pakistan also flouts its commitment to prevent its territory from being used for cross-border terrorism. The Indus may be Pakistan’s jugular vein, yet a visionless and water-stressed India has let the IWT hang from its neck like the proverbial albatross. Make no mistake: Only by asserting its Indus leverage can India hope to end Pakistan’s unconventional war. hardly any legislation passed. President Trump will continue to govern as he has, primarily through executive orders. A Republican majority in both the chambers will aid and abet those orders and will help pass legislation to support the orders. Split control would mean endless battles with one chamber blocking or reversing the other’s actions. The control of the House will matter only in terms of support for the president’s agenda.
The most intriguing possibility is the Democratic Party controlling both the chambers, which would undoubtedly lead to attempts at curbing Trump’s immigration proposals. And, it might even bring articles of impeachment now that Cohen has stated that when Trump was a candidate, he directed him to pay two women to silence them about his affairs with them.
Just as in the legislative arena, the party that controls Congress will have a limited impact on India. This is because President Trump’s policies on international affairs have primarily been unilateral; whether it is the tariffs, treaties or tirades against nations that have earned his disfavour, he consults only a small circle — and Congress doesn’t fall in that.
In sum, the US mid-term elections matter not because they will bring about dramatic changes in law-making, but because they will change a few of the law-makers. That will influence the tone and tenor of the national debate and dialogue in the country.
What will be the outcome of these elections? The citizens of the United States and the world will know on November 6. After that, there will be no more conjecture but just the consequences.