All we know of the almost regular meetings of Pakistan's Permanent Indus Waters Commissioner with his Indian counterpart is broad smiles and warm handshakes suggesting that all is well. That India is receiving United Nations assistance - in blatant violation of the IWT, signed in 1960 between the two countries - to help India build the capability to starve-or-flood Pakistan, we were not in picture.
No doubt Senator John Kerry's report on the alarming potential of India's capability to trigger 'water wars' in South Asia did outline some features of the Indian threat. That in this, India was getting funds from the United Nations is mind-boggling. If the Pakistani team was keeping informed the relevant ministries, we don't know.
The Foreign Office's knee-jerk reaction to the US Senator's disclosure, that they had been giving warnings of it to the international community was nothing more than its normal reaction. If our Permanent Representative to the UN was updated on this, again is not in public knowledge.
However, a fuller account of this aspect of India's 'silent war' by a contemporary exposes criminal negligence on the part of our concerned past and present bureaucrats in dealing with this threat, in the making for quite some time, possibly more than two years. According to that account, India applied for UN assistance in 2005 to construct two hydroelectric power projects on the tributaries of River Indus, under the rubric of carbon credits. Both the dams, now nearing completion, were granted funds by the UN.
The funds were disbursed three years later, through the organisation's UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Agency - ironically headed by a Pakistani. Consider his role with the Indians in the UN, who spare no effort in bending the world body's plans and programmes to maximum advantage of their country.
The three investigations by the ministries of water and power, environment and foreign affairs, separately, reported by the same newspaper, are nothing more than what is called in bureaucratic parlance 'filling the file's belly'. Who would be now interested in knowing what happened and who was responsible for this horrendous dereliction of duty - if at all these so-called investigations finally make public their findings?
If the Pakistani side to the deliberations, under the Indus Water Treaty, is guilty of hiding the truth, the Ministry of Environment is no less guilty. The said ministry is supposed to be responsible for all the issues that relate to climate change and its disastrous impact on the country's economy. It is supposed to be keenly aware of all the pros and cons of the climate-change issue, which is now emerging as the world's most challenging fallout, collectively and individually, on the members of world community. But it is believed to be caught with its pants down. Was it not in touch with the concerned UN agency?
It seems not, even when it was tasked by the prime minister to look into reports of unfair allocations of carbon credits. It is believed to have approached the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to look into this fiasco. It's too little and too late. But given the unrelenting political tussle, earlier hidden but now in the open, such lapses will keep happening. The ministers get cabinet appointments for all other reasons rather than for their acquaintance with the basics of their new assignments. Of course, official clarifications and contradictions are in order, that is the norm, but the damage has been done and can not be compensated by mere words.