The upper house of parliament passed a resolution through a voice vote on a motion moved by Pakistan People's Party's Dr Karim Khawaja, requesting the government to "revisit the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) 1960 in order to make new provisions so that Pakistan may get more water for its rivers." Unfortunately, saner and more educated voices within the PPP notably Farhatullah Babar and Sherry Rehman supported the move and called for the treaty to be made part of the composite dialogue, which has been renamed comprehensive dialogue by the Modi government that remains stalled subsequent to the Pathankot attack.
A recap of the merits of the water-distribution treaty for Pakistan as a lower riparian country is in order. The IWT was brokered by the World Bank on 19th September 1960 and is perhaps the only treaty between the two countries that has not only withstood the test of time but which has also survived the three wars that India and Pakistan engaged in as well as numerous skirmishes across the borders. The treaty allows control of the three western rivers namely Chenab, Jhelum and Indus to Pakistan but given that the rivers flow from India or areas administered by India it allowed India the use of the waters for irrigation, transport and power generation but, at the same time, placed restrictions on the building of dams by India that would have the capacity to create drought and famine in years of a bad monsoon year and during floods inundating large parts of Pakistan. Thus without the treaty India as the upper riparian country would have been able to build dams with impunity thereby controlling the water use by Pakistan. The treaty also identified a dispute resolution mechanism through establishing a commission that was empowered to adjudicate on all water-sharing disputes. Pakistan has invoked this mechanism with respect to the construction of Baglihar and Kishanganga dams, however, through inordinate delays in filing the complaint the verdicts did not support a rollback in construction but in the case of Baglihar merely reduced pondage from 32,580,000 cubic metres against India's demand for 37,500,000 cubic metres and reduced the height of freeboard from 4.5m to 3.0m.
The Senate in its defence may point out two legitimate concerns. First, a reference can be made to a confidential cable sent by the then US Ambassador to New Delhi David Mulford dated February 25, 2005, released by WikiLeaks, which noted that the then "politically charged impasse" between India and Pakistan may spiral into "Islamabad's worst case scenario, that India's dams in Jammu and Kashmir have the potential to destroy the peace process or even to lead to war". And, second, Pakistan is now regarded as a water-scarce country with its annual per capita water availability declining from 5,000 cubic metres to as low as 800 cubic metres during the past 55 years. However, a revisit of the IWT may well lead to India scrapping the treaty entirely, a distinct possibility given the fact that it would be in India's interest to do so.
The Minister of State for Water and Power Abid Sher Ali rightly opposed the move in the Senate which angered parliamentarians leading to a voice vote. Abid Sher Ali has a history of using language that many in the opposition regard as un-parliamentarian and one would have hoped that the government had employed a dove as opposed to a hawk to convince parliamentarians of the rightness of its arguments; yet at the same time one would have hoped that better sense had prevailed within the PPP senators who surely are cognisant of the merits of the IWT and the advisability of not opening it for renegotiations.