Water Politic: reflections on potential Pakistan-India conflict
Written 24th April 2025. First published on Brown History.
I fear there will be war.
I, from a continent away, think of my parent's house. My family lives in a large city near the border. Once in 2019, our city announced a blackout in case of an airstrike. I remember looking at up the stars that became visible when the light pollution was gone and thinking about my mother's house. It is made of red bricks, the stairs are lined with the portraits of elders staring out in sepia, mustachioed and turbaned. In a series of wedding photos, women with long dark plaits glint in gold and the jewel tones of silk, banarasi, and kimkhwab. I imagine how these faces would look lying between rubble, in ghostly echoes of ruin what befell our ancestors 78 years ago when the subcontinent was partitioned.
For the first time since partition, India has announced a suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty. On the other side of the border, where I am from, fellow Pakistanis hold their breath- and churn out memes, cutting the tension with humour that ironically reflects classic desi meme culture, including both Indian and Pakistani. Keyboard warriors joke about finally visiting the Taj Mahal and seeing Bollywood celebrities in a surreal and idealised picture of what collapsed borders might look like. I could get behind this if it weren't a facade obscuring the reality of violences already occurred at the time of writing: a massacre in Pahalgam; people rapidly returning to their home countries based on nationality that doesn't reflect cross-border mingling, often at the expense of families being separated; increased media furor; and military crackdowns especially in Indian-occupied Kashmir.
This essay is an emotion- oriented and mnemonic response to the bloodlust in the current mediascape. Emotions are political, as argued in the work of scholar Sara Ahmed. They constitute of cultural scripts, and as such are politically manipulated. This also an argument for harnessing a politics of emotion towards de-escalation, nonviolence and justice based on cooperation rather than retaliation. I touch upon entanglements through land and water. I think of Gaza, which remains a heartbreaking lesson in the violence that sustained dehumanisation, political othering, and resource acquisition can result in.
The collapse of the Indus Waters Treaty comes in the wake of a terrorist attack in Pahalgam in Indian-occupied Kashmir. The fatal attack targeted Hindus, mostly civilians, and has left shock and grief in its wake. Pakistanis, having seen such attacks towards their own people, do not find it difficult to empathise with the immense loss and emotional toll the families of the victims, as well as the Indian public. Indian politicians and media hold Pakistan squarely responsible, despite a lack of conclusive evidence. Instead of the neutral investigation that Pakistan proposes, the Indian government has adapted the tactic of scapegoat politics regarding Pakistan; the uneasily severed twin, the one true enemy to unite an India torn apart internally. No war with Pakistan can absolve India of the fascism and Islamophobia cultivated by the BJP, and the consequences of colonial oppression. And yet Pakistan manages to haunt the Indian political imagination, as a mirror-image ghost across the borderlands.
My heart twists in fear for my family, loved ones, and the minority groups in both India and Pakistan that would bear the brunt of violence if a war occurred. I cannot imagine the violence of Pahalgam multiplied and repeated many times over as justice.
Maybe choking Pakistan's arterial rivers will quieten India's internal turmoil? But you can't kill ghosts, especially those you have a hand in creating.
The media froths at the mouth: vengeance, war, terrorists, wipe them out, incinerate the threat, the government is the people and the people are the government, infiltrate the borders- wait, they infiltrated our borders- border- whose border? Who started it? Started what? This is an example of ideological state apparatus at work.
It is imperative to differentiate between nation-states as political and self-serving entities, and the people that inhabit these states as possessing complex agencies. What a state does is not always a democratic culmination of collective will. In fact, these interests and actions do not always align. At his moment, the Pakistani public expresses condolences and wonders how to absolve itself of the blame of a government they never voted in, a military they have no agency towards, and an intelligence service whose last priority is transparency or goodness forbid- morality.
Similar to the Indian state, the Pakistani state utilizes repressive tools such as military presence, police brutality, and the suppression of activism and protest in provinces like Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan. For both countries, these tools are mechanisms of colonial repression, resource control and state-building. The sociologist Goldie Osuri argues that postcolonial nation-states inherit and employ mechanisms of colonial and imperial power in order to maintain sovereignty, using the Indian occupation of Kashmir as a primary example.
Online, a slew of hatred runs alongside the shock and grief; blood demands blood, and there is a conviction of the Pakistani government funding supporting the TRF- with no substantial evidence, but plenty of political manipulation. This claim rests on Pakistan's history of association with militant groups, denied by the state.
The Indian state has managed to distract from the pressure cooker created by its own actions in Kashmir that consists of oppression, digital blackouts, curfews, and forced disappearances. Kashmir is the most militarized zone on earth, occupied by Indian military forces in what can only be considered a violent colonial project. The Pahalgam attack occurred against the backdrop of Indian occupation forces and is entangled with the violence that it entails. The attack was claimed by the Kashmir-based TRF (The Resistance Front), one of many groups that have appeared in the wake of the occupation of Jammu and Kashmir. The occupation, coupled with Pakistan’s strategic interests in Kashmir, catalyzes the rise of militancy in the region. However, this militant presence is manipulated in proxy wars- often undermining the resistance efforts of Kashmiris themselves.
When it comes to Kashmir, the Pakistani public generally both sympathises with this unjust state of occupation and fashions the state a saviour of sorts for Kashmir. Both sides have a history of glossing over the question of true Kashmiri self-determination. The western strip of Kashmir is administered by Pakistan, as part of Azad Jammu and Kashmir. I wish I could speak to its locals to ask how azad (free), or how represented they feel. Whilst the Pakistani state claims it is invested in Kashmiri freedom, it continued sustain military bases and an administrative presence. In both regions, Kashmiris, particularly women, religious minorities, youth and activists continue to be marginalised by state violence and extractive frameworks. It is certain that the Indian media strategy of scapegoating will only exacerbate the situation, and associating terrorism with Islam will not benefit the Muslim-majority population of neither Kashmir, nor Pakistan. This would only result in disproportional and collective punishment.
And so the treaty that regulated the only consistent flow between India and Pakistan - that of water- is suspended, with hydro-politics re-entering the tense arena. To be clear, the suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty spells no immediate change for Pakistan's water supply. However, it marks the first step towards a resource war and environmental violence. Resource wars are as old as humanity itself and water is a political tool, as seen in apartheid South Africa and Occupied Palestine today. Exacerbating climate change has increased the urgency of equitable resource management- and on the dark side of this coin, of seizing resources such as water by political manoeuvring. This is the territory of watery politics, slippery and fluid, shapeshifting according to need, dissolving any sense of mutual coexistence.
In the weeks leading up to this moment, Pakistanis have been clamouring against each other over river waters, and the Cholistan canal project. On one side, the Pakistani government side wants to build six canals on the mighty Indus, damming her waters from flowing into the plains and delta of Sindh and irrigating, or 'greening', the Cholistan desert instead; much of the public opposes this with horror, unable to understand why one desert would be irrigated at the cost of creating another. I recently went to Cholistan and saw the first patches of green amidst the dry terrain. We were driving through and suddenly entered a surreal picture of rectangles of Punjabi wheat fields pasted onto arid land. After this, the blush, terracotta and caramel tones of the true desert were a welcome sight. I had thought Pakistan's tassel over water would remain internal, but the scale has changed.
The real water wars begin now, over the rivers shared between Pakistan and India. The rivers that flow into Pakistan (Ravi, Jhelum, Chenab, Sutlej) originate in India and the Indus, birther of civilizations, yawns open its lake-mouth in Tibet and gains its full might in the plains of Sindh. It is hard to imagine Pakistan and India as separate when the geography, history, and people are meshed. I imagine a tapestry pulled apart, held by the threads of the rivers. The metaphor of conjoined twins is popular for a reason, echoed from political commentary to Salman Rushdie's magical realism to Yusra Amjad's poetry:
"In the absence of a flag, a faith, a language
we would come to share poison instead"
Amjed's verses talk about the choking winter smog that moves between Delhi and Lahore, and harkens to other contagions: nationalism, pseudo-democracies, neo-colonialism, collective punishment and a post-colonial caesarean scar that severs not just topography but also land stewardship.
For an uneasy 78 years, the twins have managed to share the river waters. This cooperation is rife with colonial legacy, with the Indus Waters Treaty brokered by the World Bank, bastion of economic neo-colonialism. It is ironic that an internal wave of Indian colonialism would suspend the treaty.
Could we re-imagine this treaty as mutual nourishment? As an interwoven, shared right to the land?
I pour from my cup into yours; or I just hand you the cup, and trust that you take as much- and only as much- as you need.
Pakistan and India already operate under the nuclear code of MAD - surely, initiating a water scarcity amounts to mutually assured destruction?
Surely dehumanizing each other amounts to mutually assured destruction, if not madness?
The Pakistani state responded to the announcement of the treaty suspension by closing borders that I never even knew were even open, and by closing its airspace. I hope this is an inflated threat, that the twins are blustering with heaving chests and clenched fists- nuclear missiles in the back pocket- and waiting until the blood and water runs cool again. Instead it appears that Pakistan, already fraught by climate change, might become the sacrificial lamb in a resource war.
When I began to read the newspapers a decade ago, there was a headline that branded itself into my consciousness: Pakistan expected to be in drought by 2025.
I told this to my father. Abbu had agricultural lands to irrigate. He listened seriously, the worry crawling across his face in channels. Abbu had memories of too much water, never too little. In the 80s, the Ravi had turned course and flooded his ancestral village.
The river destroyed everything that it had once nurtured: the crops, the trees, the mud-brick houses and havelis. The population of Thatta scattered and rebuilt a new village, and I grew up with elders reminiscing about the strange rage of the river. They had resigned themselves to its will.
I have to wonder where the will of the rivers is now, when greedy men fight to siphon, dam, and redirect them. This wish, of course, comes from a woman who would rather grieve nature's course than the man-made devastation of war.
Diverge as we may, our wellsprings are the same.
References:
Imperialism, colonialism and sovereignty in the (post)colony: India and Kashmir. Osuri, G. (2017). Third World Quarterly
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Louis Althusser.
What is The Resistance Front, the group claiming the deadly Kashmir attack
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/23/what-is-the-resistance-front-the-group-behind-the-deadly-kashmir-attack
Why is Pakistan’s new canal project sparking water shortage fears? Al Jazeera, 27th March 2025.
you called this!