Hassan Aslam Shad is an international lawyer and a geopolitical analyst based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, U.S.A.
Long before missiles and lethal drones crossed borders during the brief four-day India-Pakistan conflict of May 2025, the first salvo had already been fired. It came from an Indian government announcement.
The sequence of events unfolded quickly. On 22 April 2025, a terrorist attack in Pahalgam killed 26 people. The very next day, India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) announced that the decades-old Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) with Pakistan would be placed in “abeyance.” Pakistan rejected any involvement in the attack, maintained that New Delhi had not shared credible evidence with it, and called for an independent investigation.
For many outside South Asia, the announcement by India’s MEA appeared to be another episode in the often-repeated cycle of India-Pakistan confrontation. For international lawyers however, it raised an altogether different question: can a state unilaterally place a treaty in “abeyance” when the treaty itself contains no such provision?
The question matters because the IWT between India and Pakistan is one such treaty that has survived multiple crises that destroyed almost every other channel of India-Pakistan communication.
The IWT was signed in Karachi in September 1960 by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistani President Mohammad Ayub Khan after years of negotiations under the auspices of the World Bank. The treaty was the result of a carefully negotiated compromise. India was upstream of Pakistan, which was the downstream riparian state. Among other things, the treaty established procedures for information sharing, technical cooperation, and dispute resolution. Neither side got everything it wanted. That would have been utopia. Yet the treaty worked because both governments recognized – perhaps reluctantly – that water management required a stable framework regardless of the state of belligerent political relations.
Luckily for both India and Pakistan, the IWT proved durable. It survived decades of hostility, remained in force through the wars of 1965 and 1971, the 1999 Kargil conflict, and repeated military buildups between two nuclear-armed foes.
Over the years working in international law, I have come to realize that the real measure of an international treaty is not how well it functions when relations are stable, but whether it can withstand moments of deep political crises. That is when the treaty’s real legal and practical value is put to the test.
Now, let’s consider India’s decision to put the treaty in “abeyance”. Although it has attracted international attention, the public response from foreign governments has been remarkably muted, despite the potentially devastating consequences it could have for a country of more than 250 million people. While it is true that New Delhi has long faced serious security challenges, including terrorism, and the public outrage following the Pahalgam attack was expected and understandable, neither the IWT nor the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) recognizes “abeyance” as a distinct legal mechanism for suspending a treaty. In the present context, it functions as a political label rather than a treaty-law mechanism. Political grievances, no matter how serious, do not automatically extinguish treaty obligations. And that matters – a great deal – in the context of the IWT.
India’s more immediate difficulty is the treaty’s text. Article XII provides that the treaty shall continue in force until terminated by a duly ratified treaty concluded for that purpose between the two governments. What the treaty does not expressly provide is a unilateral right of either party to suspend the treaty or place it in “abeyance”. India has invoked fundamental changes in circumstances, but its public statements have not set out a detailed legal analysis demonstrating how the stringent requirements for suspension on that ground under customary international law are satisfied.
True to their habit, lawyers often disagree on treaty interpretation. Whatever ambiguities may exist elsewhere in the IWT, Article XII is relatively clear. India’s action has thus given rise to a greater concern. If states can unilaterally place treaties in “abeyance”, as India has purported to do, without satisfying either the treaty’s terms or a recognized ground under customary international law, dangerous precedents may follow. That is an especially risky development at a time when the international legal order is already under considerable strain.
India’s position also runs into pacta sunt servanda – the foundational rule under Article 26 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) that treaties must be performed in good faith. Although neither India nor Pakistan is a party to the VCLT, this doctrine is part of customary international law, meaning that even countries that have not ratified the VCLT are bound by it.
International law ultimately depends upon states upholding commitments, even when compliance becomes politically inconvenient. It is entirely natural for countries to disagree, reinterpret treaty obligations, challenge jurisdiction and advance competing legal arguments. What countries rarely do is openly claim a right to disregard treaty commitments without a legal basis.
History provides examples. The U.S. justified its withdrawals from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019 on legal grounds, even though the decisions were ultimately prompted by strategic and security concerns. The U.S. formally relied on express withdrawal clauses and identified the security circumstances it considered to have jeopardized its supreme interests.
In June 2025, the Court of Arbitration established under the treaty issued a Supplemental Award and held that India’s position did not affect the Court’s competence and could not unilaterally suspend the ongoing proceedings. The Court confirmed that the IWT contains no unilateral mechanism for “abeyance” or suspension, but found it unnecessary to determine the meaning of, or justification for, India’s decision to hold the treaty in abeyance. India rejected the decision and continued with its objections. India’s act of placing the IWT in abeyance and refusing to accept the Court’s ruling compromises the authority of the treaty’s own institutional framework and dispute-settlement mechanism. When political relations deteriorate – as they have between India and Pakistan regarding the IWT – dispute resolution mechanisms are among the few remaining avenues for amicably resolving matters.
Competing legal arguments have themselves become part of the wider India-Pakistan rivalry. Looking at the bitter history of India-Pakistan relations, one cannot help but notice how legal developments can prove just as important as events on the battlefield. While it is wars between India and Pakistan that grab international headlines, it is often the competing legal claims that determine how subsequent crises unfold.
Whilst India currently lacks sufficient storage and diversion capacity to stop or permanently redirect the western rivers away from Pakistan – and several Indian analysts have reached the same conclusion – Indian officials have publicly indicated that hydro-engineering projects could be accelerated. This has understandably attracted scrutiny and concern in Pakistan, as was evident at a recent international seminar on the IWT, where Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister reportedly warned India against “sowing seeds of war”. Water infrastructure is planned over decades, and Pakistan’s concern is therefore not confined to India’s present capacity. It also extends to what India may be able to do in the future, and how that could affect Pakistan’s water security and strategic calculations.
The IWT is not a perfect framework and was never meant to end or resolve every dispute between India and Pakistan. The two sides have spent decades disagreeing over dam designs, hydroelectric projects, and the interpretation of different treaty provisions. Even then, those disputes remained within an established legal framework that both countries had accepted. Perhaps that was the treaty’s greatest strength and the reason it survived times of increased political tension and hostility.
That framework now appears more fragile than ever. This is no longer just about water sharing. The more fundamental question is whether long-standing treaty obligations can be unilaterally set aside during periods of political tension, as India has attempted to do – a move that Pakistan and some international law commentators argue acks a legal basis in international law.
Whether the IWT can withstand the current strain is still uncertain. The military confrontation of May 2025 lasted only a few days. However, unless India reverses course and both countries find some middle ground, the dispute surrounding the Indus is likely to continue for years. Water was largely managed within a technical, treaty-based framework between India and Pakistan, but the growing politicization of water sharing has now become a continuing strategic threat that may very well give rise to another dangerous conflict between two nuclear-armed nations.
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