Rewriting Rules of Control

The court ruled. The gates didn’t. When I wrote about the Chenab last month, the argument was still partly inferential. The Marala hydrograph for April and early May showed a pattern of sharp surges, sustained depressions and near-vertical drops that no rainfall or snowmelt signal could explain. The conclusion was cautious but clear: this was not a river reacting to weather. It was behaving like a system being operated. What was missing was a ruling that said, in binding legal terms, what that operation was actually doing to Pakistan’s rights. On 15 May, that ruling arrived. Declaring Education Emergency The Permanent Court of Arbitration, convened under the Indus Waters Treaty’s dispute resolution mechanism, issued a binding supplemental award holding that India must justify maximum pondage volumes against actual hydrological conditions and realistic operational need, not engineering assumptions. It built directly on the tribunal’s August 2025 Award on Issues of General Interpretation, which confirmed that India must “let flow” the waters of the western rivers for Pakistan’s unrestricted use, and that hydropower exceptions must be read narrowly, not stretched through operational practice. India was not in the room for either ruling. The concrete, meanwhile, has continued to pour. Medicinal Plants Rasheed grows cotton in Toba Tek Singh. He has no idea any of this happened. What he knows is that his sowing window runs ten days in the third week of May, an entire season’s income folded into that narrow band, and that this year those days fell between a week when the channel ran nearly dry and a week when it flooded before his fields could absorb a drop. The telemetry now confirms what April suggested. Through the first ten days of May, the precise window that decides a farmer’s year, the Chenab at Marala ran persistently below its seasonal mean of roughly 20, 800 cusecs. On 3 May, discharge fell to around 9, 000 cusecs, less than half the canal design figure. By the 11th, it had begun to recover, climbing to 31, 500 by the 14th and holding above the mean for nearly a week. Then, on 17 May, it collapsed again, dropping to 8, 000 cusecs within hours. By the 23rd, it had reached 32, 000 and was still climbing. A snowmelt-fed river in May rises and falls gradually as temperatures shift. It does not behave like this. That staircase of deep troughs and sudden spikes is the signature of gates opening and closing, of reservoirs filling and releasing on a schedule set by someone upstream. A river being operated. Between Promise and Reality The warabandi system runs on a single assumption: when your turn comes, the water is there. A few hours short at sowing time can waste an entire input cycle. When those hours are followed by a surge the canal cannot absorb, the damage is complete. For Rasheed, water arrived at 8, 000 cusecs when his distributary needed 20, 000, and at 32, 000 when there was nothing left to irrigate. The 15 May ruling speaks directly to this. Applied to the Chenab cascade, Baglihar and Salal, and the interpretive principles from Kishenganga now travelling towards Ratle and beyond, it means the gate operations visible in the May telemetry are not incidental. Each trough below 21, 000 cusecs during sowing, each near-vertical collapse like the one on 17 May, represents a measurable instance of what the award prohibits: flow shaped by infrastructure rather than determined by the river. Past in Perspective Nor is flow manipulation the only problem the data reflects. Pakistan’s complaint, supported by downstream sediment records, is that, in December 2025, India flushed sediment through Baglihar and Salal without the advance notification Annexure D of the Treaty requires, sending a pulse downstream that damaged canal infrastructure and winter crops. The Kishenganga arbitration had explicitly prohibited drawdown below dead storage for flushing purposes. The December operations repeated it regardless. The deeper problem, as I argued in May, is cumulative. Each dam in the Chenab cascade can be individually defended as treaty-compliant. Together, they are doing something the Treaty never contemplated: controlling the timing of flows across an entire river system without formally exceeding volumetric limits. The Treaty regulates dams. It has nothing to say about a coordinated system of them. Pakal Dul, expected to be commissioned later this year, brings the first significant storage into the cascade. Sawalkote, the largest project yet, has its environmental clearance. India is also recovering storage capacity at Salal lost to decades of siltation, exactly the kind of restoration the pondage ruling now requires to be justified against Treaty limits rather than treated as routine maintenance. India has called the tribunal a “charade” and declared its awards “null and void”, insisting the Treaty has been in abeyance since the Pahalgam attack of April 2025, while at the same time withholding the hydrological data and advance notifications the Treaty independently requires. But invoking political suspension does not make the underlying conduct lawful. The principles of equitable utilisation and no significant harm exist as customary international law, binding on states regardless of any bilateral treaty. A pattern of flow manipulation that strips downstream farmers of water during sowing does not become permissible because a diplomatic dispute has been declared. International water law has a floor. Treaty politics cannot lower it. There is also a longer game India appears not to be thinking about. As a lower riparian on the Brahmaputra, it depends on a river that originates in Tibet. China is building a 60, 000MW dam at Motuo, a project that would give Beijing effective control over flows into northeast India. If India now establishes that upstream states may suspend water-sharing obligations by citing security concerns, it is doing China’s legal drafting for it. The norm that water treaties outlast political disputes is not a concession India makes to Pakistan. It is a protection India will need for itself. Pakistan’s allies, through the World Bank’s treaty oversight role, through the UN, and through direct bilateral engagement, should formally demand that India return to the arbitration process, meet its notification obligations, and stop treating as void the very mechanism the Treaty created to resolve these disputes. Water law does not enforce itself. Where it is allowed to erode, the precedent travels to every contested river, every lower riparian, including India, including the Brahmaputra. Rasheed is not waiting for a verdict. He is working out whether the water will arrive reliably enough next season for a moneylender to advance him seed money against a harvest that may not come. The Treaty did not just divide water between two countries. It made farming a rational act. These pulses are dismantling that, one dam at a time, one ignored ruling at a time, one withheld dataset at a time, one farmer’s future at a time. The question is whether the international community will continue to treat the erosion of water law as someone else’s problem, until the day it becomes everyone’s. Mohsin LeghariThe writer is a former Senator, MPA, MNA, and former Minister of Irrigation Punjab.

Read full story on The Nation