No more Indus Commission meetings till Treaty renegotiated: India

India and Pakistan at odds over renegotiating the 64-year-old Indus Water Treaty, risking the future of the Permanent Indus Commission

“There will be no more meetings of the Permanent Indus Commission (PIC) till the governments of India and Pakistan meet and discuss the renegotiation of the 64-year-old Indus Water Treaty,” a highly placed official told The Hindu. The last meeting happened in Delhi in May 2022. Since January 2023, India has written four times to Pakistan to initiate talks on revising the treaty but, according to sources, not received a “satisfactory response.”

The PIC is the most consequential product of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), signed in 1960, to manage the sharing of six Himalayan rivers between India and Pakistan. Commissioners of both countries are mandated to meet every year, and sometimes have met multiple times in the year, to discuss and resolve differences on the sharing of river water, constructing hydropower projects and data-sharing concerning the ecological aspects of the rivers.

Despite wars and disputes between India and Pakistan and the occasional stalling of the meetings, the PIC has been a permanent fixture. However, with India’s call to renegotiate the IWT in January 2023, the PIC risks oblivion. “Pakistan’s first response [following India’s call] was to discuss issues at the level of commissioners. But India denied this on the grounds that the commissioners are meant to execute the treaty, and so this can be done only by governments. If the governmental negotiations were to begin to renegotiate the treaty, India could consider reviving the commission as a goodwill measure,” the official told The Hindu.

On August 30 this year, India sent a letter to Pakistan, the fourth since 2023, asking to renegotiate the treaty. “India’s notification highlights fundamental and unforeseen changes in circumstances that require a reassessment of obligations under various Articles of the Treaty. Among various concerns, important ones include change in population demographics; environmental issues — need to accelerate development of clean energy to meet India’s emission targets; impact of persistent cross-border terrorism, etc,” said a Government note summarising aspects of the notification sent in August.

However, India’s “prime” focus, the official cited earlier said, was solving the dispute resolution mechanism set out in the treaty.

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Different interpretations

While the genesis of the dispute lies as far back as 2005 and involves the design parameters of the Kishenganga and Ratle hydropower projects in Jammu and Kashmir — the former already a commissioned project — the bad blood has ballooned because both the countries have interpreted the dispute-resolution mechanisms, set out within the treaty, differently.

According to the terms of the treaty that deal with the “Settlement of Differences and Disputes”, there are three possible steps to decide on objections raised by either side: working within the “Permanent Indus Commission” of the Indian and Pakistani delegation of water experts that meet regularly; consulting a World Bank-appointed neutral expert; or setting up a court process to adjudicate the case through the World Bank and the Permanent Court of Arbitrage (PCA). However, while India has held that each step must be fully exhausted before both sides agree to moving on to the next step, Pakistan has moved on without waiting for India’s concurrence.

While both countries first seemed to agree on the World Bank appointing a ‘neutral expert,’ Pakistan in 2016 asked for a Court of Arbitration. The World Bank first ruled that having a neutral expert and court together could lead to “contradictory outcomes”. However, in 2022, it facilitated the setting up of both an expert as well as a chairman to the court of arbitration. India has refused to attend proceedings in the court of arbitration at The Hague. Pakistan has maintained that it is working within the terms of the treaty, whereas India says the treaty doesn’t allow such parallel dispute mechanisms.

Under the treaty, water from the Beas, Ravi and Sutlej, or the ‘eastern rivers’, were allocated to India and that from the three western rivers — Chenab, Indus and Jhelum — to Pakistan. The treaty allows India to use the western rivers for limited irrigation purposes and power generation, among other ‘non-consumptive’ uses.

Published - September 18, 2024 05:44 pm IST