By Annunthra Rangan
On August 31, 2026, a five-member Court of Arbitration sitting under the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague delivered a unanimous award declaring that the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty remains fully in force and that India continues to be bound by its obligations under the agreement. The tribunal also imposed limited interim restrictions on construction activity at India’s Ratle hydroelectric project on the Chenab, pending the outcome of a separate technical process before a World Bank-appointed Neutral Expert, whose final decision is expected around July 2027.
For Pakistan, the ruling was a significant legal victory. Islamabad welcomed the award, said India remained bound by the Treaty and called for constructive engagement.
India’s response was immediate and categorical. New Delhi described the body as an illegally constituted “so-called Court of Arbitration”, reiterated that it had never recognised the tribunal or its jurisdiction and rejected the award as having no effect. India has also maintained that its April 2025 decision to place the Treaty in abeyance remains in force.
The sharp divergence in the two responses captures the central problem surrounding the Indus Waters Treaty today. The dispute is no longer simply about how a water-sharing agreement should be interpreted. It has become an extension of the larger India-Pakistan security confrontation, with both sides invoking competing interpretations of international law to reinforce their political positions.
The irony is that the Indus Waters Treaty was once celebrated precisely because it managed to keep water separate from politics. Brokered by the World Bank and signed in Karachi in 1960, the Treaty survived three wars between India and Pakistan and several periods of intense diplomatic hostility. Under its carefully negotiated terms, India received unrestricted use of the eastern rivers—the Beas, Ravi and Sutlej—while Pakistan was allocated the western rivers—the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab. India, nevertheless, retained limited rights over the western rivers, including the right to develop run-of-the-river hydroelectric projects, subject to detailed technical restrictions.
For decades, that arrangement worked. Water cooperation remained largely insulated from the broader political relationship. Even when armies confronted each other and diplomatic ties deteriorated, the Treaty continued to function.
That separation began to weaken after the April 2025 Pahalgam attack, in which 26 people were killed and which New Delhi attributed to Pakistan-linked militants. Pakistan rejected the allegation. India subsequently announced that it was placing the Treaty in abeyance. A brief military confrontation followed in May 2025, further deepening the crisis.
Pakistan’s decision to pursue arbitration, therefore, came against an already deteriorating political and security relationship. Islamabad sought a determination that the Treaty remained legally operative despite India’s decision to place it in abeyance. India, having already rejected the jurisdiction of the Court of Arbitration, chose not to participate in the proceedings.
But the jurisdictional dispute goes back much further.
The Treaty itself provides different mechanisms for resolving different kinds of disagreements. Technical “differences” can be referred to a Neutral Expert, while broader “disputes” can be taken to a Court of Arbitration. That distinction became critical in 2016, when Pakistan objected to India’s Kishenganga and Ratle hydropower projects.
Pakistan sought arbitration, while India requested the appointment of a Neutral Expert. New Delhi argued that the objections were primarily technical and, therefore, belonged before the Neutral Expert. India also objected to allowing the two mechanisms to operate simultaneously over overlapping questions.
This is an important part of India’s position that is often lost in the broader political debate.
New Delhi’s objection is not simply that it does not want to accept an unfavourable ruling. India has argued that the Treaty establishes a carefully structured dispute-resolution mechanism and that allowing two parallel processes to examine related questions risks producing contradictory outcomes.
The concern is particularly relevant because decisions of a Neutral Expert within his competence have binding effect. India’s position, therefore, is that the integrity of the Treaty’s dispute-resolution architecture matters as much as the eventual interpretation of its technical provisions.
If two mechanisms are allowed to operate simultaneously over essentially the same issues, the distinction between a “difference” and a “dispute” becomes considerably less meaningful.
The World Bank initially paused both processes in 2016, but subsequently allowed them to proceed in parallel from 2022. India has never accepted this arrangement. It has continued to participate in the Neutral Expert process while refusing to recognise the Court of Arbitration.
The Court of Arbitration, for its part, has rejected India’s objections to its competence and maintained that the arbitration can proceed. Its latest award has now held that India’s decision to place the Treaty in abeyance was not permissible under the Treaty or applicable international law.
The tribunal’s position and India’s rejection of it leave the dispute in an unusual legal limbo. India does not accept the authority of the body that has ruled against it, while continuing to participate in another dispute-resolution mechanism created by the same Treaty.
That distinction is important because it demonstrates that India has not simply walked away from the entire Treaty framework.
New Delhi’s position is that the procedure matters. It is prepared to engage with the mechanism it regards as appropriate for resolving the technical questions surrounding its hydropower projects, while rejecting what it regards as an improperly constituted parallel process.
The Neutral Expert process could ultimately have greater practical consequences for the hydropower projects than the Hague award itself. A final technical determination on projects such as Ratle and Kishenganga could establish parameters governing their design and operation, with direct implications for downstream water flows.
Unlike the Court of Arbitration process, India has chosen to participate in this mechanism. That gives New Delhi an opportunity to defend its interpretation of its Treaty rights within a process it considers legitimate.
The August 31 ruling also needs to be understood in the context of the Ratle project itself. The tribunal did not order the entire project to be stopped. Instead, it imposed specified interim restrictions on concreting parts of the dam wall and power-intake structure. Those restrictions are intended to remain until 90 days after the Neutral Expert delivers his final decision.
There is also a broader strategic argument in India’s favour. The Treaty does not prohibit India from using the western rivers altogether. It expressly permits certain uses, including hydroelectric generation, subject to technical conditions. India’s construction of hydropower projects on the Chenab and other western rivers is, therefore, not by itself, a violation of the Treaty. The dispute concerns the precise limits of those rights and the manner in which individual projects are designed and operated.
That distinction matters because Pakistan’s portrayal of Indian hydropower development as an attempt to control or weaponise the Indus waters can obscure the fact that India’s rights to specified uses of the western rivers were built into the original Treaty itself.
At the same time, Pakistan’s concerns cannot simply be dismissed. The Indus river system is central to Pakistan’s agriculture and food security. Its irrigated agricultural economy is heavily dependent on predictable flows. Greater Indian utilisation of its permitted rights, changes in reservoir management or reduced water-related information sharing could, therefore, have significant downstream consequences, even where India considers its actions legally permissible.
The dispute is consequently not merely about dams. It is about how the Treaty balances India’s upstream rights with Pakistan’s downstream dependence.
And that brings the issue to the Treaty’s greatest vulnerability: enforcement.
The Hague tribunal has no independent mechanism through which it can compel India to alter infrastructure projects, freeze funding, seize assets or restore broader water-related cooperation. An arbitral award is ultimately dependent on the willingness—or ability—of the parties to implement it.
India has made clear that it will not recognise this particular award.
For Pakistan, therefore, the immediate value of the ruling lies less in its ability to change Indian behaviour than in its diplomatic utility.
Islamabad now possesses an international legal determination supporting its argument that India remains bound by the Indus Waters Treaty. It can invoke that determination in international forums and use it to reinforce its contention that India is undermining an internationally recognised Treaty. The award consequently gives Pakistan an important rhetorical and diplomatic advantage. But it does not necessarily provide the leverage required to force New Delhi to change course.
India, meanwhile, has linked its decision to place the Treaty in abeyance to the broader issue of cross-border terrorism. New Delhi’s argument is that water cooperation cannot remain permanently insulated from a security relationship that has deteriorated so dramatically. Pakistan maintains that India cannot unilaterally suspend a Treaty that does not provide for such abeyance.
The disagreement has, therefore, transformed what was once a relatively insulated technical arrangement into another arena of strategic competition.
The future of the Indus Waters Treaty will consequently depend on much more than what happens in The Hague. Pakistan will continue to invoke the arbitration award, while India will maintain that the tribunal was improperly constituted and lacked legitimate jurisdiction. The Neutral Expert process will continue to address the technical dimensions of the hydropower dispute, in which India remains engaged.
Ultimately, the August 31 ruling has strengthened Pakistan’s legal and diplomatic narrative, but it has not forced India’s hand. India’s rejection of the award should not automatically be interpreted as a rejection of the Treaty’s entire framework. New Delhi’s position rests on a contested but substantive argument about the sequencing of dispute-resolution mechanisms, the legitimacy of parallel proceedings and the scope of India’s rights under the treaty.
The larger problem, however, is that the political assumptions which allowed the Indus Waters Treaty to survive for more than six decades are rapidly weakening.
The Treaty was designed to keep water separate from political and military confrontation. Today, that separation is increasingly difficult to maintain.
The Indus is no longer merely a river system governed by technical formulas and engineering specifications. It has become a symbol of sovereignty, security, survival and strategic leverage.
The Hague can determine questions of law, but it cannot repair the political relationship between India and Pakistan. Unless that relationship improves, the Indus Waters Treaty is likely to remain caught between international legal proceedings, India’s infrastructure ambitions and Pakistan’s growing concerns over water security.
The latest award may have sharpened the legal battle. The eventual fate of the Treaty, however, will be determined not by arbitration alone, but by the strategic choices made by both states.
— The writer is an independent researcher.
Her research focuses on West Asian studies, with a particular focus on Iran
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