India-Pak water wars: A Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohd Ali Jinnah story

Indian Express

06-05-2025

Weeks before Cyril Radcliffe drew the eponymous Line in August 1947 partitioning India and Pakistan, he had an earful from Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The founder of Pakistan told the chairman of the Boundary Commission that he would rather have 'deserts than fertile fields watered by courtesy of Hindus'. A dressing-down from Jawaharlal Nehru would follow as part of the 'joint Hindu-Muslim rebuke'.
Radcliffe was not at fault. Fighting the oppressive heat fuelled by a delayed monsoon in the soon-to-be divided Punjab, his biggest challenge in carving up the land was to assign control of its irrigation system, which was 'built, with a good deal of British inspiration, largely by Sikh money, design and sweat' to channel river waters through a system of elaborate canals to the arid west, 'turning the province into the granary of India.'
While the five rivers that supplied the water were all in the east and would invariably come under India, the land they irrigated was mostly in the west, which would become Pakistan. Realising that Partition 'vitally threatened' the great watering network, Radcliffe took a proposal, through the Viceroy, to Jinnah and Nehru: Would the two leaders agree to run this river-canal system as an Indo-Pakistan joint venture?
'Both leaders were obviously furious with him (Radcliffe),' recounted British author Leonard Mosley in his 1962 book 'The Last Days of the British Raj'. 'He was rewarded for his suggestion by a joint Hindu-Muslim rebuke. Jinnah told him to get on with his job and inferred that he would rather have Pakistan deserts than fertile fields watered by courtesy of Hindus. Nehru curtly informed him that what India did with India's rivers was India's affair.'
That was, according to Mosley, Radcliffe's 'one and only attempt to try to make a constructive suggestion' as the chairman of the Boundary Commission. The issue of shared waters between the two neighbours has remained contentious ever since.
While India put 'in abeyance' last month the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, citing a lack of 'good faith' after a terror attack in Kashmir's Pahalgam, even the buildup to the landmark water pact was fraught with mistrust.
With joint control of canals out of the question, a temporary solution was found in a 'Standstill Agreement' reached in December 1947 to buy time until March 1948 to negotiate a lasting solution. But neither side took any initiative to extend the timeline, and India discontinued the supply of water from the Indian Punjab's Ferozepur headworks on the Sutlej to the Dipalpur Canal in Pakistan's Punjab province on April 1, 1948. This also marked the formal Indo-Pakistan dispute over sharing the waters of the Indus system.
A month later, on April 30, Nehru ordered the East Punjab government to resume water supply. In an agreement signed on May 4, India assured that water would not be withheld without prior notice and time to develop alternate sources, and Pakistan recognised India's legitimate need for developing resources in Indian Punjab, which was historically deficient in water infrastructure.
Two years on, however, Pakistan said it accepted the May 1948 Agreement under 'compulsion' and 'signed under duress.' In response, Nehru wrote: 'A more extraordinary statement I do not remember to have come across at any time… It took two years for your government to discover that the Agreement was signed under duress.'
An initiative by the World Bank broke the impasse in 1951, and it took nine long years to thrash out a deal before the Indus Waters Treaty was signed in 1960. But Pakistan remained wary of India upstream.
Half a century later, Pakistan moved the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague, Netherlands, in 2011 against the Kishanganga Hydroelectric Project, citing 'stark deficit in trust between the parties' and the 'historical experience of 1948 when the East Punjab government cut off all the canals supplying West Punjab.'
Pakistan argued that the Indus River system is 'fundamental to (its) existence and the health and livelihood of its people'. Terming India's dam construction programme 'an existential issue,' Pakistan underlined the importance of 'limitations on India's capacity to manipulate the timing of flows,' by 'limiting the amount of live storage' of every hydropower dam that India could construct.
Before the PCA, India denied the relevance of events that occurred in the immediate aftermath of Partition, before the Indus Waters Treaty, 'during a period of some confusion between two new States … that were sorting out their respective rights.' Holding that 'the assertion that the Baglihar Dam was filled in such a way as to harm Pakistan is factually incorrect', India argued that the evidence introduced by Pakistan should be disregarded as 'inaccurate, emotion-laden and inflammatory'.
An Indian counsel underlined that India believes in the 'sanctity of all our international legal commitments,' including the Indus Waters Treaty. 'India wants peace and friendship with its neighbours, and we have striven very hard to build friendship, build confidence and trust,' he told the PCA.
That trust was tested by 'sustained cross-border terrorism by Pakistan targeting the Indian Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir' that goes against the fundamental 'obligation to honour a treaty in good faith'. On April 24, India decided to hold 'in abeyance' the Indus Waters Treaty, citing 'fundamental changes in the circumstances'.
Jay Mazoomdaar is an investigative reporter focused on offshore finance, equitable growth, natural resources management and biodiversity conservation. Over two decades, his work has been recognised by the International Press Institute, the Ramnath Goenka Foundation, the Commonwealth Press Union, the Prem Bhatia Memorial Trust, the Asian College of Journalism etc.
Mazoomdaar's major investigations include the extirpation of tigers in Sariska, global offshore probes such as Panama Papers, Robert Vadra's land deals in Rajasthan, India's dubious forest cover data, Vyapam deaths in Madhya Pradesh, mega projects flouting clearance conditions, Nitin Gadkari's link to e-rickshaws, India shifting stand on ivory ban to fly in African cheetahs, the loss of indigenous cow breeds, the hydel rush in Arunachal Pradesh, land mafias inside Corbett, the JDY financial inclusion scheme, an iron ore heist in Odisha, highways expansion through the Kanha-Pench landscape etc. ... Read More