The decades-old Indus Waters Treaty faces its gravest challenge as India suspends it, prompting Pakistan to warn of war.
Islamabad, Pakistan – Seven decades ago, one of South Asia’s greatest fiction writers, Saadat Hasan Manto, published a short story set in a village in Pakistan’s Punjab province. The plot revolved around rumours of an Indian plan to “shut down” water to Pakistan by closing off rivers that irrigated the province’s crops.
A character in the 1951 story titled Yazid responds to that chatter by saying, “…who can close a river; it’s a river, not a drain.”
That theory is now on test, 74 years later — with implications for two of the world’s most populous nations that are also nuclear-armed neighbours.
In April 2025, after gunmen killed 26 civilians, almost all tourists, in an attack in Indian-administered Kashmir, New Delhi blamed armed groups that it said were backed by Pakistan for the violence.
