Geneva, Sep 17 (IANS) Several international speakers at a conference on the sidelines of the 63rd session of the UN Human Rights Council on Thursday made a strong case for keeping the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) in abeyance, arguing that India's decision was a legitimate sovereign response to decades of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism and bad faith.

The IWT was signed between India and Pakistan on September 19, 1960, concerning the utilisation of the waters of the Indus system rivers.

After last year's heinous Pahalgam terror attack, India exercised its rights as a sovereign nation under international law and placed IWT in abeyance until Pakistan credibly and irrevocably abjures its support for cross-border terrorism.

Addressing the conference titled, 'Community Water Rights and the Imperative to Keep the Indus Water Treaty in Abeyance', Siegfried O Wolf, Director of Research at the South Asia Democratic Forum, Brussels, said India was within its rights to seek a review of the 1960 treaty, holding that Pakistan's conduct had undermined the object, purpose and spirit of the agreement as set out in its preamble.

He described the treaty as a voluntary Indian concession resting on a structural imbalance — an 80:20 split in water allocation, a financial contribution to the Indus Development Fund, storage and infrastructure constraints, and what he called tactical legal warfare through repeated challenges to Indian projects such as Baglihar, Kishenganga and Ratle.

Dr Wolf dismissed Pakistan's claim that India was blocking river flows as an "engineering myth," pointing out that Indian projects on the western rivers are non-consumptive and generate power before returning water downstream.

Islamabad's campaign, he said, was part of a wider effort to delay India's development, discredit it internationally and distract from a water crisis that is entirely self-inflicted — rooted in Punjab's dominance, feudal landholding, urban bias and decaying canal infrastructure.

London-based human rights activist Arif Aajakia said the right to water is a fundamental human right that Pakistan's military establishment has denied to Sindh, where the Indus has been reduced to a trickle at Kotri by upstream canal diversions. Listing major terror attacks in India from the 2001 Parliament attack through the 2008 Mumbai carnage, Pulwama and last year's Pahalgam killings, he said India's suspension of the 65-year-old treaty was justified.

Last week, an Indian NGO had called for a review of the IWT, arguing that changing water-security conditions in the region require the 1960 agreement signed between India and Pakistan to be reassessed from a contemporary human-rights perspective.

Delivering an oral statement at the 63rd Session of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) under Item 3 on the Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation, the Delhi-based NGO said access to water is closely linked to the rights to life, health, food, housing, dignity and development.

Referring to the UN recognition of access to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a fundamental human right, the statement said international water treaties should be implemented in a manner that strengthens, rather than constrains, states' ability to meet their human-rights obligations.

The NGO said the Indus Waters Treaty, despite being an important example of long-standing international cooperation, was signed more than six decades ago and the region's water-security environment has since changed significantly. It cited population growth, climate change, glacier retreat, groundwater depletion and increasingly unpredictable river flows as factors that have transformed water-security challenges in the region.

The statement argued that contemporary treaty implementation should not prevent states from fulfilling their obligations towards communities under their jurisdiction. It said ensuring water security for communities should remain a fundamental priority and described a review of the Indus Waters Treaty as an imperative, referring also to its present abeyance.

The NGO concluded that human rights and international cooperation are complementary and that transboundary water governance should place people, dignity and fundamental rights at the centre.

--IANS

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