Water as a strategic asset: Role of Kashmir’s River in Indo-Pak relations
Water as a strategic asset: Role of Kashmir’s River in Indo-Pak relations
Water as a strategic asset: Role of Kashmir’s River in Indo-Pak relations
Abstract
Water is one of the most serious strategic assets in South Asia, with the rivers of Jammu and Kashmir central to both India’s strategic leverage and Pakistan’s endurance. This study, based in Hydro politics Theory and informed by realism, liberal institutionalism, and the human security paradigm, explores three dimensions: India’s upstream control and its impact on Pakistan’s water security, the effects of climate change on Indus Basin flows, and governance gaps warning cooperative running.
Written By: Laiba Sarwar
The results reveal that India’s dam-building in Kashmir reinforces its bargaining power but deepens Pakistan’s dependence and vulnerability. Climate change and weak institutions exacerbate insecurities, while outdated treaty instruments restrict adaptation. The paper entitlements that the true strategic value of Kashmir’s rivers lies not in their potential to divide but in their capacity to unite. Reframing water as a shared human necessity, rather than a radical weapon, offers a path toward assistance, flexibility, and regional stability.
Keywords:
Kashmir’s Rivers, Indus Waters Treaty, Hydro politics in South Asia, Water Security, Climate Change, Water Governance
Introduction
Water has emerged as one of the most critical strategic assets in South Asia, where the survival and development of nations depend heavily on shared river systems. The rivers flowing from Jammu and Kashmir form the backbone of agriculture, energy, and livelihoods in both India and Pakistan. For Pakistan, the Indus Basin rivers are a lifeline, sustaining its agrarian economy and ensuring food security.
For India, control over these rivers strengthens its strategic leverage and energy potential. Consequently, Kashmir is not merely a territorial or ideological dispute, but also a water security issue that directly influences bilateral relations. The management, distribution, and political contestation over these rivers continue to shape Indo-Pak ties, making water a decisive factor in both conflict and cooperation.
For over half a century, rivalry over river resources has caused interstate tension between India and Pakistan. During the partition of British India in 1947 and the creation of the two states, border lines were drawn based on what was defined as the “Indus watershed.” The position of these lines meant that India gained control of upstream barrages that regulate water flow into Pakistan. Since the boundary between the two countries cuts across many of the river’s tributaries, an upstream-downstream power dynamic has developed, which has been a source of tension, especially in response to dam projects in Indian-administered territory .
The main objectives of this research are to assess how India’s upstream water control impacts Pakistan’s water security and economy, to explore the influence of climate change on river flow and future water availability in the Indus Basin, and to identify gaps in existing water governance policies and propose possible frameworks for sustainable and cooperative water management. Control over Kashmir’s rivers enhances India’s strategic leverage over Pakistan. India’s construction of upstream dams in Kashmir contributes to increased political and security tensions with Pakistan. Water is no longer just a resource but is increasingly being used as a strategic and political tool in Indo-Pak relations.
This research employs a qualitative approach to examine the strategic significance of Kashmir’s rivers in Indo-Pakistani relations. It relies on secondary data collection, including a review of treaties, government documents, policy papers, academic research, and news sources. This research is grounded in the Hydro Politics Theory, which focuses on the political dynamics of shared water resources between nations. India's construction of dams and water infrastructure in Kashmir reflects a strategic approach to maximize control over upstream resources, while Pakistan views this as a threat to its water security and sovereignty.
Historical and political background
To understand a conflict, it is important to pay attention to the origin of the conflict, context, developments, and life cycle of the conflict. It is also important to pay attention to position, attitude, behavior, images, and values attached to the subject matter that the parties develop for each other as the conflict evolves and new variables are added in the equation. The Indo-Pak enmity remains the most enduring unresolved conflict in South Asia.
The birth of two states through the decolonization process and the mistrust both parties shared during the freedom movement sowed the seeds for the conflict. The incompatible territorial goals over Kashmir led to an enduring conflict, which has continued for seven decades with wars and low-intensity skirmishes. Despite post-conflict phases and occasional peace efforts, the latent conflict persisted. The seeds of the conflict are rooted in the decolonization process, territorial allocation, the developments that followed the creation of the two states, and primarily, the dependence of water on Kashmir.
Centrality of Kashmir’s Rivers
Pakistan and India, since 1947, have been in strife, disarray, and anarchy. The ruler of Kashmir, Maharaja Hari Singh, was still hesitant. A rebellion against the rule of the ruler had erupted with the support of Pakistan. The besieged ruler was urged to decide on accession to India. The Indian army landed at Srinagar. The line of ceasefire awarded sixty-three percent of the land of the original princely state of Jammu and Kashmir to India, including Ladakh, the Kashmir Valley, and the majority of Jammu. Pakistan received a portion of Jammu as well as the far-flung regions of Baltistan and Gilgit. The parameters of the Kashmir conflict between Pakistan and India had been established.
Importance of Kashmir
All the wars in the world are particularly felt in the developing world. One of the most significant geopolitical points of strategic significance in the world is the broader region of Kashmir, situated among the three nuclear powers of India, Pakistan, and China. Kashmir also shares a border with Afghanistan, situated at the crossroads between South and Central Asia, while Central Asia is itself a geographic bridge between Europe and the rest of Asia.
This is why Kashmir possesses an unusual geopolitical position. This area is also of extra importance because Pakistan and India have access to the Arabian Sea, giving them a direct link to the sea corridors and the Persian Gulf region itself. We should not forget that at present, unimpeded traffic, both sea and land, is equally as precious as the goods and services being transported along these corridors.
Indus Water Treaty and its strategic implications
It was on April 22, 2025, after an attack on Pahalgam, that India unilaterally suspended the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) without proof or due inquiry. Pakistan has criticized the action, which flagrantly violates the treaty, and has taken international legal action against this suspension. The IWT, which was signed in 1960, assigned control over the eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas, Sutlej) to India and the western rivers (Indus, Jhelum, Chenab) to Pakistan.
It has also offered stability in South Asia. It created a reliable structure for water sharing, which is essential to Pakistan's agriculture and hydropower industries. The IWT works as an implicit guarantee against upstream intervention with downstream flows of water. The sudden halt of the treaty jeopardizes this protective structure at a crucial moment when Pakistan already endures extreme water scarcity. In addition, the treaty is still in the olden times, not taking into consideration issues of the moment like climate change, glacial melt, unpredictable monsoons, and increasing population needs.
Research gap:
While both South Asian hydro politics and the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) have been widely researched, there has been a significant research lacuna in understanding Kashmir's rivers as specifically strategic resources in the context of the Indo-Pak rivalry. Most of the existing scholarships pay attention to the flexibility of the treaty, legal conflicts, or the technicalities of hydropower projects. Nevertheless, it tends to miss the way India's upstream dominance in Kashmir directly determines Pakistan's water security, farm requirements, and economic susceptibility. Likewise, although climate change is becoming more universally regarded as an issue, there has been scant scholarly work that has connected glacial melting and unstable monsoon patterns with Kashmir's rivers' volatile strategic importance and their contribution to the deepening regional insecurities and abstract psychological pressure on Pakistan.
In addition, all those studies mention water governance in abstract terms without critically examining formal deficits, data-sharing deficiencies, and policy loopholes that force cooperative management under current and future stressors. As such, this study seeks to bridge these shortcomings through evaluating India's infrastructural domination of shared rivers, examining the environmental dangers posed by climate change to the Indus Basin, and pinpointing governance flaws that hamper sustainable and collaborative water organization among the two states.
Theoretical framework:
In general, the position of a state in issues of individuality and non-identity within the international system is handled equally. To make an elaborate model, it is necessary to solve the theoretical perspective of these issues. For instance, classical realism understands power politics and geopolitics as one, hence concentrating on international structure as discord, leading to disputes. Voluntarily liberals' governments, liberal governments are interdependent; therefore, they increase aid. Constructivists confirmed it by stating cautiously that states expand through cooperation.
The policies of neo-realism aim at safeguarding national welfare and enhancing security, and maximizing power (Keohane, 1986). Therefore, establishing international relations on an equal basis by considering the cost and benefit analysis. Even with negotiations concerning interstate relations, the theories do not look at water as a direct matter between the two countries. This may be due to the lack of necessary importance of the issue on the international stage, as they view it as an unnecessary idea.
Hydro-politics among South Asian nations under the conventional realist security paradigm is not free of risky implications, for water cannot be managed like land, and water cannot be handled like oil. War has no victors but different types of defeat, and water war can create a crisis of human security because water is a requirement and not a resource. Therefore, hydro-politics must be an ethical-moral, normative solution and can be addressed by a mix of functionalist liberal approach interwoven with human security.
The paradigm of human security requires an omnipresent role of the state to establish a state of freedom from fear, want, and is founded upon human dignity. Water is one of the essential resources required for agriculture, hydropower, industry, and local requirements. It can contribute to existing conflicts in South Asia on the inter- and state-level, but it can also be an operational feature to promote harmony through cooperative public management and legal institutions, forming the command under the support of a regional organization, i.e., SAARC, resulting in non-regional peace . (Akbar,2022)
The Hydro Politics Theory is the central agenda, evidenced by insights from realism, liberal institutionalism, and the human security paradigm. Realism illuminates how India's control over Kashmir's rivers upstream provides it with strategic leverage, brushing water as a power tool and a means of security. Liberal institutionalism, on the other hand, emphasizes the importance of treaties and collaborative mechanisms like the Indus Waters Treaty in addressing common resources, as well as the possibility of institutional change. Meanwhile, human security thinking emphasizes that water is not just a geopolitical device but a fundamental human requirement, connecting ecological threats, money, and dignity to subregional peace.
This coupled theoretical perspective supports the research goals by evaluating India's infrastructural dominance, examining the effect of climate change on river flows, and identifying governance loopholes that necessitate sustainable cooperation. In doing so, in turn, the framework captures the emphasis that Kashmir's rivers are an immediate source of conflict, weakness, and possible cooperation in Indo-Pak relations.
Hydro politics in South Asia
The hydro-politics of India's and Pakistan's relations are strongly influenced by the geography of the Indus Basin, in which the bulk of the rivers that nourish Pakistan originate in Indian-administered Kashmir. In addition, India's construction of dams and hydroelectric projects on the western rivers, while technically legal under certain conditions, has created fear in Pakistan that New Delhi seeks to exploit loopholes in the treaty to incrementally tighten its grip over water flows.
The analysis underscores that Indian transgressions, like initiating massive projects without consultation, serve to further reinforce the impression that water is being weaponized as an instrument of strategy. Climate change, glacial melt, and seasonal variation ended this argument further. In this context, any Indian unilateral steps towards modifying flows or postponing releases have grave repercussions for the food security, energy generation, and socio-economic stability of Pakistan. Another part of India's upstream dominance is its broader geopolitical strategy. Through constructing water infrastructure with Afghanistan, e.g., planned dams on the Kabul River, India indirectly puts at risk an important Pakistani water source.
The Kashmir dispute is hence not merely ideological or geographical but primarily hydro-political: those in control of Kashmir are also in control of Pakistan's survival lifelines. This renders water the focal point of India-Pakistan competition, where control upstream is not so much a neutral geographic reality but more of a strategic device shaping South Asia's precarious security landscape.
Kashmir’s Rivers as Instruments of Power
Kashmir's rivers are more than merely natural lifelines; they are deeply ingrained in the strategic consideration of both India and Pakistan, in their larger geopolitical rivalry. The Indus River Basin, nourished by the rivers of Kashmir, is Pakistan's main source of freshwater, feeding its agriculture, irrigation systems, and people. India has an upstream advantage that Pakistan views as a huge Achilles' heel. India's development of dams and hydroelectric facilities in Kashmir has thus been seen by Pakistan as not only development projects but tools of political and strategic power. For instance, facilities like Baglihar, Kishanganga, and the proposed Bursar dam generated Pakistani concerns over India's capacity to change flows, delay releases, or control downstream availability.
Pakistan's press, politicians, and jihadis have described Indian dam construction as "water terrorism," further solidifying the idea that India can fight a "silent water war." The psychological pressure is therefore as significant as the hydrological one, because fear that water is being militarized unbalances confidence and incites nationalist rhetoric. This narrative turns Kashmiri rivers into tools of coercion and bargaining chips in the broader Indo-Pak competition. India's power, though, is not limitless: international pressure, treaty commitments, and the technical need to maintain river flows for its own electricity generation constrain its capacity to completely weaponize water, but the uncertainty remains. So, hydro politics in South Asia is as much about water allocation as it is about the intertwinement of geography, infrastructure, and geopolitics, where upstream control turns rivers into levers of influence and helplessness.
As compared to India, Pakistan’s water policy is more comprehensive and addresses important multi-sectoral issues and concerns. Both policies focus on water resources management, development, irrigation systems, and their national interest. In comparison, Pakistan’s policy highlights areas linked to the agriculture sector, provincial autonomy, the Indus Waters Treaty, and the country’s irrigation system. While the Indian policy focuses more on water and its impact on the economy, database management, basin management, ground water level, and the importance and funding of water-related projects. India’s water policy is contradictory in terms of water management and allocation.
On the one hand, it is explicitly mentioned that water needs to be managed as a community resource under the public trust doctrine; on the other hand, the policy underlines the need to treat water as an ‘economic good’. Likewise, the policy distinctively prioritizes industrial growth at the cost of its agriculture sector, and while it mentions inter-regional and inter-state disputes in the sharing of water as detrimental, the issue is not tackled at length in the document. The policy calls attention to flood forecasting by using real-time data acquisition systems and models but again offers little in terms of on-ground implementation and or the importance of transboundary data sharing. From Pakistan’s perspective, the country needs to build at least 13 dams equivalent to the Kalabagh Dam.
It is facing a serious issue of decline in surface water flows and groundwater depletion rate, which is not a focus of the policy. Finally, the National Water Policy of Pakistan does not address the role and importance of trade in terms of the growth and export of water-intensive crops such as rice, cotton, and sugarcane. So, the governments of both these countries can learn from each other and update their respective water policies, considering these quantitative findings.
Literature review
The author contends that despite the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) having survived wars, political hostilities, and regime change in the past, it is threatened today by climate change, India's control of the waters upstream, and the securitization of water politics. The narrow technical focus of the treaty, the absence of institutional adjustment, and the inaction of provisions for real-time data sharing or adaptation planning together limit its capacity for dealing with contemporary and future threats. Hence, water in South Asia is not merely a resource concern but also a security and strategic issue, particularly in crises, when it is fenced around as leverage and sovereignty.
Water infrastructure investment is essential to meet the supply shortage and tap the development potential of Jammu and Kashmir, given the Indus Waters Treaty limitations and transboundary character of its rivers. Hydropower exploitation has been constrained by the treaty limits, continuous interruptions by Pakistan, administrative inefficiencies, financial hurdles, and technical impediments, with much scope remaining untapped even after the recent policy reforms. Hence, sustainable economic development and maximum use of resources in Jammu and Kashmir is possible only through robust, comprehensive investment drives, especially through center–state collaborations and civic–private endeavors, based on good governance and management policies. The author stresses that only by intensifying infrastructure in hydropower, agriculture, and local supply can the union territory achieve its growth and resilience, regardless of its intricate water politics.
The research indicates that India's upstream leverage and the initiatives of the Kishanganga and Ratle dams give rise to impressions that water is being utilized as a strategic instrument, whereas Pakistan's domestic challenges—i.e., provincial competitions, weak institutions, and ineffective policy enforcement—will hurt its bargaining capability. Meanwhile, the treaty does not at all consider pressing concerns such as melting glaciers, erratic precipitation, or ecological sustainability, and in view of this, the future of water security is uncertain.
It is necessary to reform the IWT with the assistance of impartial entities such as the UN or World Bank, ensuring the sharing of real-time data, engaging domestic institutions such as IRSA, and including nongovernmental organizations in water governance. It emphasizes that institutionalizing modernization, enhancing transparency, and considering water as a common environmental resource instead of a political tool can enable both nations to transform the Indus Basin from a zone of conflict into an arena for trust, peace, and sustainable development.
If water is militarized, it may develop into a human rights tragedy, environmental disaster, and even nuclear war. The author's position is that the only option is through new diplomacy, revised treaty provisions that incorporate climate change, population increase, and advancements in technology, as well as impartial international intermediaries to establish trust. By making water humans, instituting collaborative crisis processes, and facilitating people-to-people diplomacy, the two countries can turn rivers from areas of conflict to symbols of peace, resilience, and shared prosperity.
Conclusion:
The Kashmir rivers have too frequently been lined up only by the boundaries of power, control, and resistance, yet beneath it all, this struggle is ultimately one of survival and dignity for ordinary people who call the Indus Basin home. Kashmir's rivers are not just strategic assets or instruments of statecraft; they are lifelines that carry farmers in Punjab, families in Sindh, and societies in Kashmir itself that rise each morning dependent on their course.
If viewed more humanely, these rivers disclose the mutual burdens of India and Pakistan since both societies endure the same floods, droughts, and climate change that know no borders. The true measure of regional strategic power, in other words, will not be found in how many dams have been constructed or how many treaties have been put on hold, but in whether the two governments can transform these waters from icons of intimidation into symbols of adaptability and hope. In this regard, the real strategic worth of Kashmir's rivers is not their ability to bifurcate, but their singular capacity to unify—reminding both nations that although power may be ephemeral, the desire for water and for peace is eternal.
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