When water becomes both the lifeline and a faultline

Do rivers have stories to tell? As he prepared to map the Chenab, “a river of diplomacy enshrined in the Indus Waters Treaty”, Danesh Rana was reminded of a Bashir Badr couplet: “Agar fursat mile paani ki tahriron ko padh lena, har ek dariya haazaron saal ka afsana likhta hai. (If you get the time, do read the writing of the water. Every river writes a tale of thousand years.)”

In his memoir and travelogue, The Dark Coloured Waters (Juggernaut), Rana, who has served as an IPS officer in the erstwhile State of Jammu & Kashmir, profiles the river with the help of myths, legends, anecdotes and photographs, including one of the highest railway bridge in the world in Reasi district. He also describes the state of the river post-Pahalgam massacre when India suspended the Indus Water Treaty, brokered by the World Bank in 1960.

“A day after the suspension of the treaty, the sluices at Baghlihar and Salal Hydroelectric Projects were closed,” he writes. Soon, the water receded rapidly, “turning the roar of the river to a whimper,” and people began to walk across the river.

Is it possible to halt or divert rivers? Rivers are the proverbial natural arteries of ecological systems. They are also worshipped, navigated and dammed. From the ancient ecosystems of Egypt to the sinking cities of Shanghai, rivers are valued differently. No wonder, some of our major river systems are also drying, and ultimately dying. Despite such ambiguity, rivers have remained intertwined with humanity.

Water history

A river determines water history in any region, seasonal variation in its flow being the prime determinant. With the bulk of water in the system coming from rainfall and snow melt in the mountains, a river finally flows to the sea to complete its essential hydrological cycle. Of all rivers that have tried to complete the hydrological cycle, the story of the Indus basin stands as one of modern history’s great stories of large-scale environmental transformation. It is also a story of changing relationships between society and the state.

In 2015, Prof. David Gilmartin of North Carolina State University argued that a large-scale environmental history of the Indus basin was yet to be written (Blood and Water, University of California Press). The Indus basin’s history has long been the subject of historical attention. Although a largely arid region, the Indus basin became one of the globe’s most heavily irrigated river basins. Though the flow in the river in the six months from October to March is just 16% of the total annual flow, floods in the summer months have been historically significant.

It is claimed that the Indus basin supplies 80% of the water for Pakistan’s irrigated agriculture – that it employs nearly two-thirds of the labor force and generates a quarter of the national GDP. Such linear relationship has been climatically challenged. Triggered by extremely heavy rains, the July-August 2010 Indus floods affected some 20 million people; 2 million homes were destroyed, 1.6 million head of livestock died and the economic losses amounted to $43 billion. Though the consensus was that it was a-once-in-a- hundred years event, the fact remains that thanks to rapid global warming, a greater climatic uncertainty surely looms.

Floods and irrigation

No message is more powerfully conveyed by the floods’ damage than that massive human development has vastly increased the system’s vulnerability. Together with this, large-scale irrigation projects have become a tool to dominate nature. Erik P. Eckholm had noted in the 1970s that “the greater irrigation works in modern times had come to dramatise the dangers inherent in efforts to expand large-scale control over nature without sufficient attention to the ‘ecological requisites’ of nature itself.”

The Indus basin is not bereft of such transformation or vulnerability, and it is in this light that the river ought to be studied. The Indus Water Treaty was a shared heritage between India and Pakistan, till its suspension in April 2025. Consequently, the future of the water-sharing treaty between upper riparian India and lower riparian Pakistan remains shrouded in mystery (Trial by Water, Penguin, 2025). As per the treaty, the water of the five rivers of Punjab used to flow into the Indus. It may not in future. All these rivers show similar patterns of flow, and their vicissitudes have dictated much of the basin’s hydrogeography. However, all this is going to change if river water is diverted (over time) by the upper riparian state.

At this moment, is it apposite to delineate the fundamental hydrogeography of the Indus basin and its complex flow patterns? How water becomes both a lifeline and a faultline in the contested south-Asian landscape is the lingering question. Under the changing situation, can the river be allowed to flow its course to fulfil its ecological and hydrological obligations of flowing back to the sea to complete the hydrological cycle?

Mounting stress

However, to focus solely on bilateral tensions is to miss the larger picture. “The Indus Basin must be seen as a single, interconnected whole – its challenges not confined to legal frameworks or diplomatic flashpoints but rooted in deeper ecological struggles”. With the basin now confronting surging water demand, climate shocks and mounting water stress, the stakes are only intensifying in the future. Can this decades-old treaty evolve to meet a new era of crisis, rekindling its role as a platform for cooperation?

Rivers themselves have always had their own logic: their natural beauties, their floods, droughts, their tendency to silt up, their changes of course, tipping points and disappearances (Seven Rivers, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2025). Rivers have shaped our lives, just as we have shaped theirs. Changing hydro dynamics of the Indus river offers a view of the world where the person and the river, or the person and nature, are seen in relation to each other. Love, grief, and hope flow through the river.