The Indus Waters Treaty at a Crossroads: Strategic Abeyance and Hydro-politics in South Asia

The historic insulation of cooperative hydro-diplomacy from geopolitical conflict in South Asia has decisively collapsed. For over six decades, the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) of 1960 was a partitioned river-sharing arrangement. It survived wars, crises and sustained bilateral hostility. But India’s placement of the IWT in ‘abeyance’ following the April 2025 Pahalgam terrorist attack ruptures that paradigm. This article conceptualises ‘strategic abeyance’ as a novel framework of legal liminality. It is neither formal suspension under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT), 1969, nor treaty termination, but a deliberate exercise in hydro-political leverage that subordinates cooperative water management to sovereign security imperatives. It draws on qualitative document analysis of government reports, policy documents and academic literature to examine the evolving strategic and legal dimensions of post-April 2025 treaty practice. It explores how abeyance affects the Kashmiri stakeholder’s perspective, the legal and strategic dimensions of abeyance and how counter-terrorism concerns have changed the treaty’s cooperative architecture with Pakistan, calling for a new re-negotiated treaty Indus–II. Comparative models like the United States–Mexico ‘minute’ arrangements, the Columbia River Treaty, the Rhine Basin and the Mekong Agreement are studied to assess their relevance for future adaptation to the Indus basin post-abeyance, highlighting the challenges of reconciling security, development and climate resilience in transboundary water governance.