Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Tuesday that water from India that once flowed across borders will be stopped, days after suspending a key water treaty with Pakistan.
“India´s water used to go outside, now it will flow for India”, Modi said in a speech in New Delhi. “India´s water will be stopped for India´s interests, and it will he utilised for India.”
Pakistan has warned that tampering with its rivers would be considered “an act of war”.
Modi did not mention Islamabad specifically, but his speech comes after New Delhi suspended its part of the IWT, signed in 1960, which governs water critical to Pakistan for consumption and agriculture.
New Delhi has blamed Islamabad for backing a deadly attack on tourists in Pahalaga, a mountain resort in the Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) last month, sparking a series of heated threats and diplomatic tit-for-tat measures.
Pakistan rejects the accusations, and the two sides have exchanged nightly gunfire since April 24 along the Line of Control (LoC), according to the Indian army.
United Nations chief Antonio Guterres on Monday said relations between Pakistan and India had reached a “boiling point”, warning that “now is the time for maximum restraint and stepping back from the brink” of war.
India on Tuesday altered the flow of the Chenab River, one of three rivers placed under Pakistan´s control according to the now-suspended treaty.
“We have witnessed changes in the river (Chenab) which are not natural at all,” Kazim Pirzada, Punjab irrigation minister, told AFP.
Punjab, bordering India and home to nearly half of Pakistan’s 240 million citizens, is the country’s agricultural heartland, and “the majority impact will be felt in areas which have fewer alternate water routes,” Pirzada warned.
“One day the river had normal inflow and the next day it was greatly reduced,” Pirzada added.
In Azad Jammu and Kashmir, large quantities of water from India were reportedly released on April 26, according to the Jinnah Institute, a think tank led by a former Pakistani climate change minister.
“This is being done so that we don’t get to utilise the water,” Pirzada added.
Hindu-nationalist Modi had already threatened to use water as a weapon in 2016 after an attack in IIOJK. “Blood and water cannot flow together,” he said at the time.
But India also is a downstream state of China, which controls the Tibetan headwaters of the Brahmaputra, the vast river key to India’s northeast, and which then flows down through Bangladesh.