Pak's "Victim Card" On Indus Waters Can't Change India's Decision: Sources

Pakistan has not taken any credible step to stop terror groups from using its territory as a safe haven to launch attacks on India, people with direct knowledge of the matter said today, explaining the reason behind India's unchanged stand on the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), which has been in abeyance since April 2025 following the terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir's Pahalgam that killed 26 tourists.Ever since India decided to keep the IWT in abeyance, Pakistan has been lying to the international community that India's decision sets a dangerous precedent for nations that share transboundary rivers.Referring to this, sources said the IWT will never function for India in its present form and India would consider a renegotiation only if Pakistan takes credible steps to abjure terrorism. At the moment, proscribed terrorist groups that are also sanctioned entities continue to appear at public events in Pakistan, and it has taken no credible steps to stop these groups, sources said.India will continue to ignore Pakistani proceedings at the level of neutral experts, sources said. If there are floods in the western rivers, India will provide information through its high commission in Islamabad, they said.Pakistan, however, continues to play the "victim card" in order to get international support over the IWT. It approached both the Court of Arbitration and neutral experts simultaneously, a procedurally incorrect move since multiple stages of appeal exist, sources said.The argument that 240 million people in Pakistan are on the brink of water starvation is an exaggeration since there is more water in runoff in Pakistan than India's entire share of Indus waters, people familiar with the matter said, adding Pakistan has not built any big storage for decades. Rather, it has objected to every major project that India has wanted to initiate in river waters. At least 50 per cent of water drawn by Pakistan gets wasted, with a major runoff to the sea.Sources said Pakistan's recurring claims of water insecurity are contradicted by its own official documents and public statements. The Pakistan National Water Policy acknowledges that approximately 35 million acre-feet of water flows annually into the Arabian Sea without productive utilisation. It further records that nearly 30-40 per cent of canal water is lost during conveyance, with barely about 58 million acre-feet ultimately reaching farms out of more than 100 million acre-feet diverted through the canal system.The IWT, negotiated over 60 years ago, is based on decades-old technology that has fundamentally changed - ancient techniques in infrastructure and dam-building as per the IWT standards do not work for India anymore, sources said. The treaty's preamble states it was concluded "in a spirit of goodwill and friendship", which Pakistan has breached by promoting terrorism, leaving no "good faith".Last year too, India had said that until such time that the treaty is in abeyance, India is no longer bound to perform any of its obligations under the IWT. "No court of arbitration, much less this illegally constituted arbitral body which has no existence in the eye of law, has the jurisdiction to examine the legality of India's actions in exercise of its rights as a sovereign," the Ministry of External Affairs said in June 2025.