In April 2025, India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, one of the world’s most enduring transboundary water agreements, following a deadly terrorist attack in Kashmir. The move sent shockwaves through South Asia and raised a question that researchers have been tracking for years: when rivers become weapons, who pays the price?
This research examines how the race to build hydropower dams in two of South Asia’s most strategically vital river systems – the Indus and the Brahmaputra – is deepening political tensions, weakening international institutions, and increasing the risk of conflict between nuclear-armed neighbours.
Dams, Power, and Politics
Hydropower is a foreign policy tool. Globally, governments are turning to it as a cornerstone of their renewable energy transitions. But in South Asia, dam-building is about more than electricity. In the Indus and Brahmaputra basins shared between China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bhutan, and Bangladesh, hydropower infrastructure functions as a tool of geopolitical leverage. Upper riparian states, those sitting at the source of a river, have an enormous structural advantage. By controlling the headwaters, these states can regulate flows downstream, disrupt irrigation, or simply withhold hydrological data as China did during the 2017 Doklam military standoff with India, cutting off flood warning information that downstream communities depend on.
This research draws on the frameworks of hydro-hegemony and hydro-political vulnerability to understand these dynamics. Hydro-hegemony describes how powerful riparian states use their geographic position, economic might, and infrastructure investment to establish dominance over shared water resources. Hydro-political vulnerability refers to the risk of conflict that builds when institutions governing shared rivers are too weak to absorb the shocks of environmental change and unilateral action.
In both basins studied, the emerging picture is one of declining institutional resilience and rising vulnerability.
The Indus: A Treaty Under Siege
The Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) of 1960, brokered by the World Bank, is frequently cited as a landmark in transboundary water governance. By allocating the basin’s six rivers between India and Pakistan, the three eastern rivers to India, the three western rivers predominantly to Pakistan; the Treaty established a durable framework that survived three wars and sustained mutual distrust for over six decades. Its longevity, however, has often obscured its structural limitations.
The IWT was designed as a bilateral arrangement between two states. It has no mechanism for incorporating the interests of other basin riparian states – notably China and Afghanistan – and its dispute resolution architecture, though formally tiered, has shown increasing strain. The Treaty’s first recourse to third-party adjudication came only in 2007, when Pakistan referred the Baglihar Dam dispute to a neutral expert. Since then, both the Kishanganga and Rattle projects have triggered twin-track processes involving both a neutral expert and the Permanent Court of Arbitration simultaneously, an unprecedented and constitutionally ambiguous situation that reflects how far the Treaty’s internal mechanisms have been stretched.
India’s broader hydropower ambitions on the western rivers compound this institutional stress. Successive projects on the Jhelum and Chenab rivers formally allocated to Pakistan have drawn sustained Pakistani objections on grounds of altered storage capacity and downstream flow disruption. India’s formal notification in August 2024 seeking modifications to the Treaty under Article XII (3) marked a significant escalation: it shifted the dispute from a technical register, where the IWT’s mechanisms ostensibly apply, to a political one, where India’s leverage as upper riparian is considerably greater. India’s August 2024 notice sought government-level negotiations under Article XII (3) and that Pakistan viewed this as a move to advance hydropower projects through political negotiations.
The unilateral suspension of the Treaty by India in April 2025 further exposed the fragility of institutional mechanisms governing bilateral water diplomacy. Following the Pahalgam attack, India declared the IWT "held in abeyance," blocked Chenab flows at the Baglihar Dam, and accelerated several stalled Kashmir projects. The move reflects what the hydro-hegemony literature describes as "issue linkage": deliberately connecting a water institution to a broader security agenda to leverage upper-riparian advantage. Its consequences extend beyond the bilateral: analysts have noted, with some justification, that India’s precedent could furnish China with a rationale for suspending its own hydrological data-sharing obligations on the Brahmaputra. The fragility of one basin’s institutions thus compounds the vulnerability of another.
The Brahmaputra: A Race Without Rules
If the Indus is an institutional crisis in progress, the Brahmaputra (known as the Yarlung Tsangpo in China) is a basin where meaningful cooperation has never fully taken hold.
China and India are engaged in what can only be described as a dam-building arms race. China, the upper riparian, completed its first major hydropower dam in Tibet in 2015, and has since proposed three more on the Yarlung Tsangpo in its middle reaches. Most recently, China announced plans for a staggering 60-gigawatt mega-project at the Great Bend of the river, a location where the river drops nearly 2,000 metres, making it extraordinarily well-suited for power generation.
India is responding in kind by developing a 10-gigawatt project in Arunachal Pradesh—referred to by China as South Tibet, a region it has long claimed. The territorial dispute over Arunachal Pradesh is not separate from the water politics at play; the two are tightly linked. Control of the land ultimately means control of the river. The bilateral relationship between India and China over the Brahmaputra has oscillated between periods of cautious cooperation, including a 2002 Memorandum of Understanding on hydrological data sharing, and outright suspension of information exchange during military standoffs. The most recent MoU expired in June 2023 and remains unrenewed, leaving the future of even basic flood data sharing uncertain.
Meanwhile, India’s own upstream ambitions on the Brahmaputra are creating new anxieties downstream in Bangladesh, which has little control over decisions that directly affect the water security of tens of millions of its citizens.
Why Institutions Fail and What Might Help?
The pattern across both basins is consistent. When territorial disputes intensify, or when national governments prioritise energy security over regional cooperation, the institutions designed to manage shared waters are the first casualty. This outcome is not inevitable. Strong institutional frameworks backed by real political will have historically been the most effective buffer against water conflicts. The Indus Waters Treaty itself is evidence of this: even an imperfect treaty is better than none. The question now is whether it can be rebuilt, extended, or replaced with something more resilient.
Several steps could help. Memoranda of Understanding could be extended to cover climate adaptation, disaster warning, and water quality issues where cooperation benefits all parties and where the political stakes are lower than formal treaty renegotiation. These agreements could also include non-signatory states (notably China and Afghanistan in the Indus basin) and engage community and civil society groups across borders, whose local knowledge of water stress is often ahead of any government data. Neutral platforms such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) could provide spaces for technical cooperation at the regional level.
None of this is straightforward in a region defined by nuclear rivalry, unresolved territorial disputes, and deep historical distrust. But the alternative basins where each state pursues its own energy ambitions without reference to shared consequences points toward a future of permanent crisis.
The Bigger Picture
The suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty marks a turning point, both literally and politically. It shows that water governance in South Asia has entered a more dangerous phase, where the lines between energy policy, territorial rivalry, and national security are increasingly blurred. This research indicates that developments in the Indus and Brahmaputra basins are not just bilateral disputes. They reflect a deeper structural issue: regional powers are pursuing competing goals in shared river systems, while existing institutions are too weak to manage the tensions that arise. The rivers will keep flowing. The real question is whether the countries that depend on them can cooperate to manage these shared resources or whether the politics of hydropower will ultimately outweigh the forces of nature.
This blog is based on the author’s article "Unpacking Hydropower Politics in the Indus and Brahmaputra River Basins," published in the Journal of Water Management Modeling (2025). Read the full article here.
Asma Yaqoob is a PhD candidate at the School of Law and Government at DCU, and a Research Fellow at the DCU Conflict Institute. Her research focuses on women’s political vulnerabilities in climate disasters.
