India’s Ambassador to the US Vinay Mohan Kwatra has laid out New Delhi’s most detailed public justification for keeping the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) in abeyance, saying Pakistan had rendered the 1960 agreement unworkable through decades of cross-border terrorism, procedural obstruction and refusal to adapt the treaty to present-day realities.In his article ‘A Treaty Pakistan Destroyed Long Before India Set It Aside’ published in American magazine Newsweek, Kwatra argued that India’s decision to place the World Bank-brokered treaty in abeyance following the April 22, 2025, Pahalgam terror attack was not a sudden political reaction but the culmination of years of Pakistan undermining both the letter and the spirit of the agreement.“They murdered 26 persons, resulting in the highest number of civilian casualties in a terrorist attack in India since the November 26, 2008, Mumbai attacks. Over 40,000 civilians in India have been killed as a result of Pakistan’s persistent terror campaign,” Kwatra wrote.Referring to the treaty’s preamble, which says it was concluded in a spirit of “goodwill and friendship”, Kwatra wrote that Pakistan had systematically dismantled that foundation through repeated wars and sustained cross-border terrorism, making continued implementation of the pact untenable.Beyond the security dimension, the envoy argued that Pakistan had consistently prevented India from fully exercising even the limited rights available to it under the treaty by challenging Indian hydropower projects through prolonged dispute-resolution processes and resisting every attempt to update the six-decade-old agreement despite advances in engineering, changing climatic conditions and rising developmental needs.He added that terrorist attacks on project sites, including the 2012 attack on Tulbul Navigation Project, had further constrained India’s ability to utilise the waters allocated to it under the treaty.Rejecting Pakistan’s allegation that India was using water as a weapon, Kwatra argued that Pakistan’s water stress stemmed largely from chronic domestic mismanagement, claiming that only about 40 per cent of the water it receives reaches farms, with the rest lost during transit or flowing into the sea.“The abeyance merely acknowledges what Pakistan’s conduct had already destroyed,” Kwatra wrote, adding that meaningful cooperation on bilateral issues would require Pakistan to first dismantle the terror infrastructure operating from its soil.