South Asia’s nuclear power threatens to halt water relations in view of Tuesday’s attack on Pakistan’s northern hemisphere
Tensions between South Asia’s two nuclear-armed powers got hotter after India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed to pursue the perpetrators of Tuesday’s attack in India-administered Kashmir.
“I say to the whole world: India will identify, track and punish every terrorist and their backers,” Modi said in English during a rally in the northern state of Bihar.
India and Pakistan have been at odds since India blamed Pakistan for the attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir that killed 26 men. Pakistan has denied involvement in the attack, one of the deadliest on Indian civilians in years.
Pakistan’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister denied they were involved in a press conference. If there’s proof that Pakistan was involved, please share it with us and the world.
Pakistan and India both claim to have control of parts of Muslim-majority Kashmir. They have gone to war over Kashmir multiple times.
On Wednesday, India’s foreign secretary announced a series of moves to pressure Pakistan, including expelling diplomats, shuttering a border crossing and crucially, suspending a decades-old water treaty between the two countries.
The treaty will be held abeyance until Pakistan ceases its support for cross-border terrorism, said the foreign secretary.
According to the statement, released by the office of the prime minister, Pakistan would consider India’s move to hold back water as an act of war.
Water from the major rivers between India and Pakistan can’t be held back or diverted by India because of the treaty.
Embedding the Indian Ocean into the Kashmir Sea: “What will the Indian military tell us about the Kashmir crisis” – Pakistan’s response to the Indian attack on Tuesday
On Thursday afternoon, Kashmir police released a poster with names and sketches of three people they wanted to find for Tuesday’s attack. It identified two of them as Pakistani nationals and offered a cash reward of more than $20,000 for information leading to their “neutralization.”
The union demanded that the Bollywood film featuring Pakistani actor Fawad Khan be banned. The Pakistan government’s X handle was blocked by India.
“India has a freer hand to escalate for the simple reason that it does not have any alliances or military partnerships,” says Ajai Shukla, a strategic affairs commentator and retired Indian army colonel. “The downside is that India will be fighting alone. There are limitations on the weaponry it can buy and use. And there’s the sorry fact that Pakistan and China and other countries tend to coalesce into an anti-India coalition of sorts.”
“What India can immediately do is shut off communication on water flow that it gives to Pakistan,” says Imran Khalid, an independent water analyst from Pakistan. He warns that India could reduce Pakistan’s access to water in the long term.
Like him, Khaled cautions against further escalations. “India hasn’t said, we’re going to withdraw from the treaty. It’s only suspending it. I believe there’s room for both countries to approach the subject in a way that is in line with the long history of cooperation.
MUMBAI, India — A day after the United Nations appealed for “maximum restraint” between Pakistan and India, the Indian military reported an exchange of fire with Pakistani soldiers on Friday across the de-facto border of the disputed region of Kashmir.
Secretary-General Siddharth Varadarajan: “There is no place like home” for Kashmir, and there’s no need for a military intervention
The United Nations is appealing to both countries to keep the situation at bay, the spokesman for the Secretary-General told reporters Thursday.
Some Indian analysts warned of the possibility of more serious military action in the coming days. “One thing we can say with pretty much absolute certainty is that there will be a military response,” said Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor of The Wire, an online daily.
Varadarjan pointed to previous incidents of hostility between the two countries as a guide of what might happen now, but he believes that some could be harder to handle than before. “The global terrain is different,” he says. “You have a White House that may be less inclined to interfere and intervene than it did five years ago.”
State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce declined to answer a question from a journalist this week on whether the U.S. might try to mediate on Kashmir, as President Trump offered to do during his first term in the White House. “As we all know, it’s a rapidly changing situation and we are monitoring it closely, as you might imagine,” Bruce said. President Trump is in condemnation of Tuesday’s attack.
Rajesh Rajagopalan, a professor of international politics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, noted that it would be difficult for India to sustain a wider conflict, simply because it does not have enough air power to do so. “There doesn’t seem to be any kind of plans for, any kind of capacity for any kind of sustained military operation,” he said. It is going to be quick even if there is a military operation. Of course, the problem is that then Pakistan will respond — and then how that goes, it’s difficult to say.”
Let’s assume the Indians have gone crazy, right? They pull out $100 billion out of their pocket and start building dams like absolute crazy people. They’re going to use the dam. Mustafa says. “If it’s a hydroelectric dam, they have to release the water in order to generate electricity.” And a dam to store water, he says, would “submerge the entire Kashmir Valley. That’s the end of the Kashmir issue.”