India will never restore the Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan, said Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Saturday.
While speaking to The Times of India, Shah said that India will use water that rightfully belongs to it, and that Pakistan “will be starved of water that it has been getting unjustifiably.”
He said that India will use the water that had been flowing to Pakistan from Rajasthan by constructing a canal.
India had placed the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance a day after the April 22 attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam. India said that the treaty would be suspended until Pakistan “credibly and irrevocably” stopped its “support for cross-border terrorism.”
Shah said: “International treaties can’t be annulled unilaterally but we had the right to put it in abeyance, which we have done. The treaty preamble mentions that it was for peace and progress of the two countries, but that has been violated, there is nothing left to protect.”
India and Pakistan signed the Indus Water Treaty in 1960 with the World Bank as an additional signatory. The pact sought to divide the water of the Indus river and its tributaries equitably among the two countries. Under the treaty, water from three eastern rivers, Beas, Ravi and Sutlej, were allocated to India and that from the three western rivers – Indus, Chenab and Jhelum – to Pakistan. The treaty also allowed both countries to use the other’s rivers for certain purposes, such as small hydroelectric projects that require little or no water storage.