NEW DELHI – Trust Prime Minister Modi to deliver on his promise made to the 1.4 billion Indian citizens on identifying, tracking, and punishing the terrorists and their backers for the merciless murders of 26 civilians in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam on April 22, 2025.
Don’t mistake this as some praise for Modi from a blind supporter. That’s how Modi, the politician and now Prime Minister of India, is built.
With 15 years as a full-timer of the world’s largest volunteer outfit, India’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh growing grassroot social movements and another 15 years as a political worker building the world’s largest political organization, the Bharatiya Janata Party, to another 24 years as an administrator in provincial and national governments – he reads the mood and the pulse of the citizens accurately.
There was an overwhelming anger among Indians and a demand for revenge for the killing of innocents by Pakistan-groomed terrorists at Pahalgam, and Modi answered it with Operation Sindoor, a nine-location military strike inside Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir on May 7, 2025.
But Modi did not act on an impulse or display a knee-jerk reaction to the worst terror strike on Indian soil since the 2008 Mumbai attacks by Pakistan-trained terrorists.
Modi took two weeks to discuss the fallout of the Pahalgam terror strikes on South Asian security with India’s military and diplomatic leadership, chalk out a foolproof plan, and execute it with precision.
On May 7, between 1:05 am and 1:30 am, Indian Army commandos and Air Force warplanes bombed nine locations — all terror camps that recruited, indoctrinated, trained, and launched armed groups to infiltrate India and carry out bloody attacks on Indian infrastructure and civilians — deep inside Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
A day after the Pahalgam terror attack, India responded to the provocation by Pakistan-trained terrorists with a series of diplomatic punitive actions, which included the expulsion of the military attaches functioning at the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi, reducing the reciprocal diplomats’ strength at its High Commission in Islamabad to 30 personnel, and cancelling all visas to Pakistani nationals on a visit to India and asking them to leave by April 30, 2025.
Included in this action, as approved by the Modi-chaired Cabinet Committee on Security, India’s highest defense decision-making body, was the immediate abeyance of the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, until Pakistan credibly and irrevocably abjures its support for cross-border terrorism. If enforced strictly over the next 10 years, this decision could debilitate Pakistan’s agriculture, threatening its food security.
Pakistan’s Punjab province is overwhelmingly dependent on the six Indus rivers — Indus, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Satluj, and Beas — for its agrarian economy to flourish. Signed after nine years of negotiations, with World Bank intervention and participation, the treaty provided a framework for irrigation and hydropower development.
As part of the treaty, India has historically never stopped the flow of the Indus River waters into Pakistan despite several provocations, military tensions, and even wars. The treaty has been hailed globally as a shining example of enemy states cooperating on water sharing.
A section of the Indian strategic community has criticized India’s decision under the first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru as a major ‘strategic’ blunder, as the treaty favoured Pakistan and provided no leverage to India. But that seems to have changed forever under Modi.
As the Modi government in India decided to suspend the Indus Waters Treaty in response to the Pahalgam terror attacks, many so-called ‘experts’ rushed in with doubts on ‘How will this suspension work?’ or ‘Changing river’s course takes decades,’ and even bizarre ideas like installing giant pumps to empty rivers. But what they do not realize is that Modi doesn’t just make statements. He works on them silently and does enough groundwork before the headlines hit the media.
Post the Uri terror attack in 2016, Modi said something the world should have taken seriously: “Water and blood cannot flow together.” But in TV studios, the think tankers were busy analyzing the threat of a nuclear attack — though in the limited form of tactical nukes used in localized battlefields — in case India and Pakistan escalate their military tensions to a full-fledged war. But Modi was building infrastructure brick by brick.
The Kishanganga Hydroelectric Project (HeP)on the Jhelum tributary to divert waters through a tunnel was completed and inaugurated in 2018, and this project became a dispute with Pakistan. The Ratle HeP project on Chenab was revived in 2021. The Tulbul Navigation Project on the Jhelum was reactivated in 2016, ready to regulate flow. The Shahpurkandi Dam construction on the Ravi went full steam in 2018, and this dam could block the surplus water outflow. The Ujh Multipurpose Project on Ravi’s tributary has been underway since 2020, designed to choke the water supply into Pakistan. Some of these projects are run-of-the-river dams, which means all water flow cannot be stopped, but the water release could be controlled and brought to a minimum than normal.
So, Modi’s Indus Waters Treaty suspension decision wasn’t essentially retaliation. This is his policy with a purpose against Islamabad, executed since 2014 over the last 10 years. This is India’s new strategic doctrine to bring Pakistan’s agrarian economy to its knees.
With temperatures soaring this summer, it is most likely that Pakistan’s water crisis will explode on Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s government soon. With the suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty, and if India decides to use its dam storage and diversion capacities on the six rivers, farmlands in Sindh and Punjab in Pakistan could become inadequate, if not dry up entirely.
Some estimates say Pakistan’s food security depends on 90 percent of the Indus waters. So, all that Modi must do is to turn the taps off and do it legally and methodically. This isn’t warfare as we know and understand it. This is strategic strangulation — without noise, drama, or a global fallout — all for maximum effect, at maximum cost, and with zero apology for what India can do to Pakistan.
N.C. Bipindra
The writer is a New Delhi-based defense and strategic affairs analyst.
