Nation and Region in the Post-Partition Remaking of the Indus River Basin

Abstract The Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) of 1960, though subject to increasing stresses in recent decades (and “suspended” by India in 2025), was long hailed as one of the great success stories of international water disputes. A treaty negotiated to divide the Indus rivers to conform to the new territorial boundaries of the subcontinent’s 1947 partition, the IWT’s ultimate result was to effectively create two separate river basins operating in, and helping to define, distinctive Indian and Pakistani “national spaces” of water control—and “water nationalism.” However, another effect of this approach was also to encourage increasing internal competition—and conflict—over water within each country. This article argues that the roots of this structure go back to the abstract, and environmentally disconnected, form of “nationalism” that dictated the drawing of the original 1947 partition line, and to the ways that state water policy—and the IWT itself—reflected and responded to this.