Indus Waters

Abstract

In this chapter, I wish to offer a pre-history to the Indus Water Treaty of 1960. Since the period that this book covers ends at 1952, and since I wish to situate the discussions around the treaty as a means of implementing the partition, it becomes particularly important to understand the considerations that affected the early stages of the Indus negotiations. I argue that although the Indus Waters Treaty, negotiated under the auspices of the World Bank, was signed only in 1960, over a decade after the partition, many of its clauses had built upon the assumptions that had been formed by 1950. Indeed, by 1951, both the source of the problem—the fear that enough water would not be allowed to flow in to Pakistan from the canals that had been built before the partition—as well as its solution—that new canal networks would have to be developed in a way that would satisfy the separate requirements of both India and Pakistan—were already apparent. The discussions around Indus waters in the years that immediately followed the partition, offer valuable insights into how the implementation of the partition was conceptualized.