London, May 9 India’s decision to place the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) in abeyance following the heinous April 2025 Pahalgam terror attack carried out by Pakistan-backed terror group is widely viewed as a calibrated measure and one of the least disruptive tools available within the global order, a report said on Saturday.
According to a report in British newspaper Asian Lite, over the last four decades, Pakistan has used “non-state violence” as an alternative to conventional military capability against India.
The report cited United States Congressional Research Service findings in March 2026 documenting at least 15 terrorist outfits operating from Pakistani soil, 12 of them US-designated Foreign Terrorist Organisations.
The Resistance Front (TRF), which claimed the Pahalgam terror attack, is the most recent addition, designated by the US State Department on July 17, 2025 as proxy of terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
The report noted that the Western international lawyers familiar with Articles 60 and 62 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties – relating to material breach and fundamental change of circumstances – should recognise that India has faced 40 years of terrorist violence emanating from Pakistani territory.
“Pakistan's breach is not of the treaty’s water-sharing clauses. It is of the customary law obligation, articulated by the International Court of Justice in the Corfu Channel and Nicaragua jurisprudence, not to allow one’s territory to be used for acts contrary to the rights of other states,” it added.
Highlighting the escalatory rhetoric from Islamabad since the Pahalgam terror attack, the report said former Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari twice spoke of war in 2025 if the treaty was not restored. Additionally, on August 10, 2025, Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir told a diaspora gathering in Florida’s Tampa that Pakistan would destroy any future Indian dam with “ten missiles” and was ready to take half the world down with its nuclear weapons.
“That is not a deterrent signalling of the kind Western strategists recognise. It is the open conflation of treaty grievance, conventional asymmetry and nuclear threat, delivered on American soil by a serving army chief," it stressed.
The report emphasised that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address from the Red Fort on August 15, 2025, made clear that nuclear blackmail would no longer be tolerated and that “blood and water cannot flow together”, restoring a clear threshold of Indian deterrent communication. It added that if Western non-proliferation concerns are genuine, focus should be on Rawalpindi rather than pressuring New Delhi.
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