Alleging that the signing of the Indus Waters Treaty by former PM Jawaharlal Nehru was “one of the greatest strategic blunders”, Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma said the suspension of the pact sends a clear message that India will “no longer reward terror and hostility with appeasement”.
Sarma also alleged that the country’s first prime minister’s “misplaced obsession with international approval came at the cost of India’s long-term national interest”.
He praised the Narendra Modi government’s decision to keep the treaty in abeyance.
India’s decision to suspend the decades-old treaty follows the killing of 26 people, mostly tourists, in a terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam on April 22.
“Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s signing of the Indus Waters Treaty in 1960 stands as one of the greatest strategic blunders in India’s history (sic),” CM Sarma said in a post on X.
“Despite India’s natural upper riparian advantage, Nehru, under immense pressure from the then American administration and the World Bank, handed away over 80 per cent of the Indus basin waters to Pakistan, gifting full control over the mighty Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab rivers, while restricting India to the smaller eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas, Sutlej) (sic),” the Assam CM claimed.
