The water bomb

We are all aware that Pakistan is faced with a number of serious problems and threats, each of which seems to be more serious than the other. However, of all the problems none is more threatening than the schemes of Hindu India to block the water of Pakistan's Rivers, thereby causing water famine in the country.

Unfortunately, awareness of this threat has been lacking on the part of Pakistan's rulers in the past. But we cannot afford to ignore it any longer because the consequences will endanger not just the agriculture, economy and the stability of Pakistan but its very survival. India knows this vulnerability of Pakistan and fired by its eternal enmity to this country has been moving ahead with plans to hit Pakistan hard in the sensitive sphere of water. India, as you would also know by now, is constructing 58 dams and water reservoirs on Pakistan's Rivers, Chenab, Jhelum and Sindh.

Realising the great danger that Pakistan is about to face through acute scarcity of water, we have held several conferences and exclusive sessions with professional experts in this field at the Nazria Pakistan Trust. What role would Nazaria have if the country's survival was not ensured first! The picture that emerged from the evaluation of the situation by the experts is far grimmer than what we had generally known through media reports.

History has acknowledged now that the unannounced dishonest alteration in the Punjab boundary line made by Radcliff and Mountbatten at the time of the Partition in August 1947, by which the two very important headworks of Madhopur on the Ravi and Ferozpur on the Sutlej were given to India, laid the foundation of depriving Pakistan of the water resources that historically and geographically belonged to it. The Indus Basin Treaty (IBT) of September 1960, whose provisions clearly favoured India, and which the dictatorial Ayub regime accepted although it was against our national interest, was, similarly, designed to deny Pakistan even its rightful share of the water of the three allocated Rivers in the years to come.