Published 2026-03-20
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Abstract
Water governance in South Asia has entered a period of acute politicisation. This paper examines the 2025 abeyance of the Indus Waters Treaty as a case of water securitisation shaped by the discourse of “climate wars.” Employing a single-case qualitative design, the study integrates process tracing, theory-driven discourse analysis, and empirical hydrological contextualisation with few expert interviews. The empirical corpus is explicitly bounded to official speeches, ministerial statements, policy notifications, and publicly reported dam operations between 2014 and 2025 that directly reference the treaty, security, or water management. Discourse analysis is operationalised through securitisation indicators: existential-threat framing, identification of the target audience, and justification of extraordinary measures beyond normal politics. These speech acts are traced against subsequent policy actions to assess coherence between rhetoric and implementation. Basin flow patterns, glacier dependence, and climate-stress projections are incorporated to evaluate the material feasibility of water coercion. The findings demonstrate that while structural and hydrological constraints limit large-scale flow denial, political rhetoric, particularly under Narendra Modi, reframed river governance from a technocratic regime into a domain of strategic signalling, intensifying mistrust between India and Pakistan under conditions of environmental stress.