The images out of Punjab don’t look real. Villages half-underwater, families perched on roofs, children clutching pots instead of toys. More than two million people displaced, and the water keeps rising. You can call it a natural disaster, but the politics are impossible to miss.
Pakistani leaders are asking the question many whisper: did India deliberately unleash this flood?
The sky did its share
First, the rain. Relentless monsoon clouds parked over the subcontinent and poured down harder than usual—26 to 27 percent more than last year. No human could have stopped that. Dams in Indian-controlled Kashmir swelled beyond safety limits. In such conditions, dam operators had little choice but to release water. If they didn’t, the walls themselves could have burst, endangering their own citizens.
That much is fact. The monsoon was fierce, and water had to go somewhere.
But mistrust fills the gaps
Here is where the story turns darker. India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty back in April. That treaty, flawed though it was, provided a lifeline: data, notifications, a mechanism to manage the shared rivers. Without it, Pakistan was left half-blind. When the floodgates opened, they had only a few hours to move hundreds of thousands.
India insists it issued warnings. Pakistani officials admit some messages came through, but too late and too vague. Imagine being a farmer told “flooding expected” without numbers, timing, or flow rates. Do you save your animals, your family, or your crop?
Words matter when water is rising
It didn’t help that Pakistan’s Planning Minister accused India of “water aggression.” Strong words in a moment of crisis. Yet the anger isn’t baseless. To many in Pakistan, the dam releases felt less like necessity and more like punishment. A reminder of vulnerability.
India, for its part, rejects the idea outright. Officials say they did what any country would do: protect their dams, warn their neighbor, hope for the best. The line between technical necessity and political hostility blurs quickly when trust has already collapsed.
The real failure
So did India intentionally try to flood Pakistan? The evidence says no. But intention isn’t the only measure of responsibility.
The true failure lies in politics. The suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty. The silence between neighbors who share rivers but no longer share data. The inability of two nuclear-armed states to manage something as basic, as elemental, as water.
This was not a weaponized flood. But it was a warning. Nature doesn’t wait for peace treaties. And when climate chaos meets political breakdown, it’s always the poor who drown first.
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