When Bombs Obscure Ecological Genocide

Last night, India attacks Pakistan, while the catastrophic status of the Indus River remains "not barabar."

Lowell Bliss May 07, 2025

Yesterday, Indian armed forces attacked nine sites in Pakistan in retaliation for the terrorist attack that killed 26 tourists in Indian-controlled Kashmir on April 22. The border between India and Pakistan—violated first by terrorists which New Delhi alleges had Pakistani backing, and then last night by Indian fighter jets—has been dubbed “the world’s most dangerous border,” dangerous because both nations possess not only historical animosity, but also nuclear weapons.

In my opinion, the greatest danger is being revealed by something which knows nothing of borders: the water molecules of the Indus River simply trying to make their way to the sea.

At the end of last week, I wrote an article entitled “Will India and Pakistan ‘Do the Right Thing’ in 120° Temps?”It was a climate change piece. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his generals were contemplating a retaliation, they were doing so in 50°C temperatures, a historic April heatwave. Studies show that higher temperatures fuel greater violence. But the other part of that inquiry—from a climate change perspective—is India’s suspension of the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty and the threat to block the Indus River from flowing into Pakistan. This treaty has survived two wars between these nations, but in an age of climate change, it is now abrogated by a single terrorist attack.

In the article, I quoted Pakistan’s Information Minister who claimed to have “as credible intelligence that India intends carrying out military action against Pakistan in the next 24-36 hours.” India has now attacked and the Minister was off in his prediction by 96-108 hours. Nonetheless, the world should be more concerned about what happens in the next 24-108 months. The diverting of the Indus River, as threatened by Prime Minister Narendra Modi again publicly just hours before he ordered the air strike, has the potential to devastate agriculture in Pakistan, the world’s fifth most populous country.

Let’s look at the events and rhetoric of the last 24 hours in terms of a single word shared by both the Hindi and Urdu languages: barabar, which means “equal.”

1. Immediately after the air strikes, the Indian military releases a statement, characterizing the attack as “focused, measured, and non-escalatory in nature.” In other words, barabar. That’s what “non-escalatory” means.

2. They further point out that they only attacked civilian targets, not military targets. “Civilian” in this case means alleged terrorist camps, in the same (barabar) way that alleged-Pakistani militants killed civilians on April 22. Since no Pakistani soldiers were killed by Indian soldiers, no Indian soldiers need to be targeted by Pakistani soldiers, i.e., no war is necessary.

3. Pakistan claims to have shot down Indian fighter jets. This fact (and a consistent number) has not been verified, but it allows the Pakistani military to claim that they are barabar with their counterparts in India.

4. The Indian army posted on X: “Justice is Served.” Barabar.

5. Pakistan reports that 26 people were killed in the air strikes. What is curious about this number is that it was 26 people who were killed on the Indian side on April 22. It’s hard to imagine that this reporting is a coincidence. The number of deaths are barabar. And when Pakistan highlights the deaths of at least one infant and two teenagers, they are trying to claim that morality has also been rendered barabar. The innocent suffer even in our press releases.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has decried the Indian air strikes as “an act of war.” Islamabad has pledged retaliation. I have lived in both these countries for 14 years, including during their last nuclear standoff in 2001 and 2002. My wife grew up in Pakistan, graduating high school from a boarding school there. I have hiked the mountains in both Kashmirs, and served on an earthquake relief team in 2005 on the Pakistani side. I’ve ridden on the top of a bus through the narrow roads that run through Kargil, near the Line of Control. For that matter, I’ve whitewater rafted on the Indus River in India’s Ladakh. My heart is knit to these places and these people. As a result, my heart is too broken to risk predicting that India and Pakistan have become barabar and that despite Sharif’s pronouncements and pledges, things will de-escalate from here on out. No, I fear that war is possible.

Nonetheless, in my mind, the bigger and more threatening picture is the one that has not blatantly become barabar: the fate of the Indus River. As I wrote in the previous article, under a treaty that has been around for 65 years, more than 80% of Pakistan’s agriculture and one-third of its hydropower is dependent on the flow of water that, geographically, begins in India. More accurately, the headwaters of the Indus River are in the Tibet region of China, but India controls the crucial border crossing. On Tuesday, just hours before the air strikes, PM Modi appeared at an event and said, “Earlier, even the water belonging to India was flowing out, now India’s water will flow for India’s benefit, will stay here for India’s benefit and will be utilised for India only.”

Unless PM Modi walks this back, a reservoir of death, famine, and desperation that will exist behind a dam that will surely burst forth in more violence than we have seen this Spring, is just too horrific to contemplate, even should an immediate and hoped-for de-escalation occur now. India and Pakistan have done this dance before on the bloody edge of saber-rattling. The Indus River Treaty and climate change makes this current incident in no ways barabar with earlier tragedies. Journalists, diplomats, and the world: keep your eyes on the Indus and on the thermometer.