It sounds like talks held to talk about having more talks to solve the water disputes between India and Pakistan.
This week, representatives from the Indian side of the Permanent Indus Commission visited Pakistan in accordance with the stipulations outlined in the Indus Waters Treaty.
At the end of the five day visit, the biggest decision to come out of the talks was an agreement to set a deadline by which talks must finish and a decision on how to resolve the disputes must be made.
Perhaps I am being overly cynical. India and Pakistan will be sitting down to discuss current water disputes. The word “disputes” is fairly vague, though. I assume the word covers Pakistan’s belief that India is withholding water and the five dams India is either constructing or planning in Kashmir. But, despite my being new to the game, I have a feeling all of this has been talked about before.
And frankly I am a little confused as to whether the water talks are the same or different from the talks proposed by India last week. India proposed “open-ended talks at the level of Foreign Secretary on all outstanding issues affecting peace and security, including counter terrorism;” Pakistan Foreign Minister Qureshi expressed to the media a desire for bilateral talks to end the Indo-Pak water crisis. After captured members of the Taliban revealed a plan to bomb the Baglihar dam, I can see how resolving water disputes could be viewed as counter terrorism. But it is still unclear to me as to whether these talks are the same. More shall be revealed, I suppose.
On a related note, I came across a particularly affecting paragraph in A.A. Michel’s 1960s tome on the Indus River. Hindsight. It’s a marvel.
If the irrigation factor was strong enough at Gurdaspur to vitiate the communcal majority principle to the extent of partitioning a Muslim-majority district and awarding not only the non-Muslim Pathankot tahsil but two Muslim-majority tahsils to India, then the irrigation consideration should have prevailed at Ferozepore at least to the extent of giving Pakistan control of the right-hand portion of the headworks with the intake of the Dipalpur Canal. In other words, if the Ravi was the logical boundary in the Gurdaspur District, then the Sutlej was the logical boundary in Ferozepore. Such an arrangement would have forced the parties to cooperate from the start, and might have set a precedent that would have obviated the need to partition and divorce the Indus Rivers in 1960.
A. A. Michell — The Indus Rivers (1967) pp 193
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