Can India stop Pakistan’s river water — and will it spark a new war? | India-Pakistan Tensions

Islamabad, Pakistan – Seven decades ago, one of South Asia’s greatest fiction writers, Saadat Hasan Manto, published a short story set in a village in Pakistan’s Punjab province. The plot revolved around rumours of an Indian plan to “shut down” water to Pakistan by closing off rivers that irrigated the province’s crops.

A character in the 1951 story titled Yazid responds to that chatter by saying, “…who can close a river; it’s a river, not a drain.”

That theory is now on…