Water and blood cannot flow together, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in his first message to the nation after Operation Sindoor, India’s counterstrike in retaliation for the Pahalgam terror attack. The water and blood reference was a clear message to Pakistan that while India may have agreed to a ceasefire, it has no plans to lift the hold on the Indus Waters Treaty that it imposed a day after the heinous attack in which 25 tourists and a Kashmiri man were murdered in cold blood.
“Terror and talk cannot take place together. Terror and trade cannot take place together. And, water and blood also cannot flow together,” Prime Minister Modi said in his message to the nation during which he warned Pakistan that India has only paused its action and its next move will depend on Pakistan’s actions.
Stressing that Operation Sindoor had rewritten the rules of India’s response to terror, the Prime Minister said the country would respond to terror on its terms and that any form of nuclear blackmail — Islamabad’s oft-used trick — won’t be tolerated.
A day after the Pahalgam terror attack, India took a series of diplomatic steps against Pakistan. The biggest of them was the suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty, a 1960 water-sharing agreement between the two countries signed by then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistan President Mohammed Ayub Khan. The suspension of the treaty was significant because such a move was not taken even during India’s wars with Pakistan.