Ever since India decided to keep the Indus Water Treaty in abeyance, Pakistan has launched a full- scale, propaganda- driven lawfare across various platforms, desperately trying to internationalize a bilateral issue. The recent projection of the verdict given by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) on the Indus Water Treaty is another effort to internationalize the issue and create strategic space to pressure India. However, a close examination of Pakistan’s lawfare tactics shows it is about less fighting and more noise.
The Lawfare Tactics
Countries primarily use lawfare to stage propaganda or to fight a case with ingenuity to force compliance, seize assets, and legally restrict an opponent’s operational behaviour. In the former case, the state exploits legal terminology, treaty texts, or international forums purely as a perception- management tool. The goal is to internationalize the issue and seek legitimacy in international opinion. In the latter case, lawfare tactics are instrumental: the state fights a legal battle against an adversary to achieve a broader strategic objective, while genuinely using lawfare tactics and relying on compliance mechanisms, international treaties, or binding arbitration, regardless of public opinion.
Pakistan’s Propaganda Lawfare
History tells us that Pakistan has been engaging in propaganda lawfare to stage an anti- India narrative on bilateral issues. Perhaps the first crucial incident of lawfare between both countries came shortly after the Kargil War in 1999, when, after the war’s conclusion, an Indian Air Force MiG-21 shot down a Pakistani Navy Breguet Atlantique surveillance aircraft that had crossed into Indian airspace in the Rann of Kutch, killing all 16 personnel on board. In this case, Pakistan, in plain sight, violated the 1991 bilateral air agreement between the two countries, which strictly prohibited military combat and reconnaissance aircraft from flying within 10km of the border. However, to extract global condemnation of this act and to seek damages, despite violating a bilateral treaty, Pakistan approached the International Court of Justice a month after the incident.
Pakistan’s propaganda lawfare tactics in this case were crystal clear in two stages. First, internationalize the issue and seek damages. Second, secure global condemnation and propagate an anti-India narrative in the region by playing the deliberate victim card. However, India successfully fought the case and challenged Pakistan’s grounds before the ICJ, demonstrating both instrumental and genuine lawfare tactics. India’s then Attorney General, Soli Sorabjee, argued on two grounds.
First, the ICJ had no jurisdiction over the matter. He cited an exemption India filed in 1974, which strictly excludes the court from arbitrating disputes between India and other Commonwealth states. Second, he argued a bilateral breach, claiming Pakistan had directly violated the 1991 bilateral border accord. As a result, after a year, in June 2000, a 16-judge ICJ bench voted 14-2 in favour of India, officially ruling that it lacked jurisdiction to entertain Pakistan’s application. The case was dropped permanently, with no recourse to appeal, dealing a heavy diplomatic and financial setback to Pakistan, which had spent around 25 million Pakistani rupees in pursuing the lawsuit.
Another case was one of the most controversial – the Kulbhushan Jadhav case, which was a crystal-clear case of intense lawfare between two countries. After the capture and forced confession of Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav, a Pakistani military court hastily sentenced him to death in 2017. Pakistan attempted to leverage this situation to label India as a terror-backed and subversive network operating in Pakistan. In Jadhav’s case, India used instrumental legal statecraft to enforce legal compliance with international treaties and conventions, which Pakistan blatantly violated.
Pakistan denied India consular access, arguing that the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR) did not apply to individuals accused of espionage, while Pakistan was preparing ground for propagandist lawfare tactics aimed at blocking consular access to advance its espionage charge to propel an anti-India narrative. India’s Attorney General, Harish Salve, successfully countered Pakistan’s espionage charge by arguing that Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR) provides an absolute, unconditional right to consular access for any detained foreign national. India argued that the treaty contains no exclusion or exemption clause for individuals accused of espionage, terrorism, or national security offenses. India further relied on two strong legal logics.
First, the treaty applies universally and may set a dangerous precedent; Pakistan’s actions and such exclusion are granted, as they can be easily misused against any foreign traveller, and Consular access is a prerequisite to ensure a fair trial and verify the well-being of the prisoner before a credible, transparent legal process legally establishes guilt. Second, the logic was that bilateral agreements cannot supplant multilateral treaties; this logic was given in rebuttal to Pakistan’s reliance on a 2008 Bilateral Agreement on Consular Access signed between India and Pakistan. This agreement stated that in cases involving national security, either country could examine the merits of granting consular access.
To this point, India argued that a bilateral agreement is meant to supplement and smooth out the implementation of the VCCR, not supplant or weaken it, further emphasizing that under international law, a country cannot use local or separate bilateral pacts to strip away the fundamental human and legal rights guaranteed under a universal, binding multilateral convention like the VCCR. The ICJ fully accepted India’s counter. In its final judgment, the Court explicitly ruled that the VCCR applies to all individuals “regardless of the allegations” against them. It noted that allowing a state to deny access based purely on its own unilateral allegations of espionage would defeat the object and purpose of the global treaty, and it allowed consular access to Jadhav. Further, in a 15-1 verdict favouring India. The ICJ stayed Jadhav’s execution, severely admonished Pakistan for violating international law, and forced Islamabad to amend its local laws to allow Jadhav the right to a legal appeal.
This case presented a clear instance of multidimensional propaganda lawfare by Pakistan, deliberately seeking to create conflicts of law and short-circuit legal processes. First, by exploiting ambiguities in treaties, especially the bilateral treaty of 2008; second, by routing the case through the Field General Court Martial (FGMC) under the Pakistan Army Act to bypass the ICJ’s jurisdiction by claiming a matter of sovereignty. Pakistan deliberately exploited and twisted every legal instrument and mechanism in this case of lawfare. In contrast, India demonstrated high standards of legal statecraft by rightly interpreting treaties and ensuring compliance with international law and universal human rights in spirit.
The Indus Water Treaty and the Illegal Ruling
Pakistan is again repeating the lawfare tactics employed during Jhadav’s case at the ICJ by using a propagandist approach, legal exploitation, and short-circuiting legally established procedures, while India is enforcing the treaty’s legal compliance. The recent Permanent Court of Arbitration order, which also covered the technical jurisdiction, is technically illegal and demonstrates Pakistan’s ingenuity in lawfare. Apart from non-recognition of PCA jurisdiction, there are three key grounds on which this order’s legality and Pakistan’s arguments collapse.
First, it directly violates the sequential hierarchy (Permanent Indus Commission, Neutral Expert, and CoA). The IWT does not allow parties to choose their preferred forum arbitrarily. Under Article IX of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), a strict line is drawn between what constitutes a “Difference” and what constitutes a “Dispute”. Engineering issues, such as dam construction and gate issues, which are listed as 22 in number (engineering-specific criteria) under the treaty, are constituted as differences, and only a Neutral Expert has jurisdiction to resolve these technical points. If they remain unsolved, they go to the CoA. If the issue falls outside those 22 specified engineering issues, it will be classified as a dispute, which can only be dealt with by a Court of Arbitration (CoA) specifically created to adjudicate disputes arising from the IWT.
Pakistan has short-circuited the legal process with an arm-twisted interpretation, bypassed the sequential framework set out in the treaty, and directly approached the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Second, the genesis of the conflict. The origin of the conflict in the IWT stems purely from technical points constituting differences for which the options of a Neutral Expert and a Court of Arbitration are already available; hence, Pakistan cannot create a parallel Court of Arbitration that can adjudicate not only disputes but also technical differences. This has created the coexistence of two separate dispute-resolution forums tracking the same engineering issue, which is a structural anomaly and an illegal overreach. Third, this clearly violates the basic law of international arbitration.
A tribunal’s legitimacy is derived strictly from the consent of the contracting sovereigns as defined by their agreement, but in the IWT the sovereign consent has not been directly defined but is technically defined with the clause of “Advance Consent”; meaning that by signing the treaty in 1960, both India and Pakistan agreed in advance to a highly specific, pre-packaged ruleset for arbitration. But a logical interpretation of Article 9 and Annexure G, which governs the establishment of a Court of Arbitration, suggests that this advance consent is conditional. Annexure G. The very opening language of Annexure G states
“If the necessity arises to establish a Court of Arbitration under the provisions of Article IX, the provisions of this Annexure shall apply.”
This reading of the language clearly indicates conditional advance consent. The phrase “if the necessity arises” is a strict conditional consent clause. India argues that necessity arises only if the treaty’s sequential hierarchy has been fully followed. Hence, because Pakistan did not follow the sequential hierarchy, India’s advance consent was not unlocked or deemed consented to by the PCA tribunal, which is an illegal entity operating without sovereign consent.
Both Pakistan and the Permanent Court of Arbitration appear to be engaging in lawfare at a similar frequency. The Court, while invoking the competence-competence principle (that courts can create their own jurisdiction), justified intervening in this issue. Similarly, Pakistan is creating a conflict of law and deliberately twisting interpretation to utilize the space and stage created by PCA jurisdiction. India has clearly countered these lawfare tactics by arguing that PCA cannot manufacture consent where a treaty explicitly limits it.
For Pakistan, it is more noise than substance, and the fight is a deliberate attempt to legally short-circuit a bilateral issue by internationalizing it through lawfare. The IWT is another such attempt that has propaganda value but not persuasive value, because PCA rulings have neither enforcement powers nor systemic backing like the ICJ, which enjoys explicit UN backing under the UN Charter. The PCA ruling for Pakistan is a tactical propaganda tool. It has no strategic value, as the PCA has become a stage for strategic narrative-building, not for fighting genuine lawfare as India did.
