The Indus system's eastern tributaries define Punjab, the land of five rivers, and therefore the homeland of Sikhism, so the river basin carries the geography of a religion founded on its plain.
Partition in 1947 cut the irrigation network in half, leaving headworks in India and the canals they fed in Pakistan, and the dispute that followed took more than a decade to settle. The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 allocated the three eastern rivers to India and the three western rivers, including the Indus itself, to Pakistan, and it has survived several wars. It is regularly cited as one of the more durable water agreements anywhere, and it has been threatened publicly during recent crises.
The river also carries sacred sites that partition separated from their communities. The shrine of Katas Raj in the Pakistani Punjab, with a pool that Hindu tradition holds was formed from the tears of Shiva, receives Indian pilgrims under visa arrangements agreed between the two states. The Sikh sites of Nankana Sahib and Kartarpur are in the same basin.
The water itself is now heavily depleted. Abstraction for irrigation means that in many years very little of the Indus reaches the sea, and the delta has retreated with consequences for the fishing communities living in it. A river named in the oldest surviving Indian religious poetry as the loudest of the rivers now runs dry at its mouth.