Two nuclear-armed neighbors are further from settling a long-running water dispute after India rejected a court order directing it to honor a decades-old water-sharing treaty with Pakistan. Arbitration is the process that produced the order: a binding ruling issued by a neutral panel, outside either country's domestic courts. The rejection adds a new layer of stress to a dispute that was already unresolved.
The treaty in question has existed for decades. The arbitration process was a legal path to clarifying what that treaty requires of each country. India's refusal to follow the ruling means that path is now closed, at least for the moment.
That matters more in this case because of who the parties are. India and Pakistan both hold nuclear weapons. A long-running dispute over a shared resource between two countries in that position carries a different kind of risk than a similar disagreement between states without that arsenal. The arbitration ruling was a mechanism to reduce that friction. India's decision to set it aside leaves the friction in place and the dispute with one fewer path to resolution than it had before.