In the aftermath of the recent fighting between India and Pakistan, an Indian delegation has been traveling the West’s capitals on a mission to build support against what it described as Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. Shashi Tharoor, a senior politician with the opposition Indian National Congress party, led the delegation to the United States, where it met with Vice President J.D. Vance.
Afterward, Tharoor said the U.S. continued to support India and dismissed any chance of talks with Pakistan until it stops supporting Pakistan-based armed groups with a history of attacks against India. New Delhi won’t talk to Pakistan “with a gun pointed to our head,” Tharoor said.
But some believe it’s the very absence of regular diplomatic engagement, both formal and informal, between India and Pakistan that may be responsible for the current intensity of their conflict and the heightened risks of its spiraling out of control. Communication and coordination do occur, but typically only on the level of military officials. And so, when the time came for India and Pakistan to de-escalate in their most recent confrontation, there was no goodwill on either side to pull back.
Since the early 1990s, India and Pakistan have usually maintained communication, either through governmental back channels or at Track II forums between retired officials who didn’t represent their respective governments but reported to them, nonetheless. Since then, civil society engagement has also been sporadically encouraged, despite bouts of severe tensions. Writers, poets, and journalists were granted visas to travel across the border or meet in a third country and were relied upon to reinforce shared cultural heritage and tame nationalistic sentiment.
But all that changed in 2019 when more than 40 Indian soldiers were killed in an attack claimed by the Pakistan-based armed group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), and months later India revoked Kashmir’s special status. The last notable Track II talks were held in 2018; by 2019 India had changed its mind to keep even a back channel alive.
By August that year, when India revoked Kashmir’s special status, Pakistan downgraded diplomatic ties and expelled the Indian envoy. For years both sides have since been reluctant to resuscitate channels that often functioned as conduits and facilitated people-to-people contact.
Some experts believe the clashes in early May could have probably been contained much earlier, before the Trump administration got involved, had there been a preexisting back channel between the two governments. At the very least, they said, a Track II conversation could still allow airing of grievances and avoid a future altercation.
On May 7 the day India hit deep inside Pakistan and retaliated against what it said was a Pakistan-backed terror attack in Pahalgam in late April, members of a civil society group called the Pakistan India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy issued a letter against the perils of a full-blown conflict. “Any continuation of the present situation with unpredictability of further military expansion would unleash catastrophic humanitarian consequences. It would claim countless innocent lives and create massive displacement,” it read.
Imtiaz Alam, a senior Pakistani journalist who sat on several Track II forums and founded a nongovernmental organization called South Asian Free Media Association to facilitate more Track II conversations, said the letter did not receive any attention and was not published by any major media outlet. “The media, the journalists, they were at war with each other,” Alam told FP over the phone from Lahore. “They were trying to tell us: To hell with you peaceniks, we want to fight.”
Alam said that while there was no appetite to enhance people-to-people contact or civil society engagement in the current environment, the only way forward is to first start a back channel between government representatives. “The director general of military operations on both sides talk regularly and have implemented the cease-fire agreed upon after the recent escalation. But I think a back channel between Indian [National Security Advisor Ajit] Doval and Field Marshal [and Chief of the Army Staff] Asim Munir’s trusted officer must happen. There is no other way,” he said.
A former Indian diplomat actively involved in the Pakistan file until 2014 told FP that in the absence of any kind of regular and intensive dialogue it was hard for both India and Pakistan to gauge how the other intended to react. “Track II allowed some sort of talks and engagement, however minuscule. Today, there is nothing,” he said. “Since 2019, you have hardly met bilaterally, you don’t have a back channel between the two national security advisors, you don’t even have a high commissioner,” added the Indian diplomat.
“If you can’t really communicate with the other side, then you have to resort to what you have. That may not be very subtle, that may be kinetic in nature, and that has a chance of escalating beyond your control.” The media on both sides was accused of spreading disinformation and rooting for war. False and exaggerated claims of victory and destruction were made on social media in both nations and often amplified by the mainstream press. The pacifists were ignored altogether.
Alam participated in the Neemrana dialogue that was perhaps the first informal Track II conversation that started in 1991. He said that while the process was largely “futile” in driving change in governmental attitudes, it did help when the two governments wanted to positively influence public perception and ascertain the mood in each other’s administrations. “It did help when you are having a Cold War-like situation and was a useful exercise in finding out what the other side might be thinking. Sometimes governments could get a message—let us say, if a participant was an influential former official and was seen as close to the [prime minister] or the foreign minister.”
Shirin Tahir-Kheli, the U.S. National Security Council director of Near East and South Asian affairs in the late ’80s, chaired the BALUSA Group, which began in 1995 and brought former Indian and Pakistani officials together to discuss possible areas of cooperation.
In 1999, months after India and Pakistan fought the Kargil War, BALUSA representatives met in Lahore and discussed ways the two countries could “back on the path to reengagement.” The last BALUSA meeting was held in 2002. A year later, other forums—now more bilateral in nature—picked up, including a back channel. In 2003, a multiparty delegation of Indian parliamentarians was authorized to travel to Pakistan under the banner of the Pakistan-India Parliamentary Forum, a Track II group of sorts composed mainly of Indian and Pakistani parliamentarians. The visit had the blessings of then-Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who hailed from the same political party as the current prime minister.
According to Alam, such engagement laid the ground for a cease-fire in 2003 at the operational but disputed border between India and Pakistan, and a year later, after Indian journalists visited Pakistan-administered Kashmir, both governments decided to open the border at four points to facilitate people-to-people contact. “It was under Vajpayee that the two sides began back-channel diplomacy on Jammu & Kashmir,” Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, a Pakistani politician who served as the minister of foreign affairs of Pakistan from 2002 to 2007, told a Hindustan Times reporter.
The next government under Congress’s Manmohan Singh not only continued the back-channel talks but pushed them forward. “When Vajpayee lost power in 2004, we were worried about the future of these talks. But to his credit, his successor continued the process,” Mahmud Kasuri said of Singh.
Mumbai’s siege in 2008 by members of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba group put a stop to engagement. At the time, India adopted a policy of strategic restraint and naming and shaming Pakistan in global capitals.
However, instead of completely abandoning engagement, a few years later peaceniks were again granted some space. In 2012, Pakistani fabric traders were invited to display their famous and familiar designs at the yearly international trade fair in New Delhi, and improving ties through trade became the new mantra of the two governments.
Even Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to have tried talking at first. In 2015, on his way back home from Moscow via Kabul, Modi made a surprise visit to Pakistan to wish then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif well on his birthday. It was seen as a gesture to resolve differences through conversation.
A back channel between Doval and Pakistan’s counterpart, retired Lt. Gen. Nasir Khan Janjua, helped manage the fallout of two terrorist attacks on Indian soil against Indian security officials in 2016— that was claimed by United Jihad Council, a Kashmiri Islamist Jihadist group, but blamed on JeM by the Indian government.
Pakistan-based JeM claimed the attack on an air base in Pathankot on Jan. 2, while India also blamed it for the second attack on an Indian military camp months later and even carried out a limited incursion in retaliation. Doval and Janjua met in Thailand in December 2017.
In an interview in May 2019, after JeM claimed the February attack in Pulwama on the Indian convoy, Modi said he could no longer trust promises made by Pakistani politicians. But in the same interview, Modi’s preexisting opposition to talks and engagement was also evident when he referred to India’s retaliation to the Uri attack as tough and insinuated governments before him were weak.
“I said it in your show only—stop sending love letters to Pakistan when it has been resorting to planned attacks on India. They [the opposition] used to send love letters, I sent fighter jets,” he said.
Over time, pacifists in both countries lost their currency. Those who dared call for talks or peace were often castigated as anti-national.
Raza Rumi, a U.S.-based Pakistani writer who has interacted with his Indian counterparts over many years as a part of civil society, lamented the loss of cultural exchanges and the role they played in building confidence and trust among the two people.
“Since 2008, I have been participating in such forums. I did that for about six, seven years. The idea was that even when things appear to be completely unfixable there was a way to find some space for peace-building. Now it’s impossible to get a visa, and there is an information iron curtain,” he said.
Beena Sarwar, a prominent peace activist and founder of the South Asia Peace Action Network, blamed social media for drowning the voices of most others she believed sought peace over war and nationalistic jingoism.
“There was no social media back in the day,” she said. “If you look at it, it’s just a few people making a lot of noise. The reality that I know is that people want to have peace, to have dialogue, to eat each other’s food and watch each other’s movies.”
The former Indian diplomat said that from an Indian perspective, there is a valid argument against talking to Pakistan, “since talking did not exactly deter Pakistan’s army from supporting terror groups,” he said. “But how is not talking any better?” He said without engagement, “constituencies interested in peace weaken and leverage is limited, especially when tensions rise and de-escalation is required.”