ON June 10, 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted the delegations that had travelled around the world in the wake of the May 7-10 hostilities between India and Pakistan. Their brief was to expose Pakistan’s five-and-a-half-decade-old proxy war against India.
These multi-party and cross-disciplinary delegations that rose above the partisan political divide underscored a rare politico-strategic national consensus. It was a unique one-off moment in an otherwise bitterly contested political landscape. Their very composition underlined the spirit of the unanimous parliamentary resolutions of February 22, 1994, and March 15, 2013, that described Pakistan as a sponsor of terrorism.
These missions had carried a three-point message for their global interlocutors regarding Pakistan — terror and talks cannot go together; blood and water cannot flow together; and India will not make a distinction between terrorists and their state sponsors. This consensus echoed in the parliamentary debate during the Monsoon Session of 2025.
Eleven months later, a senior functionary of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological mentor of the BJP, gave a rather perplexing statement in an interview to a wire service. Dattatreya Hosabale said, “If Pakistan is like a pinprick trying to create incidents like Pulwama, we have to answer appropriately according to the situation because the security and self-respect of a country have to be protected, and the government of the day should take note of it and take care of it… But at the same time, we should not close the doors. We should always be ready to engage in dialogue. That is why diplomatic relations are maintained, trade and commerce continue, and visas are being given. So we should not stop these, because there should always be a window for dialogue… This is the one hope I think, because I believe strongly that ultimately the civil society relations [will work]. Because we have a cultural relation and we have been one nation.”
On the face of it, Hosabale’s averment was a reasonable and fair articulation, but why it is unworkable in the case of Pakistan needs to be both understood and explained.
It’s the military, not any democratic dispensation and least of all civil society, that calls the shots in Pakistan. That nation does not have a military; conversely, it is a military that has a nation. This has been the case from Field Marshal Ayub Khan to Field Marshal Asim Munir over the past seven decades. The Pakistani military has an institutional obsession with retribution against India for having created Bangladesh.
In the aftermath of Pakistan’s dismemberment, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto convened a conference in Multan on January 24, 1972. Two seminal decisions were taken. The first was to acquire nuclear weapons to safeguard what remained of the rump of a moth-eaten Pakistan, and the second to bleed India with a thousand cuts.
It was the second conclusion that led to 15 years of terrorism in Punjab from 1980 to 1995. This campaign of terror was upscaled to Jammu & Kashmir and the rest of India from 1989 onwards.
The Mumbai bombings (1993), the Kargil War and IC-814 hijacking (1999), J&K Assembly attack and an assault on the Indian Parliament (2001), 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks (2008), the strikes on the Uri Army camp and the Pathankot airbase (2016), Pulwama suicide bombing (2019) and the Pahalgam massacre (2025) are just some of the milestones of this bloody journey that commenced five-and-a-half decades ago.
Concurrently, India tried its best to engage with Pakistan over the years. In the phase beginning with the Gujral Doctrine conceptualised in 1996 and underpinned by its five principles to the Composite Dialogue (1997 to 2008), the Resumed Dialogue (2011-14) and the Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue (2015 onwards). However, each effort and every initiative was derailed by a major terror attack perpetrated by Pakistan-based/trained terrorists.
Then there were three backchannels established at the level of the Indian Prime Minister and Pakistan’s military dictator or Army Chief, who was represented by his civilian proxies for over a decade and a half.
It commenced with the RK Mishra-Niaz Naik conversations in 1998-99 that were interrupted by the Kargil War. The threads were picked up by then NSA Brajesh Mishra and his Pakistani counterpart after the winding down of Operation Parakram between November 2002 and May 2004.
This was followed by talks between former Ambassador Satinder Lambah and his Pakistani counterparts Tariq Aziz (2005-08), Riaz Mohammad Khan (2009-12) and Shahryar Khan (2013-14). Subsequently, there have been conversations between the respective NSAs that reportedly led to the ceasefire agreement of February 25, 2021. There is the DGMOs’ hotline that is supposed to be activated every Tuesday. Then there was Aman Ki Asha and Track 1.5, 2, 3 and 4 conferences on establishing civil society interfaces, music and culture exchanges, tourism and religious pilgrimage initiatives, parliamentary and media confabulations, to list a few.
Unfortunately, nothing worked. Despite all these efforts, the spectre of Pakistan-sponsored terror continues to haunt the Indo-Pak dynamic.
The question that India needs to answer is: what does it want from Pakistan? The answer is nothing except the cessation of state-sponsored terror.
An exceptional politico-strategic consensus today exists in India vis-a-vis Pakistan. It would be wise for New Delhi to stay the course rather than try to go down the same rabbit hole all over again, notwithstanding Western prodding and pressure.
These days, Pakistan’s duplicity is on full display on its western border. On the one hand, it is playing the role of a broker between the US-Israel and Iran, but on the other, it is relentlessly bombing civilian areas and hospitals in Afghanistan, a fact confirmed by UNAMA (UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan). Paradoxically, the same Taliban who rule Afghanistan today were Pakistan’s spearhead as it sought strategic heft on its western front decades after the loss of Bangladesh. In January 2024, Pakistan had carried out retaliatory airstrikes against Iran.
Pakistan has been on a high since May 2025, thanks to its “rediscovery” by the Trump administration. However, the fact remains that Pakistan is structurally a failed state that can implode or go into a meltdown at any time.
The only area where a conversation is perhaps imperative is nuclear security and stability, given the inherently unstable nature of Pakistan’s nuclear command-and-control system and hierarchy. This is perhaps the only track worth exploring.
