In recent weeks, media has focussed its attention on “Track 2” meetings that have taken place between groups of individuals from India and Pakistan over the last year. This is new, as such meetings have been held at the rate of two or three annually since 2007, perhaps even earlier.
In the years that formal press releases were issued at the end of these sessions, naming the participants and listing suggestions to the two governments, getting them published was a challenge. The newsroom verdict then was, who are these “Track 2 types” anyway, and why are they pretending they can change anything?
The rush of interest in these non-official meetings is thus intriguing. Perhaps it is due to Pakistan’s new moment under the geopolitical spotlight, and a heightened awareness about what this implies for India. The apparent good ties between Field Marshal Asim Munir, the de facto ruler of Pakistan, and US President Donald Trump have certainly injected more variables in the fraught India-Pakistan relationship.
Considering that the reported “Track 2” meeting in Colombo was the 10th edition of the annual “IISS-NESA Track 1.5 South Asia Security Dialogue”, that previously met last July, just two months after Operation Sindoor, the sudden public discovery of this format may owe to some quarters wanting to spread the word that India and Pakistan have not lost all contact.
Coming at the same time as pronouncements by top RSS leaders Mohan Bhagwat, Dattatreya Hosabale, and Sunil Ambekar for “people to people” dialogue between India and Pakistan, questions if all this is linked are not out of place. Especially as Hosabale, the first from his organisation to declare India should not shut its doors to Pakistan, made the remark soon after a visit to the US, where he and Ram Madhav, a national executive member of the RSS, had been invited to speak at a conservative think tank in Washington DC.
Some definitions are in order. The Western definition of Track 2 is a bilateral or multilateral meeting of “influential” non-official individuals. Track 1 is official diplomacy. Track 1.5 meetings have senior officials in the mix with non-official participants. In India, however, Track 2/1.5 tends to get mixed up often with “secret” or “backchannel” diplomacy. The latter is an ultra-secret, super-official track, usually a bilateral one, in which the interlocutors are ideally just two, one from each side, empowered by the senior most leaders of their respective countries. India and Pakistan have had several such backchannels, including in the last decade.
Some of the confusion arises because organisations that host the Track 2 or 1.5 insist on keeping the names of participants and the agenda hush-hush. Given the backlash to the reported meeting in Colombo, they cannot be blamed.
Large swathes of the country are under the influence of a cocktail of hyper-nationalist politics, “destroy Pakistan”- themed Bollywood flicks and hate speech. Thus it is no surprise that any hint of Indians meeting Pakistanis in a setting other than through the crosshairs of a gun at the LoC is enough to unleash an “anti-national” tirade against those individuals.
These Track 2/1.5 engagements are neither a substitute for official diplomacy, nor do they qualify to be called people-to-people engagement. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) casts its dialogues as a “private” exercise held on an “invitation-only” basis.
Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri may be right that these meetings count for nothing. At the same time, it is also true that the government is aware that these meetings take place, and does not prevent them. Organisations that enable such engagement are no lightweight NGOs.
The London-based IISS, for instance, is considerably funded by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, international defence corporates and American foundations. It has hosted NSA Ajit Doval as a guest speaker, and keeps in close touch with the Indian High Commission in London. It is the main organiser of the Shangri La security dialogue where India is represented by officials.
Some participants in Track 2/1.5 meetings, especially politicians and retired officials, are wont to keep their government informed that they are attending such a meeting, and even seek permission to attend. And most participants arrive at the table to repeat official positions, treating it as an exercise in “listening to each other”.
Track 2 or 1.5 meetings that feel truly empowered to present new ideas are rare, and take place only when there is official engagement between the sides, and such non-official meetings are used as sounding boards for proposals already under discussion or to be discussed at the official level.
Likewise, people-to-people engagement cannot happen in a vacuum. It flows from decisions taken during official engagement. Thanks to social media, individuals do not yet need government permission to engage with friends across the border, and doing this has its own subversive charms in these times.
As policy though, it needs full government backing. So, when Hosabale says there should be “people to people engagement, visas must be given and trade and commerce should take place to ensure some channels of communication remain open” with Pakistan, he must know that all this is the stuff of Track 1, aspects of a bilateral relationship to be agreed upon by officials. Sending an RSS member to a Track 2/1.5 meeting in a third country is not people-to-people contact.
From the 2000s until about 2015, people from both sides visited each other, cultural and sporting exchanges took place, buses and trains took passengers from Amritsar to Lahore and the other way, and there was even a robust “Aman ki Asha” project, sponsored by an Indian and a Pakistani media house.
All because the two governments were engaged in what was called a “Composite Dialogue” in which “people-to-people” was a separate topic. Even then, it all depended on officials deciding who or what was kosher. Against the tide, a constituency for peace that came up at that time in both countries has continued to exist.
A statement by over a 100 prominent personalities in both countries, including two former Jammu & Kashmir chief ministers, Farooq Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti, RJD parliamentarian Manoj Jha, and former TMC minister Humayun Kabir on the Indian side, addressed to the two Prime Ministers “to take meaningful and sustained steps” towards restoring peace in the interests of the welfare and aspirations of the people of both countries, speaks to this constituency.
It is not clear from the statements of the RSS functionaries if they share this vision. Bhagwat’s own explanation — or defence, as one report put it — of Hosabale’s remarks cast them as part of the RSS’s long-standing organisational position of “Akhand Bharat”. That is hardly a credible basis for cross-border engagement with any neighbouring country, let alone Pakistan.
Irrespective of what’s at play – international pressure, RSS paving the way for the Modi government, or government using the RSS to send up a hot air balloon to see how far it flies – talking to Pakistan is a project the BJP will first need to square with Dhurandhar. However, if Messrs Bhagwat, Hosabale and Ambekar really mean what they say about “opening up to Pakistan,” perhaps the world’s largest NGO could begin with “peace education”, which would help improve the atmosphere both at home as well as with Pakistan.
The author has participated in several Track Two meetings
