India keeping a backchannel open with Pakistan, officials say
Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers will meet on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the first high-level interaction between the two countries in three years.
Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan may not have appointed a National Security Advisor (NSA) after resignation of former NSA Nasser Janjua of the previous regime who also served as a backchannel of sorts for India to communicate with its neighbour, but New Delhi does have a back-channel open to Islamabad, senior Modi government officials said on condition of anonymity.
Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan wrote a letter to his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi seeking resumption of comprehensive dialogue between the two countries. (AP Photo)
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Their admission comes even as Khan has reached out to Modi through a letter with the offer of talks on all issues, including terror, but also Pakistan. The letter, written last week, was delivered to India through the Pakistan High Commission this week.
While the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) is not aware of this communication channel, the backchannel becomes important in the context of possible talks, perhaps as soon as next week during the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York next week, and between India’s external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and her Pakistani counterpart.
Nasser Janjua was designated backchannel with India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval from October 2015 to June 2018. The government officials cited in the first instance said the new backchannel has been helpful in lowering the volume of cross border firing from the Pakistan side as well as conveying Islamabad’s readiness for a dialogue.
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.
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