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Rare India-Pakistan moment amid war as ex-secy Nirupama Rao, ex-minister Hina Khar suggest a reset: ‘Women must speak’
Nirupama Menon Rao and Hina Rabbani Khar engage on need for common ground over shared interests amid US-Iran war
When India's former foreign secretary Nirupama Menon Rao critiqued India's idea of “strategic autonomy” in the ongoing US-Iran war, she did not use the word Pakistan as such in her X post. But Pakistan's former foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar decided she needed to jump in.
This set off a conversation on Monday, March 30, about bonhomie and shared interests with Pakistan, with an argument for having more women make decisions.
What India's ex-diplomat wrote
Rao said in her original post that strategic autonomy — a word used by PM Narendra Modi's government to define India geopolitical stance — “cannot mean adjusting our language to the hierarchy of power”.
She wrote: “Assassinations of leaders, the killing of civilians, open assertions of force—these are no longer aberrations but instruments. In such a world, silence is not neutrality. It is read, interpreted, and often misread as consent."
She noted that India long claimed a distinctive space in global affairs, “not as an appendage to power, but as a voice shaped by its own civilisational experience and its history of speaking for sovereignty, restraint, and balance”.
In an argument that runs counter to those made by Congress leader Shashi Tharoor among others, she wrote: “Restraint has its place. Calibration is necessary. But when fundamental questions arise — about sovereignty, about the limits of force, about the protection of civilians — India cannot afford to be silent.”
She countered the idea that morality has no space in diplomacy: “A moral compass is not an ornament of foreign policy. It is its direction. Without it, realism drifts into accommodation, and autonomy into ambiguity.”
Rao, who retired as foreign secretary as only the second woman to occupy the senior most position in the Indian Foreign Service, said the US-Iran war has “damaged India’s interests in almost every practical sense”.
She cited rising costs, “narrowed diplomatic room”, stressed shipping, “complicated” Chabahar, and “fresh instability into a region vital to India’s economy and external strategy”.
This sparked a rare, reasoned exchange of views across the India-Pakistan border — though the protagonists are only former, not current, wielders of power or position.
Pakistan's Khar speaks of deep nostalgia
Pakistan's Hina Rabbani Khar re-shared Rao's X post with a comment, saying she “felt deep nostalgia for such strategic clarity”.
She framed the issues raised by the West Asia war as those that must be addressed by India and Pakistan together.
“As a citizen of the region it was & remains impinging upon all of us to make South Asia a safe and thriving place for all its citizens,” Khar wrote, “Hope the current trend is an aberration and not the final chapter of South Asia s destiny.”
'The women must speak': Rao's response
Nirupama Menon Rao appeared to have noticed Khar's intervention rather quickly. She shared Khar's X post and made a case for the women of India and Pakistan “to deploy our ingrained common sense and suggest ways forward in our relationship”.
She wrote: “We need a women’s caucus. Not to throw accusations against each other but to think calmly and sensibly about the future ahead. For the sake of our children.”
She argued that India-Pakistan engagement “has been trapped in a single script: territory, terror, recrimination” for decades. She suggested to "widen the frame".
She explained in the current context: “In West Asia, especially the Gulf, our interests often run in parallel: energy security, diaspora welfare, maritime stability, crisis response… Engaging here need not dilute our positions, create false parity, or reopen familiar disputes. It can remain tightly bounded, issue-specific, and without prejudice to core differences.”
In essence, Rao made a case for moving forward on specific issues of immediate or shared concerns.
“Skeptics will argue that Pakistan cannot compartmentalise, that any engagement risks being instrumentalised, and that peripheral cooperation has never altered core hostility. But the purpose here is not transformation, it is insulation. Not to resolve the conflict by other means, but to prevent it from defining all means,” she further explained.
“Some may also say Pakistan has found a ‘role’ in the Iran crisis and India should not be seen as seeking one. But this is not about visibility or mediation,” she wrote, not naming names.
India's foreign minister S Jaishankar has derisively called Pakistan a “dalaal” (broker) state when asked how the neighbouring country is playing peacemaker between Washington and Tehran.
Rao argued further about need to reset India-Pak ties: “If anything, the moment underscores a larger truth: even adversarial states operate beyond their disputes when interests demand it.”
In an apparent nod to Khar, she also said, “Sometimes, widening the field is not weakness. It is strategy. The women must speak.”
‘Stop romanticism’: A counterpoint
But a prominent woman leader from India did not seem to agree with the idea of a reset.
“Stop this romanticism of getting into a dialogue with Pakistan,” Shiv Sena (UBT) MP Priyanka Chaturvedi wrote on X, not expressly saying if she was referring to the Rao-Khar exchange.
“Who does one talk to, what authority do their government or elected representatives have? It is the army that wields the power and all they seek is to hurt India,” Chaturvedi, whose party is part of the Opposition, wrote.
Hina Rabbani Khar's earlier comments calling India a “rogue state” last year had also got a stren response from Chaturvedi.
