When Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale told the Press Trust of India on May 12 that “doors should not be closed” for talks with Pakistan, and that there must always be “a window for dialogue”, the remark deserved more attention than it received. Hosabale was speaking of the operational language of visas, sports, trade, and structured engagement.
The context of his statement is important. It came a year after Operation Sindoor, with the Indus Waters Treaty still in suspension and New Delhi unwilling to have any conversation with Islamabad. Meanwhile, the strategic environment around India has hardened in ways that make an opening with Pakistan “not an unthinkable proposition”. Pakistan’s defence pact with Saudi Arabia has deepened the former’s ties with West Asia while India’s traditional ability to balance various players in the region has become constrained. China openly supports, and US President Donald Trump continues to favour, Islamabad. Moreover, another terror attack could trigger a kinetic exchange that can take us into unknown territory.
In that sense, India’s strategic interest in keeping the lines of communication open with Pakistan, then, has less to do with Pakistan itself and more with managing the new geopolitical realities. Talks with Pakistan, in this reading, is a hedging instrument, not a concession to that country. It is what serious nuclear-armed States do as a matter of risk management.
What indeed is the state of communications between India and Pakistan a year after Operation Sindoor?
{{/usCountry}}What indeed is the state of communications between India and Pakistan a year after Operation Sindoor?
{{/usCountry}}The directors general of military operations (DGMOs) remain in contact through a hotline. This channel did important work during the 88 hours of escalation during Operation Sindoor, enabling the cessation of hostilities. It continues to perform tactical deconfliction at least once every week. But, confidential military chat cannot signal political intent, carry messages between civilian leaderships, or reassure us that things are under control. Therefore, treating the DGMO line as a substitute for an India-Pakistan conversation would be a mistake.
Track-II channels have been operating with greater intensity than is publicly acknowledged. Reports in this newspaper and others have confirmed that at least four meetings between experts, parliamentarians, and former officials from India and Pakistan have taken place since July 2025. These conversations often test propositions before they reach official tables. They often give us an idea about Pakistan’s military thinking, through interlocutors with access to Rawalpindi. They allow signalling and testing the temperature that neither government can do publicly. They keep channels open so that when Track-I shuts down, the wiring is in place for an alternative line of communication. As someone who has been involved in such dialogues for the better part of two decades, I can attest to its utility, not least because the participants on the Pakistan side are able to carry messages back to General Headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi.
Then, there is the backchannel conversation. Records show every period of meaningful India-Pakistan progress, from the Lahore process through the composite dialogue to the 2021 ceasefire agreement, has been preceded by quiet backchannel conversations. I do not want to speculate whether such conversations are taking place now, but I will say that the absence of any such channel for an extended period is itself a strategic vulnerability.
Now is not the time for grand bargains. What we need is conflict management, not conflict resolution. Resolution requires a very different political and geopolitical climate which simply doesn’t exist today. One important step towards conflict management is authorising backchannels with explicit mandates on crisis communication, as also for procedural conversations on Line of Control (LoC) management, prisoner repatriation, and the handling of incidents below the threshold of full mobilisation. None of this requires solving the Kashmir issue or even discussing it. All of these reduce the probability of the next Pahalgam triggering the next Operation Sindoor or something worse. Even if it isn’t able to do this, such a channel would still be useful. Why take a chance by shutting off this option?
This is where Hosabale’s statement is most useful, though limited in some ways. The instinct to keep the window open with Pakistan is astute. But the civilisational packaging that came with it, the claim that India and Pakistan have been “one nation” and that civil society can pave the way, relying on the strength of cultural relations, belongs to a different era and might not work. Hosabale is not the first senior RSS functionary to make such an argument: RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat has invoked a shared civilisational geography in the past.
But that vocabulary has not worked in the past, and is unlikely to work now or in the future. The two-nation theory is the founding logic of the State of Pakistan. No interlocutor of consequence in Islamabad or Rawalpindi can endorse the suggestion that the two countries were ever one nation without ending his usefulness at home. In fact, the newer generations in Pakistan have no “one nation” nostalgia. The framing also hands the Pakistan military a ready-made script for portraying every Indian opening as the Akhand Bharat ideology in another costume, which strengthens precisely that constituency in Pakistan which the RSS’s more thoughtful voices say they want to bypass.
The spirit of Hosabale’s argument is sound, but its packaging is dated. India needs to keep talking to Pakistan because these are two nuclear-armed States with too much that can go wrong, and too few guardrails to manage them. So, the case for the window is strategic, not civilisational. Hosabale has done the harder political work of opening the door. But the policy case now needs to be made in the language of risk, not of family reunion.
Happymon Jacob is distinguished visiting professor at Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala and editor, INDIA’S WORLD magazine. The views expressed are personal