Track 2 diplomacy with Pakistan is a dangerous illusion

For decades, Track 2 and Track 1.5 talks between Bharat and Pakistan have been marketed as enlightened peace exercises. These unofficial and semi-official engagements are routinely celebrated as sophisticated alternatives to hard power and work well while dealing with normal states. But Pakistan is anything but normal. In the Pakistani context, these exercises acquire an almost Orwellian character where war becomes peace and terror takes the shape of diplomacy by other means.

Delhi’s experience since Independence demonstrates this painful but undeniable truth where dialogue, instead of becoming a pathway to peace, has functioned as a mechanism through which Islamabad buys time, gains legitimacy, neutralises international pressure and prepares for the next round of hostility. Yet every few years, sections of the Indian establishment relapse into the same peace fantasy.

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To be fair to the current dispensation in Delhi, it largely avoided this trap for over a decade after the Pathankot attacks in January 2016. But lately, familiar noises have begun resurfacing in elite circles and policy corridors about the “need for engagement” with Pakistan. Predictably, Islamabad welcomed these signals with enthusiasm. A Pakistan Foreign Office spokesperson described such statements from the Indian side as “a positive development”, expressing hope that “sanity will prevail in India”.

That remark alone should have served as a warning.

Against this backdrop, reports regarding the quiet revival of Track 1.5 and Track 2 engagements after Operation Sindoor are deeply disturbing. According to a Hindustan Times report, at least four rounds of such interactions took place between Indian and Pakistani representatives, including a Track 1.5 meeting in London. Organised by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a Britain-based think tank, within weeks of the Pahalgam attack on April 22, 2025, the London meeting included several serving military officials from Pakistan, while the Indian side had no military representation whatsoever.

Even before one examines the substance of such meetings, the structure itself raises troubling questions. There is something fundamentally problematic about the entire process of Track talks. A former diplomat who participated in several such dialogues once described their reality with brutal honesty. These gatherings, he said, are invariably held in plush hotels in glamorous cities — London, Bangkok, Doha, Muscat — where every conceivable luxury is carefully arranged. The atmosphere resembles diplomatic tourism more than strategic engagement. In these settings, participants compete to sound more “peace-loving” than one another. Moral exhibitionism replaces strategic clarity. The performance of peace becomes more important than peace itself. Peace is no longer the goal; peace talks are.

This is not diplomacy. It is an industry. And like every industry, it has financiers. For instance, the alleged Track 1.5 talks in London were organised by a think tank that reportedly depended heavily on Bahraini funding. One must legitimately ask: why is a British think tank bankrolled by Gulf money so invested in managing Bharat-Pakistan relations?

The answer is simple. Such institutions thrive not by resolving conflicts, but by curating permanent instability. Conflict management, not conflict resolution, is their business model. This is the same IISS that reinvented itself overnight after 9/11 as a counterterrorism authority focusing on Al-Qaeda. During the 2003 Iraq War, it was also accused of amplifying the hysteria surrounding weapons of mass destruction that helped legitimise the American invasion.

But the deeper problem lies not merely with Track 2 diplomacy. The real problem is the foundational assumption behind it: that Pakistan is a rational state waiting to be persuaded into peace through dialogue and confidence-building.

Large sections of Delhi’s political and intellectual class remain trapped in a sentimental nostalgia about “shared history”, “civilisational bonds” and “people-to-people contact”. Pakistani elites have long weaponised this sentimentality while simultaneously nurturing anti-Bharat hostility at home. Addressing a conference in Delhi through a video link on November 22, 2008, Asif Ali Zardari, as President of Pakistan, quoted his wife, Benazir Bhutto, saying that every Pakistani had “a little bit of India” within, just as every Indian had a little bit of Pakistan. His remarks were greeted with applause and emotion. Four days later came the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, shattering then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s fantasy of “breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Kabul”.

This pattern actually began with the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who visited Pakistan in 1953 — merely five years after Partition — and reportedly felt “among friends and completely at home”. His close confidant Badr-ud-Din Tyabji, who accompanied Nehru to Karachi as Commonwealth Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs, advised the Prime Minister to “consider Pakistan as your constituency in which you have to get elected; where you could get elected if you tried”. Tyabji summed up his advice thus: “You have to win them over.”

That psychological impulse — to win Pakistan over — has shaped Delhi’s approach ever since. Even after the decisive victory in the 1971 war, Delhi squandered enormous strategic leverage in pursuit of moral grandeur. Over 93,000 Pakistani soldiers were taken prisoner. Yet Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, influenced by PN Haksar’s warnings against imposing a “Versailles” on Pakistan, released them without extracting meaningful concessions on Kashmir or broader security questions. Astonishingly, Delhi even failed to secure the return of all its own soldiers lodged in Pakistani prisons.

This compulsive generosity has only strengthened Islamabad’s belief that Delhi can be pressured, manipulated and strategically strangulated. Islamabad has consequently perfected a cyclical strategy: initiate dialogue, resort to terrorism, absorb outrage, wait for international pressure, and then resume talks under the language of ‘peace’ and ‘normalcy’.

Talks and terror are not contradictory instruments in Pakistani strategy. They are complementary ones. The 2001 Parliament attack, the 2008 Mumbai attacks and the 2016 Pathankot attack all occurred when diplomatic channels were active. Dialogue did not moderate Pakistan’s behaviour, but instead provided strategic cover for it. When Delhi demonstrates that every terror strike will eventually be followed by renewed engagement, it incentivises precisely the behaviour it seeks to prevent.

The problem is structural and ideological. Pakistan’s national identity was built not merely on separation from Bharat, but on civilisational opposition to it. As author Venkat Dhulipala argues in Creating a New Medina, Pakistan was conceived as an “Islamic utopia that would be the harbinger for renewal and rise of Islam in the modern world, act as the powerful new leader and protector of the entire Islamic world and, thus, emerge as a worthy successor to the defunct Turkish Caliphate as the foremost Islamic power in the twentieth century”.

This is precisely why Track 2 diplomacy becomes dangerous. It is based on a false diagnosis. The problem is not lack of communication. The problem is Islamabad’s enduring ideological hostility and terror tactics vis-à-vis Delhi. No luxury seminar in London or Bangkok can alter this stark reality.

The leadership in Bharat may engage in talks when tactically useful, for global optics or temporary de-escalation. But it must never confuse dialogue with peace. The path to peace with Islamabad does not run through Track talks and diplomatic platitudes. It runs through strategic realism, military preparedness and the refusal to reward aggression.

There is an old saying: if you want peace, prepare for war. That is certainly the case with Pakistan.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)