India-Pakistan relations have reached an all-time low following the Pahalgam attack, resulting in frozen diplomatic ties and suspended trade. Official engagement is nonexistent, with high commissioner posts remaining vacant. India maintains that "talks and terror cannot go together," while Pakistan faces internal political instability and rising militancy. Both nations have adopted assertive military postures, increasing the risk of conflict. While discrete backchannels focus on crisis management to avoid accidental escalation, a public thaw is unlikely. Experts suggest that long-term stability requires reviving people-to-people engagements and non-official "Track-II" diplomacy.
Post Pahalagam, the India-Pakistan relations have dipped to an all-time low with zero diplomatic engagement. The Pahalagam attack and India’s subsequent military response have made any talk of restarting dialogic reengagement through formal diplomacy a non-starter even in non-official discussions. The diplomatic missions in both countries are reduced to the minimum number. The offices of high commissioners on both sides remain vacant. Government to government talk is virtually nonexistent, with a total collapse of people-to-people movement and a total crash of the limited trade and closure of all important trade corridors. The India-Pakistan relations at the moment can be characterised by frozen official ties, little or no backchannel diplomacy, and self-censored non-official Track-II engagements.
The intensity of the situation can be gauged from one personal experience. In the beginning of this year my cousins in Skardu wanted to post an important document to India for which they travelled all the way to Islamabad to find a post office from where they could send it across to their relatives in India. When they found the post office, the officer concerned pointed out that nothing can be sent to India by post at the moment and suggested that they send the document to a middle eastern country and then onwards to India. They also tried to find other ways to send it like through embassy people, or someone travelling to India but nothing materialised and hence they went for the first option. They could finally get the document across spending a hell lot of money from their pockets.
People on both sides of the border are living in a constant state of fear, especially those with relatives on either side, as these connections can be questioned at any given time by the governments in both countries. With almost zero official engagement, the common people at the moment are preferring to lower their social engagements with their counterparts across the border. All the peaceniks and the organisations and NGO’s that talked about peace have lost their voices and have preferred to remain silent. Talking about peace talks between the two countries has become some kind of taboo in both India and Pakistan, with the field left open to war- and hate-mongers whose views are hyped in the media of all kinds.Â
The Indus Water treaty (IWT) stands unilaterally suspended. With India as the upper riparian state, Pakistan blames that it is in a constant state of threat of the possibility of India using water as weapon of war. The SAARC, is literally defunct and has died its natural death due to the Pakistan’s rejection of the SAARC motor vehicles agreement as also its continued policy of use of terror as an instrument of its foreign and security policy vis-à -vis India.
The strained relationship between the two countries has also affected the functioning of regional cooperation organisations where both bring their exclusive positions to the table on important issues. Both governments are also constrained by internal politics and pressures. Pakistan is caught in a cycle of political instability with rising militancy in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, making it difficult for the Shehbaz Sharif government to initiate a unified peace overture. India on the other hand maintains a stance that talks and terror cannot go together, insisting on a verifiable end to cross border activity before resuming official engagement with Pakistan. The regional spillover of the conflict in West Asia, with Pakistan emerging as strategic alliance to Iran and India tilting towards the US, has further complicated India-Pakistan relations.
Although there are reports of limited under-the-radar meetings involving former diplomats in a third country to manage the crisis, these sessions are merely an effort to keep the lines of communication open and to prevent accidental escalation, though there is very less chance these efforts will translate into a public thaw any time soon. High profile matches like T20 men’s World Cup, and the upcoming T20 women’s World cup in June are now being played in international neutral venues, but these cannot be counted as Confidence Building Measures (CBMs).
The potential for a future conflict remains as both Islamabad and New Delhi appear unwilling to engage in a meaningful dialogue. In the absence of dialogue, the existing condition of stalemate is likely to perpetuate and hostilities may resume anytime given the propensity of rogue elements in Pakistan to use terror as an instrument and Indian determination to meet any such act with force, despite Pakistani threats of possible nuclear escalation. New Delhi has stated very clearly that it will consider any attack like Pahalgam in future as an act of war, while Islamabad has said the same with respect to any violation of the IWT that stops flow of water on the Western rivers of Indus, Jhelum and Chenab. In this context, any likely scenario of Pakistan maintaining deniability while orchestrating terror attacks on India, in future, will also invite overwhelming use of conventional force by India to take our terror infrastructure within Pakistan, that its agencies have used as de facto paramilitary arms of the Pakistan army in their covert operations inside India.
It is ironical that while Pakistan is seeking to mediate for return of peace in the West Asian theatre, its power elite continues to pursue a path of war with its neighbours to the east and west— India and Afghanistan. Pakistan’s continued romance with terrorism and asymmetric warfare vis-s-vis India has led to hardening of domestic opinion in India on the question of dialogue that remains suspended since the Mumbai attacks of 2008. It is also true that the peace overtures made by Modi government during 2014-2019 were killed by repeated cross-border terror acts in Pathankot, Uri, Pulwama and Pahalgam, to cite only the major ones.
In the meanwhile, Pakistani media is hyperactive in celebrating what it calls its Maarka-e-Haq (Battle of Truth) based on its Operation Bunyan-um-Marsoos (a compact/solid structure), which is framed in Pakistani narratives as a moral and military victory where "truth prevailed" over a larger adversary, often tied to events following the Pahalgam incident (which Pakistan called a false flag). Such false narratives help create an environment where delusion overtakes reason. Rather than questioning the policy of using terror, the people of Pakistan are fed with claims of defeating the Indian army in the post-Pahalgam encounter. Interestingly, the hostility with India, carefully perpetuated through state-sponsored narratives, is used by the powerful army of Pakistan both as a binding factor that unites diverse and divergent ethnic groups and also as a legitimising tool that strengthens its hold on power. The hybridity in the power structure has ruled out any agency on the part of the political leadership in Pakistan to initiate steps towards dialogue and reconciliation.
For the moment, there does nor appear any hope of any peace deal or dialogue between India and Pakistan. It is even more unlikely for both countries to strike a grand bargain, or return to the composite dialogue of the past. The rules of engagement have shifted as each has adopted a more assertive military posture. Instead, for India and Pakistan the focus for 2026 seems to be on crisis management using discrete backchannels to avoid miscalculation while the official relationship remains in a deep freeze. In the long run, as Shashi Tharoor writes, “the most effective deterrent to cross-border hostility may not be military might or diplomatic isolation, but the presence of human relationships that resist the logic of enmity. This calls for enhanced people-to-people engagement, especially in sectors where the risk of infiltration or misuse is low”. Conflict and War are costly business, and rather than focusing on the hard-power, India and Pakistan should rely on soft power and give dialogue through non-official tracks a chance.
Dr. Zainab Akhter is an independent analyst based in Delhi. Â The views expressed here are her own.
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