Arshad Mahmood Awan
In the theatre of South Asian geopolitics, even the smallest gesture carries enormous weight. When Dattatreya Hosabale, the General Secretary of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the second most powerful figure in the ideological machinery that drives India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, publicly suggested that India “should always be ready to engage them in a dialogue” with Pakistan, the statement landed with the quiet force of something long forbidden finally being spoken aloud. Coming from the RSS — the hard-line nationalist organisation that functions as the BJP’s ideological parent and moral authority — this was not a routine diplomatic observation. It was, by the standards of the current Indian political climate, a small earthquake.
To understand why this matters, one must first understand how relentlessly the Modi government has worked to close every conceivable door between India and Pakistan. Since Narendra Modi’s consolidation of power, the relationship between the two nuclear-armed neighbours has been reduced to a performance of hostility. Trade has been suspended. Cultural exchanges have withered. People-to-people contact, once a fragile but genuine bridge between ordinary citizens, has been largely severed. And in perhaps the most telling symbol of this manufactured estrangement, Indian athletes at international competitions have reportedly been instructed not to shake hands with Pakistani opponents. The reasoning, however absurd it sounds when stated plainly, is consistent with the broader BJP worldview: that any gesture of ordinary human decency toward Pakistan constitutes a threat to national security, or worse, a form of disloyalty.
Against this backdrop, Hosabale’s suggestion to keep diplomatic doors open represents the most meaningful opening in nearly a decade. It does not undo the accumulated damage of years of hostility, nor does it signal a dramatic reversal of policy. Hosabale, after all, dutifully repeated the standard BJP talking points about Pakistan’s alleged role in terrorism, including the contested narrative around the Pulawama attack, for which independent scrutiny of the evidence has never produced the international consensus India has sought. But the very fact that even within the framework of those accusations he found room to advocate dialogue tells us something important: that even at the highest levels of the Hindutva establishment, the zero-sum approach to Pakistan is beginning to strain under its own contradictions.
The Modi government’s campaign to brand Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism has not achieved its intended international effect. Despite sustained diplomatic pressure and repeated assertions from New Delhi, no significant bloc of nations has formally adopted India’s characterisation of Pakistan. More damaging for India’s global standing, the international community has instead grown increasingly uncomfortable with evidence of the Modi government’s own conduct abroad — specifically, credible allegations linking Indian intelligence to targeted killings of regime critics in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. These revelations have forced several Western governments to quietly reassess their relationship with New Delhi, complicating India’s self-presentation as a responsible democratic power and a reliable partner in a rules-based international order.
This is the larger context in which Hosabale’s remarks must be read. The hard-line approach to Pakistan has not delivered strategic dividends. It has not isolated Pakistan internationally. It has not produced a global consensus on terrorism that serves India’s interests. What it has produced is a frozen relationship that periodically threatens to spiral into open military conflict, a regional atmosphere of chronic instability, and a domestic political culture in India so saturated with anti-Pakistan sentiment that any politician or commentator who dares suggest the obvious — that two nuclear powers sharing a border must find ways to coexist — risks being labelled a traitor and subjected to coordinated harassment or worse.
This is precisely why the silence of the BJP’s troll ecosystem following Hosabale’s remarks is as significant as the remarks themselves. These are the same networks that have spent years attacking opposition politicians, independent journalists, and academic analysts for the crime of suggesting dialogue with Pakistan. The accusations have been ugly and the threats at times violent, with militant Hindutva groups proving disturbingly responsive to online incitement. For the RSS’s second-in-command to say what opposition voices have long been vilified for saying, and for the usual machinery of outrage to remain conspicuously quiet, reveals something the BJP’s defenders would prefer left unexamined: that the line between patriotism and anti-nationalism in Modi’s India has never been principled. It has always been about who is speaking, not what is being said.
The double standard has not gone unnoticed. Citizens on both sides of the political spectrum in India have observed, with varying degrees of irony and frustration, that the same sentiment which earns a liberal intellectual a torrent of abuse apparently earns an RSS general secretary respectful silence. This is how ideological ecosystems work when they are built not around ideas but around loyalty: the idea itself is never what is being defended. The tribe is.
What, then, should Pakistan make of all this? Cautious optimism is probably the appropriate register. One interview from one RSS leader does not constitute a policy shift, and the structural dynamics that have driven India-Pakistan relations toward hostility — domestic political incentives, institutional mistrust, unresolved historical grievances — remain firmly in place. But signals matter in diplomacy, and this one is worth noting. If the BJP finds that permitting dialogue with Pakistan does not cost it politically, if its own base absorbs the shift without revolt, then the political economy of hostility may begin to look less attractive than it once did.
For the citizens of both countries — who share languages, cuisines, literary traditions, and the living memory of a shared past — the stakes of this moment are not abstract. Ordinary people on both sides have paid the price of elite hostility through severed families, cancelled visas, missed sporting moments, and the constant low-grade anxiety of living in the shadow of potential conflict. If a crack has appeared in the wall, however small, it deserves to be widened by every reasonable voice on both sides with the courage to speak.
The RSS opened a door, however narrowly. The question now is whether anyone in power has the wisdom to walk through it.
