Islamabad, Pakistan – Earlier this month, as Indian television channels and government leaders were celebrating the anniversary of the war against Pakistan in May 2025, one of the most influential ideologues of the political movement that Prime Minister Narendra Modi leads struck a discordant note.

In an interview with an Indian news agency, Dattatreya Hosabale, general secretary of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – the mothership of the Hindu majoritarian philosophy of Hindutva that guides Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party –  said New Delhi should explore dialogue with Pakistan.

“We should not close the doors. We should always be ready to engage in dialogue,” he said.

His comments instantly stirred up a political storm in India, with the opposition questioning the RSS position and pointing out how it was in stark contrast to Modi’s.

Indeed, Modi and his government have repeatedly said “terror and talks can’t go together”, arguing against any dialogue with Pakistan, which India accuses of sponsoring and arming fighters that have attacked Indian-administered Kashmir and Indian cities for decades. The four-day 2025 war – which Pakistan and India both insist they “won” – followed an attack by gunmen in the resort town of Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir in which 26 tourists were killed.

Pakistan welcomed Hosabale’s comments, with Foreign Ministry spokesperson Tahir Andrabi saying Islamabad would wait to see whether there was “an official reaction” from India to calls for talks.

More than a week later, the Modi government is yet to formally respond to Hosabale’s call for dialogue, but other prominent voices in India have backed the RSS leader, leading to suggestions that New Delhi might be preparing the ground to restart formal engagement with Pakistan.

Analysts say, however, that while there’s a growing rationale for the neighbours to re-engage diplomatically, and that they have already quietly taken baby steps in this direction, resurrecting a full-fledged dialogue will not be easy.

Voices from the margins – or testing the waters?

The push for talks didn’t end with Hosabale.

Former Indian army chief General Manoj Naravane publicly backed the RSS leader’s position, also telling an Indian news agency on the sidelines of a book launch in Mumbai that the “common man has nothing to do with politics” and that friendship between peoples naturally helps improve relations between states.

Across the border, Andrabi responded: “We hope that sanity will prevail in India and warmongering will fade away and pave the way for more such voices.”

While the RSS is the same as the BJP and is not itself in government, most senior BJP leaders, including Modi, have served for years in the group, which plays a critical role in building grassroots support for the governing party.

Irfan Nooruddin, a professor of Indian politics at Georgetown University, said the signals for talks were emerging from the RSS and retired generals like Naravane for a reason.

“The Modi government has boxed itself into a corner with its anti-Pakistan rhetoric,” he told Al Jazeera.

“For it to unilaterally stand down and initiate dialogue would be potentially politically costly. So, for the calls to come from the RSS and from ex-military leaders is to the BJP’s advantage as it gives them political cover. Any efforts on their part can be spun as responding to calls from society rather than a political concession,” the Washington, DC-based academic said.

Below the surface

The calls for dialogue aren’t coming in a vacuum, point out analysts.

Jauhar Saleem, a former Pakistani diplomat, told Al Jazeera that roughly four meetings involving former officials, retired generals, intelligence figures and parliamentarians from both sides had taken place over the past year, since the May 2025 war that ended in a ceasefire that United States President Donald Trump insists he mediated.

The meetings, split between Track 2 and Track 1.5 formats involving several serving officials, were held in Muscat, Doha, Thailand and London, he said. A Track 1.5 format refers to a meeting where there are serving officials and retired bureaucrats, military officers and members of civil society from both sides. Track 2 events are ones where members of civil society and retired government and military officials from the two sides meet, but with the blessings of the governments. These mechanisms are used by governments as icebreakers and to test the waters for formal diplomacy where there’s a lack of trust between two countries.

“I believe they have helped carry forward informal dialogue on a range of issues with a view to preventing major misunderstandings, and testing the ground, perhaps paving the way for formal contacts, which have been almost non-existent in recent years,” Saleem said.

Tariq Rashid Khan, a former major-general who later served as Pakistan’s ambassador to Brunei, described the dialogues as essential infrastructure rather than diplomatic progress.

“Track-1.5 and Track-2 dialogues are not a substitute for official diplomacy. Instead, they are a safety valve,” he told Al Jazeera.

When asked directly last week about reports of such contacts, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to comment.

“If I was to comment, there would be no back channel,” Andrabi said during his briefing.

The altered equation

These quiet engagements are unfolding against a backdrop that has shifted considerably since the ceasefire of May 10, 2025.

Pakistan’s global standing has changed markedly in this period. Field Marshal Asim Munir, who commanded Pakistani forces during the conflict, was by April 2026 personally brokering the ceasefire between Washington and Tehran.

The Islamabad talks held on April 11-12 produced the first direct high-level engagement between the US and Iran since 1979, with President Donald Trump publicly crediting Munir and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif multiple times.

Meanwhile, India-US relations are under strain over trade tariffs and immigration restrictions, narrowing the space in which New Delhi can count on Washington to defer to its regional preferences on Pakistan.

For India, analysts say, that shift carries consequences New Delhi has yet to publicly acknowledge.

“The geopolitical situation has flipped on its head,” Nooruddin told Al Jazeera. “India has gone from having pole position with respect to its leverage in Washington to being on the outside, while Pakistan has expertly managed to re-enter America’s good graces. India could afford to ice out Pakistan when it appeared to be forging a special relationship with the US, but no longer.”

But Khan, the former Pakistani military official, cautioned against overstating the significance of the recent signals.

“Quiet signalling reflects realism more than sudden reconciliation,” he said.

The deep divide

Khan’s scepticism was underscored by the events of the past week.

Speaking at a civil-military event at the Manekshaw Centre in New Delhi on May 16, Indian Army chief General Upendra Dwivedi said if Islamabad continued to “harbour terrorists and operate against India”, it would have to decide whether it wanted to be “part of geography or history or not”.

Within 24 hours, Pakistan’s military responded. The Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) directorate described the remarks as “hubristic, jingoistic and myopic”, warning that threatening a nuclear-armed neighbour with erasure from the map “is not strategic signalling or brinkmanship; it is sheer bankruptcy of cognitive capacities”.

Any attempt to attack Pakistan, the ISPR added, could “trigger consequences that shall neither be geographically confined nor strategically or politically palatable for India”.

Meanwhile, a ruling from an international tribunal captured the state of the relationship in miniature.

The Court of Arbitration at The Hague issued an award on May 15 concerning pondage limits at Indian hydroelectric projects on the Indus river system.

Pakistan welcomed the ruling, expectedly, while India rejected it outright, reiterating that the tribunal was “illegally constituted” and that any decision it issued was “null and void”.

The Indus Waters Treaty, placed in abeyance by New Delhi following the Pahalgam attack in April 2025, remains suspended, India’s Ministry of External Affairs said. The treaty has long been the cornerstone of water sharing between India and Pakistan, and, before its suspension in 2025 by India, had survived three wars between the neighbours.

The exchange between Dwivedi and the ISPR was the clearest public signal yet of where relations stand.

“A debate is taking place in the Indian strategic ecosystem about the level of engagement with Pakistan, where some see merit in moving towards formal dialogue,” Saleem, the former Pakistani diplomat, told Al Jazeera. “But the political will for the same is not yet clearly evident.”