What do civil society peace activists, especially the cross border ‘people to people’ dialogue enthusiasts say about the growing buzz around a senior political ideologue, and a former army chief signalling the possibility of India’s reset in the confrontational face-off in the India-Pakistan bilateral relations? The media discourse has been heavy with mixed reactions of the political class and even some encouragement from realist strategists, but what about the cross border civil society networks – the track two, and particularly the people-to-people track – that supposedly are meant to break the deadlock in the zero-sum paradigm of the two nuclear armed neighbours?

Movements such as the three decades old Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD) have not simply been idle, or waiting for government approvals or the commendation of fundamentalists. On April 18-19, PIPFPD shook off the constraining burden of anti-national labelling, surveillance and militarised nationalist propaganda, and re-energised the Pakistan-India people-to-people commitment to reject the logic of war, politics of hatred and silencing. 

After eight years, the urgency of the political moment – of deepening militarisation, authoritarian megalomania and shrinking democratic spaces – drove the convening of the National Convention of PIPFPD, India chapter in Delhi. 

The thematic call of Ishq, Siyasat, Awam: Why Peace Matters, returned the enthusiastic inter-generational assembly once again to a shared historical responsibility as we invoked the memory and spirit of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Sahir Ludhianvi and Avtar Singh Pash – poets who refused the violence of borders, who spoke against hollow nationalism, and who placed love, dissent, and people at the centre of politics. It was a continuation of the tradition of celebrating voices such as Fahmida Riaz and Amrita Pritam who insisted that the subcontinent’s history cannot be reduced to division, nor its future to hostility.

For the hundreds who came – voicing the diverse struggles of farmers, fisherfolk, forest dwellers, workers, artists, academics and lawyers, across fault lines in Manipur, securitised and militarised regions of Chhattisgarh and Kashmir, displaced communities and students – peace was not a slogan. It was a political demand rooted in democracy, human rights and justice. Pakistani colleagues disabled from joining by hostile visa regimes, were present in supportive video cameos, excited at the prospect of the return of the multitudinous PIPFPD joint conventions which, since the 1990s, had enabled ordinary Indians and Pakistanis to travel to each other’s countries and pull down the walls of otherness that divided them. 

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These multifarious contacts were ruptured by the sterile policy of “terror and talks don’t go together” which broke off road, rail and air links, trade and medical tourism, divided families, and stripped diplomatic contacts to bare bones. Toxic propaganda and militarised nationalism triggered escalating military action culminating in Operation Sindoor and the May 2025 India-Pakistan military........

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