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Publication: Swarajyamag.com
Date: April 1, 2026
URL:    https://sharpbyswarajya.substack.com/p/nirupama-menon-rao-pakistans-favourite?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

When Pakistan's former Foreign Minister applauds your India critique, it should tell you everything.

There is a particular kind of Indian diplomat, retired, comfortable, fluent in the language of nuance, who has spent decades ensuring that Pakistan never pays the full price for its terrorism. The method is always the same. After each atrocity, this class counsels restraint, proposes a fresh dialogue track, and frames continued engagement as the sophisticated response. The vocabulary rotates; the function does not. Absorb the shock, propose a process, let the moment of accountability pass, repeat.

Nirupama Menon Rao, former Foreign Secretary of India, has just offered the latest iteration of this service.

In a series of posts on X, Rao declared the India-Pakistan relationship trapped in a “single script: territory, terror, recrimination,” repeated with “ritual precision” and yielding “diminishing returns.” Her prescription: parallel tracks of engagement in West Asia, energy cooperation, diaspora welfare, maritime stability, and, with a flourish, a “women’s caucus” animated by women’s “ingrained common sense.” She branded it “insulation, not transformation,” as though the rebrand were itself the argument.

What Rao airily dismisses as a single script is a set of facts, and the consequences of discarding them deserve to be stated plainly.

If territory is a rhetorical habit, then Pakistan’s occupation of Kashmir is simply the status quo, to be managed rather than reversed, which is, of course, Islamabad’s preferred position.

If terror is a talking point that yields diminishing returns, then India should stop raising it, which grants Pakistan the only thing its terror infrastructure has ever needed: impunity.

And if accountability is mere recrimination, then the dead of Pahalgam and Mumbai are reduced to diplomatic baggage, an embarrassment to be set aside so that sophisticated people may get on with the business of engagement.

Rao does not state these conclusions. She does not need to. They are the only destination her logic permits, and a former Foreign Secretary ought to know where her own argument leads.

Since when do the women of India want anything different from the men of India when it comes to the Pakistani problem? At Pahalgam, newlywed husbands were shot in the head while their brides, still wearing wedding bangles, watched. Did the widows of Pahalgam grieve differently because of their gender? Did the mothers and widows of soldiers killed along the LoC across three decades desire “women’s caucuses” and “parallel tracks”?

When terror did discriminate based on gender, it was worse for Indian women.

The terrorists at Pahalgam spared the women because the logic of Pakistan’s terror ecosystem has always carried a specific, gendered cruelty: kill the men, render the women as spoils. In 1990, loudspeakers atop mosques across the Kashmir Valley blared through the freezing dark: Asi gachchi Pakistan, Batao roas te Batanev san, we want Pakistan, with Hindu women, but without their men. A promise of conquest and enslavement, directed explicitly at women.

The argument that gender can cut through what decades of statecraft could not is also historically illiterate.

Benazir Bhutto, Oxford-educated, photogenic, globally hailed as the face of progressive Muslim leadership, sponsored the JKLF’s escalation into full-blown insurgency in Kashmir. Under her watch, the Taliban were created with ISI support.

On a visit to Muzaffarabad in 1990, she exhorted a crowd to chop the Governor of Jammu and Kashmir into pieces, jag-jag, mo-mo, han-han, slicing the air with her hand to leave no ambiguity. She screamed azadi slogans, called Kashmiris the blood of mujahids and ghazis, and effectively lit the fuse for the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits. On the Indian side, it was during a woman’s Prime Ministership that India broke Pakistan into two. Gender has never determined strategic behaviour. There is no reason to pretend it does now.

As Arshia Malik, herself a Kashmiri Muslim woman, has pointed out, the elite women of Pakistan provide intellectual and rhetorical cover for the jihadi apparatus of their own military-industrial complex, even as ordinary Pakistani women suffer under Hudood laws, honour killings, blasphemy accusations, forced conversions, and the quiet genocide of Baloch communities. A “women’s caucus” bridging a gap rooted in the Pakistani state’s use of terror as an instrument of policy does not deserve serious engagement. It deserves derision.

The most instructive part of this episode, however, is the applause.

Within hours of Rao’s thread on the Iran war, Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan’s former Foreign Minister, quote-tweeted it, calling it “strategic clarity” and expressing “deep nostalgia.” She hoped “the current trend is an aberration and not the final chapter of South Asia’s destiny.” The next day, replying directly to Khar’s endorsement, Rao proposed the parallel tracks, described them as “insulation, not transformation,” and concluded: “The women must speak.”

Let us be precise about who was applauding. Khar, who just months ago called India a “belligerent, rogue, terrorist state.” Who told a press conference in Islamabad that “no country has used terrorism better than India.” Who, after Operation Sindoor, accused India of “setting a dangerous new criteria” for the region. She now gazes upon Rao’s thread and feels nostalgia, and one can see why.

What Khar misses is the diplomatic class to which Rao belongs, the class that staffed track-II dialogues and bankrolled peace initiatives while the deep state ran the terror pipeline without so much as a polite pause. Those processes gave Pakistan cover, optics, and time. Khar misses those Indians because they were useful. They kept the game going while Pakistan never had to fold.

One does not need to speculate about whether Rao’s proposal serves Pakistan’s interests. Pakistan’s own former Foreign Minister confirmed it, publicly and enthusiastically, within hours.

Rao, to her credit, anticipates the objection that any engagement risks being instrumentalised. She knows the counter well enough to state it herself. She simply believes the word “insulation” is sufficient to retire it.

It is not. Insulation requires a partner who respects boundaries, and Pakistan has not respected a single one across seven decades: not at Agra, not after Mumbai, not after Pathankot, and not after Pahalgam. Every insulated track India has opened has been converted, with practised efficiency, into a concession extracted while the terror infrastructure hummed along undisturbed.

Rao herself has form. In 2012, barely four years after 166 people were killed in Mumbai by Lashkar-e-Taiba, the diplomatic establishment that Rao led was planning to sell electricity to Pakistan even while India could not generate enough for its own demand. This instinct is consistent: engage first, assess later, and treat scepticism as a failure of imagination rather than a product of lived experience.

The women of India did not need a caucus. The widows who watched their husbands shot through the skull were not waiting for parallel tracks with the country that made them widows. They wanted what decades of this diplomatic gentility have deferred: a price, paid in full.