In the last few days, a fleeting phase of an unintended cue to track two diplomacy between India and Pakistan has been put to the enduring reality check of hard-nosed diplomacy. In the process, the limits of maudlin fragility of people-to-people contact suggestions, and even the limited run of soft power, have become clear. Between these two ends, the episodic flicker of back-channel diplomacy bringing LOC ceasefire agreements, as the latest one, creeps in as a footnote.

Last week, sections of Indian and international media raved about how the viral five-second “pawri” video of Pakistani Instagram influencer Dananeer Mobeen was “bringing India and Pakistan together”. There were reports about how brands and celebrities in India were finding a common chord with the video. Even state agencies like the Uttar Pradesh police dipped in the meme deluge the video unleashed and made it a part of their social media messaging. At the same time, the high table of multilateral diplomacy in Geneva was witnessing a verbal confrontation between India and Pakistan along the long-entrenched lines.

On February 24, Indian diplomat Seema Pujani, second secretary in the permanent mission to the United Nations, exercised India’s right to reply to the statement made by Pakistan’s human rights minister Shireen Mazari at the 46th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Responding to Pakistan’s familiar charges about human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir, India rejected Islamabad’s attempt to “engage in baseless and malicious propaganda against India” and went on to remind the forum that Pakistan had one of the worst human rights records. Besides highlighting state-condoned violence and discrimination against the Shia, Hazara and Ahmadiya communities, and political repression in Balochistan, Pujani brought to fore the “violence, institutionalized discrimination and persecution faced by Pakistan’s minorities”.

Stressing on the plight of women from minority communities in Pakistan subjected to abduction, forced marriage and conversion, the Indian diplomat cited a report of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan to say: “The condition of women belonging to minority communities, notably Hindus, Sikhs and Christians, remains deplorable. An estimated 1,000 women from minority communities are subjected to abduction followed by forced conversion and forced marriage in Pakistan every year, according to a recent report published by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Most of these women fall in the age-bracket of 16-25 years. The fact that young women, and not men or older women, are the main victims of forced conversions is a telling fact about Pakistani society.”

The issue of forced marriage and conversion of women from minority communities in Pakistan was also highlighted in Kathy Gannon’s report for the Associated Press last December. The same month, Indian diplomat Ashish Sharma, the first secretary in India’s Permanent Mission in the UN, called out the UN General Assembly for failing to condemn violence against the followers of Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism in various parts of the world.

In its latest intervention at the UNHRC, besides stressing the point about the plight of minorities in Pakistan, India reminded the forum of Pakistan’s sponsorship of terrorism, and went on say, “Pakistan has been the home and patron to the largest number of internationally proscribed terrorist entities and individuals in the world. As many as 126 individuals and 24 entities, sanctioned under the UN Security Council 1267 and 1988 Committees’ Lists, are associated with Pakistan.”

While India’s response has been on the lines of its long-held position on multilateral fora, the last two decades have made it more focused on realist stocktaking. The intermittent phases of track two diplomacy have inevitably led to disillusionment, and subsequent reordering of diplomatic priorities. It isn’t only the post-Pulwama scene, or the predictable fate of zero sum bilateral parleys, but the dismal historical register of track two diplomacy efforts that make it difficult for India to think of it as anything more than a quixotic option.

In the last three decades, the state-aided track two diplomacy has been a story of traumatic pitfalls: Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s bus trip to Lahore was quickly followed by Pakistan launching the Kargil War in 1999, the meeting between Manmohan Singh and Yousaf Raza Gilani at the India-Pakistan cricket match in Mohali in 2011 failing to result in any breakthrough on crossborder terrorism, Narendra Modi’s sudden stopover in Lahore in 2015 to meet his counterpart was followed by attack on the Indian security forces in Uri in September 2016. More recently, even the attack on the Indian security forces in Pulwama in 2019 was preceded by a historic people-to-people initiative in which the two countries threw open the corridor linking Dera Baba Sahib in Gurdaspur in India and Gurdwara Kartarpur Sahib in Pakistan.

So, India’s slow realization, if not hard-learnt cynicism, about the limits of track two diplomacy has resulted in a more guarded assessment. That, however, hasn’t meant a discarding of the new modes of public diplomacy or even technology-driven moves like digital diplomacy. It’s a part of reaching out and diplomatic exercise in the public realm, something that former British diplomat Tom Fletcher identified as an irreversible process in his work Naked Diplomat. While “instant diplomacy” that the process demands is a contradiction in terms, many governments have embraced it for specific purposes like responding to calls of distress. In the last few years, India has been eager to use digital diplomacy for some marked purposes; it was particularly visible when Sushma Swaraj led the foreign ministry.

In some ways, the limits of track two diplomacy also mirror the confines of soft power in advancing the national interest. While it can be only an adjunct to the hard power of military or economic might, even in this limited role the idea of soft power has a better chance of leverage with countries that don’t have overriding grounds of military, geopolitical or economic hostilities with the country wielding levers of cultural sway. In India-Pakistan relations, this inherent limit of soft power is clear in how it fails to work against the historical memory of hostilities and geopolitical imperatives.

After a spate of terror attacks in the 2010s, a career UN diplomat had remarked that while a terrorist will watch Bollywood movies he still would be motivated enough to bomb our cities. In fact, many may argue that in the formative years of India’s post-Independence life, the limits of soft power deployment were evident as Nehruvian pacifism failed to dissuade Asian neighbours like China and a newly independent Pakistan from military aggression. Decades later, in a different sense of strategic big power unilateralism, one may argue the same for the Gujral doctrine of the 1990s.

In the last two decades, India has had enough reasons to do a realistic stocktaking of not only the inherent limits of track two initiatives but even the obvious confines of soft power deployment in its relations with Pakistan. The porous realms of social media influence have an insurmountable task against a hard-learnt diplomatic clarity and weight of geopolitical history.