Assessing the Prospects for India–Pakistan Peace
More than a
year after the brief but intense India–Pakistan military confrontation of May
2025, a fresh, if fragile current of diplomacy is stirring beneath the surface
of South Asia's most enduring rivalry. It is being carried not by governments,
but by 117 private citizens, by airline balance sheets bleeding red ink, by
business chambers eyeing a market of nearly two billion people, and by a United
States administration recalibrating its own interests in the region. None of
these forces guarantees peace talks will resume. But together they represent
the most visible push toward normalization that India and Pakistan have seen in
years.
On June 30,
2026 a joint appeal titled Appeal to the Prime Ministers of India and
Pakistan by Concerned Citizens was released signed by 117 prominent
individuals 61 Indians and 56 Pakistanis. The initiative was coordinated by the
Centre for Peace and Progress, with social activist Om Prakash Shah among its
core organizers.
The list of
signatories is notable for its diversity and stature. On the Indian side it
includes National Conference president Dr. Farooq Abdullah, Peoples Democratic
Party chief Mehbooba Mufti, Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq Rajya Sabha MP
Manoj Jha, former Trinamool Congress minister Humayun Kabir, former Congress
leader Mani Shankar Aiyar, and former RAW chief A.S. Dulat alongside academic’s
journalists and civil society figures. From Pakistan signatories include former
Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, former diplomat Ashraf Jehangir Qazi
National Assembly member Isphanyar Bhandara and physicist and peace activist
Pervez Hoodbhoy. Notably the signatories are drawn largely from opposition
politics retired diplomacy and civil society rather than from either country's
ruling establishment a fact that shapes how much weight governments are likely
to give the appeal.
The people
of both countries deserve a future defined by peace, development, connectivity
and cooperation rather than perpetual mistrust and confrontation. from the
joint appeal The letter's demands amount to a fairly comprehensive
normalization roadmap: restoring full diplomatic relations and reappointing
High Commissioners in New Delhi and Islamabad; resuming regular visa services;
reopening the Attari-Wagah border for trade and travel; reviving the
Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service; reopening commercial airspace; and restoring
cross-border religious and cultural access, including the Kartarpur Sahib
Corridor and pilgrim access to Sharada Peeth in Pakistan's Neelum Valley. On
the political track, it calls for a revival of comprehensive bilateral
dialogue, including discussion of Jammu and Kashmir with reference to the
framework negotiated between 2004 and 2007 alongside steps toward
demilitarization and de-escalation.
The organizers have been careful to frame the appeal as humanitarian rather than political a call to prioritize the welfare of nearly one-fifth of humanity over entrenched positions, not an endorsement of any government's stance on Kashmir or terrorism. That framing matters because New Delhi's official position reiterated consistently since the 2025 conflict is that terror and talks cannot coexist and that trade cannot be normalized while cross-border militancy continues. Some early signatories have also since sought to publicly distance themselves from parts of the initiative underscoring how contested even symbolic gestures toward dialogue remain in the current climate.
Independent
of the citizens letter a parallel and older logic has been building in the
corporate boardrooms of both countries. Since the last period of relatively
normal bilateral trade (2014–2018), Indian industry bodies such as the
Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and their Pakistani counterpart the
Pakistan Business Council (PBC) have jointly maintained that normalization is a
matter of when not if. The two organizations previously ran the Pakistan India
Joint Business Forum, which met five times between 2014 and 2016 to make
progress on liberalizing trade in agriculture light engineering, and textiles
before political relations deteriorated after 2019.
The economic
case is not trivial. Even under today's constrained conditions India revoked
Pakistan's Most Favoured Nation trading status in 2019 and imposed steep
tariffs while Pakistan suspended formal trade the same year residual and
indirect bilateral trade has still shown strong growth driven heavily by Indian
pharmaceutical exports to Pakistan. Business chambers on both sides continue to
argue that a full reopening, alongside eased visa regimes for businesspeople
and reactivated joint forums could unlock billions of dollars in mutual trade
that currently moves through costly third-country routes such as Dubai and
Singapore instead of directly across the Attari-Wagah border.
Nowhere is
the economic cost of hostility more visible and more precisely quantified than
in commercial aviation. Since April 24, 2025 Pakistan has kept its airspace
closed to all Indian carriers a retaliatory measure following India's Operation
Sindoor strikes in the wake of the Pahalgam attack. The closure, repeatedly
extended through NOTAMs from Pakistan's Civil Aviation Authority, has remained
in force well into 2026.
The
financial toll on Indian aviation has been substantial and well documented.
Industry estimates presented to India's Ministry of Civil Aviation put the
consolidated annual loss to Indian carriers at roughly ₹7,000 crore or
approximately $800 million. Air India, which operates the largest number of
long-haul international routes dependent on Pakistani overflight rights bears
the heaviest burden with internal airline correspondence citing potential
annual losses approaching $600 million. IndiGo follows with an estimated ₹1,300
crore hit while SpiceJet Air India Express and Akasa Air absorb the remainder.
Flights from
Delhi and other northern Indian cities to North America, Europe and Central
Asia must now detour around Pakistani territory adding anywhere from 45 minutes
(Middle East routes) to over four hours (North American routes) to flight
times. This translates into higher fuel burn, additional crew costs, payload
restrictions and in some cases outright route cancellations IndiGo suspended
its Delhi-Almaty and Delhi-Tashkent services for a period in 2025 because the
detour placed those cities outside its fleet's operational range. Air India has
gone so far as to explore securing Chinese permission to route flights through
Xinjiang airspace as a workaround and has formally requested government
subsidies to offset the mounting costs. Compounding matters, the parallel spike
in fuel prices tied to Middle East tensions has pushed Air India, Indigo and
SpiceJet to jointly press Indian authorities to review aviation turbine fuel
pricing with the Federation of Indian Airlines calling the situation dire
enough to require immediate government intervention.
For
Pakistan, the closure carries its own quieter cost in the form of forgone
overflight fees and some regional observers have described the ban as carrying
more political symbolism than strategic utility given the financial strain it
also imposes on Pakistani aviation authorities. Even so, from New Delhi's side,
the arithmetic is unambiguous: every month the airspace remains closed adds
tens of millions of dollars to Indian airlines' operating costs, giving the
aviation sector one of the clearest, most quantifiable economic incentives for
either a bilateral thaw or at least a narrow technical arrangement on
overflight rights.
The third
and most geopolitically consequential pressure point is Washington's shifting
posture toward South Asia under the second Trump administration. The picture here
is more complicated than straightforward “pressure on India,” and reflects a
genuine realignment rather than a simple tilt.
President
Trump has repeatedly claimed credit for brokering the ceasefire that ended the
May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict a claim India's government has consistently
and publicly rejected, insisting the de-escalation was reached bilaterally and
that Operation Sindoor's objectives had already been achieved. That
disagreement has had real consequences: it coincided with a sharp deterioration
in US-India relations, including steep US tariffs on Indian goods (which
reached 50 percent at their peak before later relief) tied partly to India's
continued purchases of discounted Russian oil, and a marked cooling in
leader-level engagement between Modi and Trump through much of 2025.
At the same
time, Pakistan's standing in Washington has risen. Islamabad embraced and
amplified Trump's ceasefire narrative, went as far as nominating him for the
Nobel Peace Prize, and has since positioned itself as a useful intermediary in
other US diplomatic priorities notably facilitating US-Iran contacts including
hosting related talks in April 2026. This has visibly strengthened ties between
Trump, Pakistan's Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, and army chief Field Marshal
Asim Munir who were hosted at the White House in June 2025.
US officials
have taken pains to publicly deny that warmer ties with Pakistan come at
India's expense. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, during a May 2026 visit to New
Delhi stated that Washington does not view its relationship with any country as
coming at the expense of strategic alliance with India while Indian External
Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has responded with pointed language of
his own framing India's approach as “India First. Since the arrival of US
Ambassador Sergio Gor in New Delhi in January 2026 high-level contact has
increased and an interim trade agreement was reached in February 2026
suggesting the relationship is stabilizing even as friction persists.
Whether this amounts to deliberate US “pressure” on India to normalize with
Pakistan or simply a more transactional Washington pursuing separate interests
with each country is a matter of ongoing debate among South Asia analysts but
the net effect is a US posture less willing than in the past to treat
India-Pakistan tension as something to be quietly managed rather than actively
discussed.
Taken
together these threads point to real if modest momentum but a full resumption
of formal peace talks remains far from assured and the picture contains genuine
cross-currents worth weighing on both sides.
·
A broad, bipartisan-style civil society coalition has,
for the first time in years, put a detailed and specific normalization roadmap
on record, potentially giving both governments a ready-made framework to draw
from if political will emerges.
·
The economic incentives are large and growing:
aviation losses alone running toward $800 million a year for Indian carriers,
alongside an established business lobby on both sides pushing for restored
trade.
·
Washington's recalibrated South Asia posture has,
whether by design or as a byproduct of its own transactional diplomacy, created
new incentives for both Islamabad and New Delhi to manage the relationship more
actively rather than let it drift.
·
India's official position that terrorism and dialogue
cannot coexist has not changed, and the government has shown no public sign of
softening it in response to the letter or business pressure.
·
The letter's signatories are drawn overwhelmingly from
opposition and civil society circles rather than sitting governments, limiting
its direct policy leverage; some signatories have already sought to distance
themselves from aspects of the initiative.
·
US influence, while real is being read very
differently in New Delhi and Islamabad and Trump's own claims about the 2025
ceasefire remain a genuine sore point for India rather than a shared starting
point for trust-building.
·
Aviation and trade losses however large have
historically not been sufficient on their own to force political normalization a
similar airspace closure after the 2019 Balakot strikes cost Indian carriers
hundreds of crores over several months without producing a broader thaw.
The most
realistic near-term outcome is probably incremental and technical rather than
sweeping quiet steps such as a narrow understanding on overflight rights
backchannel contacts facilitated by third parties or business-to-business
engagement continuing to build a case for normalization from below even as
formal, comprehensive peace talks await a shift in the underlying political
calculus in New Delhi which continues to link any dialogue to demonstrable
progress on cross-border terrorism.
The convergence of a citizens peace appeals a business community eager for restored trade an aviation sector hemorrhaging money and a United States recalculating its regional priorities has created more visible pressure for India-Pakistan normalization than has existed in several years. Yet pressure is not the same as political will and the core dispute over terrorism that froze the relationship after 2019 remains unresolved. Whether 2026 marks the beginning of a genuine thaw or simply another chapter of parallel grievances will depend less on open letters and airline balance sheets than on whether New Delhi and Islamabad's governments themselves choose to act on the momentum being built around them.
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