In a long-forgotten and deeply ironic turn of events, two senior Pakistani political leaders were chief guests at India’s Republic Day parade – not once, but twice: in 1955 and again a decade later, in 1965.These surprising gestures came at a time when the wounds of Partition and the ensuing 1947-48 Kashmir war were still raw, leaving borders contested and distrust embedded in the politics of both newborn states.Yet, on both occasions, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru as well as his successor Lal Bahadur Shastri, opted for engagement on India’s most visible ceremonial stage, hoping to pave the way for reconciliation and eventual conflict resolution with its neighbouring rival.The first such occasion was in January 1955, when Sir Malik Ghulam Muhammad, Pakistan’s Governor-General, attended Republic Day celebrations, the year the grand military parade shifted – later permanently – to Rajpath, recently renamed Kartavya Path. Till that time, the parade had been held-1950 onwards, at Irwin Stadium-now the Major Dhyan Chand National Stadium, to showcase India’s military power. Sir Malik was a key figure in Pakistan’s early political history and served as its third Governor General from 1951-1955. A former Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer, he was knighted by the British in 1946 and, after independence, played an influential role in Pakistan’s formative years, particularly in economic and administrative affairs, having earlier served as federal Finance Minister.His tenure as Governor-General is best remembered for accelerating the erosion of Pakistan’s constitutional governance by dismissing Prime Minister Khawaja Nazimuddin’s government in 1953 and later dissolving the Constituent Assembly. In recent retrospective assessments, Muhammad is credited with setting damaging precedents for Pakistan’s executive overreach – actions that not only weakened parliamentary supremacy, but also legitimised judicial acquiescence, laying the foundations of its hugely skewed and enduring civil-military imbalance.Online research has revealed that at the time, his presence on the saluting dais at Rajpath carried ‘layered meaning’ for India’s leadership, which believed that symbolism could ‘soften hardened attitudes’ with its neighbour. Conversely, Pakistan’s acceptance of Nehru’s invite to Muhammad suggested a willingness to engage beyond the bitterness and hostility engendered by Partition and subsequent hostilities in Kashmir.A decade later, history repeated itself when Rana Abdul Hamid, Pakistan’s Minister for Food and Agriculture, was the chief guest at the Republic Day parade in January 1965, when Lal Bahadur Shastri was India’s prime minister. A Punjabi feudal landlord, Hamid belonged to the influential Rana clan that traces its ancestry to the Hindu Soda Rajputs of Umerkot, formerly Amarkot, in Sindh, signifying royal lineage, with ethnic and tribal linkages in western Rajasthan. Hamid’s visit was part of a broader attempt to stabilise relations through dialogue and diplomatic engagement – an experiment in confidence-building at a time when the neighbours were engaged in ‘quietly reassessing’ each other’s military strengths and vulnerabilities.However, within two months of Hamid’s appearance at the saluting dais on Rajpath, Pakistan launched Operation Desert Hawk, its military incursion into the Rann of Kutch in April, escalating further skirmishes over the next 6-8 weeks. In May 1965, the conflict spiraled into larger clashes with the Indian Army, following which a ceasefire was agreed upon with British mediation that ended hostilities in June 1965. Soon after, Pakistan initiated Operation Gibraltar, a covert military plan to infiltrate Jammu and Kashmir in August 1965, with troops in mufti to spark a Muslim uprising against Indian rule in the disputed state, divided between the neighbours 18 years earlier. The plan failed, as the locals gave up the infiltrators to the Indian Army, but within days, it ended up triggering the three-week-long India-Pakistan War in September 1965.According to open source accounts, these Republic Day gestures by Nehru and Shastri were not free from debate at the time, with some Indian commentators and politicians viewing the invitations to the two Pakistani’s as confidence-building measures to keep diplomatic channels open, especially when formal bilateral talks between them were sparse. Others, however, criticised them as premature or politically naive, arguing that inviting Pakistani representatives to preside over such a landmark function risked legitimising positions hostile to India’s interests.B.G. Kher, then senior Congress leader and first chief minister of then Bombay State for five years, till 1952, was amongst those publicly supporting Nehru’s diplomatic gestures to the Pakistani’s. In parliamentary debates, he reportedly argued that ceremonial diplomacy could serve as a “soft bridge” for dialogue and confidence-building, despite unresolved issues over Kashmir.India’s former Governor General C. Rajagopalachari, on the other hand, expressed caution in his writings and public addresses. And though he did not actively oppose engagement with Pakistan, he warned that India should not appear conciliatory at the cost of sovereignty or give the impression that its territorial claims were being legitimised.Other Indian officials like K.R. Narayanan – then a junior diplomat – and later India’s president- are believed to have written memos emphasising that careful calibration was required over these two invites. They maintained that ‘ceremonial hospitality’ towards Pakistan should not translate into policy concessions.Newspapers like the Times of India, too, framed such invitations as “measured gestures of civility,” acknowledging the symbolic value of hosting Pakistani representatives, while also reflecting public anxiety over ongoing border disputes.Almost five decades after India first experimented with this symbolic outreach to Pakistani leaders, Prime Minister Narendra Modi went a step further in attempting a dramatic diplomatic reset with Islamabad.In May 2014, breaking with convention, Modi invited Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to his swearing-in ceremony in New Delhi, signalling an intent to engage despite an even longer and far more bruised history of mistrust. The gesture was striking precisely because it was unilateral and unexpected.That impulse peaked thereafter in December 2015, when Modi made an unannounced stopover in Lahore on his return from inaugurating the Afghan parliament building in Kabul, becoming the first Indian prime minister in over a decade to visit Pakistan. He attended Sharif’s granddaughter’s wedding at Raiwind, near Lahore, and held brief talks with his counterpart in a visit heavy with symbolism. But like the earlier Republic Day overtures by Nehru and Shastri, this initiative too proved fleeting and futile, soon subsumed by renewed tensions, Pakistan-sponsored terrorism and continued estrangement. It is often asserted in Pakistan that India has never truly accepted its existence as a sovereign state, but the Republic Day invitations of 1955 and 1965 directly refute that claim. These were not merely ceremonial courtesies, but deliberate and public acknowledgements of Pakistan as a legitimate state, accorded visibility on India’s most important national stage. Such gestures, extended in full view of India’s political and military leadership, constituted acts of diplomatic recognition that few diplomats or security analysts would regard as ambiguous, regardless of the conflicts and estrangements that followed.India’s approach was similarly evident in the economic realm. In 1996, New Delhi granted Pakistan Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status under World Trade Organisation rules, providing non-discriminatory market access, despite enduring political tensions. Pakistan never reciprocated, and India eventually revoked this status in 2019, following the Pulwama terror attack.More broadly, Pakistan rendered sustained engagement with India hostage to its Islamic ideology and security doctrine, while pursuing its decades-long campaign of cross-border terrorism. This repeatedly derailed all and any normalisation efforts and brought the two nuclear-armed neighbours perilously close to open conflict – most starkly during crises like Operation Sindoor – when further escalation loomed, before it was contained.In such a context, the two previous Republic Day invitations belong to a different diplomatic and security era, when ceremony and symbolism sought in vain to restrain conflict, even as strategy and trust lay in ruins – a stark, almost apocalyptic reminder of the fragility of today’s frayed relations between Islamabad and Delhi.