India, March 30 -- When India's former foreign secretary Nirupama Menon Rao critiqued India's idea of "strategic autonomy" in the ongoing US-Iran war, she did not use the word Pakistan as such in her X post. But Pakistan's former foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar decided she needed to jump in.

This set off a conversation on Monday, March 30, about bonhomie and shared interests with Pakistan, with an argument for having more women make decisions.

Rao said in her original post that strategic autonomy - a word used by PM Narendra Modi's government to define India geopolitical stance - "cannot mean adjusting our language to the hierarchy of power".

She wrote: "Assassinations of leaders, the killing of civilians, open assertions of force-t...