The problem is resolved. There were multiple issues:
1. The office laptop I was using had some stringent firewall setting. Access to unauthorized ports was disabled even for local machine. Changed the firewall settings and JBoss communication started working both ways.
2. One of the project jar files was using Maven transitive dependency feature and adding an unwanted jar file(geronimo-jms_1.1_spec.jar) to application war. This caused an exception where app server was trying to cast JBoss queueu objects returned by JNDI lookup to normal javax queue objects. Made this dependency as 'provided' in Maven so that the code compiles but Geronimo JMS jar does not get added to war file.