Mediation is not independence: Comparing India and Pakistan misreads the map

When Pakistan stepped forward to play mediator in the Iran conflict, a certain strain of commentary — particularly from voices eager to fault New Delhi’s foreign policy — rushed to frame this as a moment of Pakistani statesmanship that exposed Indian passivity. The argument, stripped to its core, was that Pakistan acted while India stood aside. This is a deeply misleading comparison, and not merely because the two countries occupy different strategic positions in the world. It misreads what Pakistani mediation actually was, ignores the web of compulsions that drove Islamabad to the table, and misunderstands why India’s calibrated, interest-driven stance was not a failure of nerve but an exercise of genuine strategic autonomy.

To credit Pakistan with independent diplomatic initiative is to mistake a man being pushed for a man who chose to walk. Islamabad’s engagement with the Iran crisis was shaped not by visionary foreign policy but by a constellation of pressures so severe that mediation was essentially the only role Pakistan could safely perform — it was a way of appearing useful to multiple patrons simultaneously without committing to any of them.

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Begin with the Saudi dimension. Pakistan’s defence relationship with Riyadh is not a partnership between equals; it is, in many functional respects, a dependency. Tens of thousands of Pakistani military personnel have served in Saudi Arabia, Pakistani soldiers guard Saudi palaces and installations, and billions in remittances flow from the Kingdom to Pakistani households. Saudi Arabia, which views Iran as an existential rival and a sponsor of regional destabilisation, had an obvious interest in how Islamabad positioned itself. Pakistan could not afford to be seen tilting towards Tehran, but equally could not afford to antagonise Iran, with whom it shares a long and volatile border. Mediation, then, was not a policy choice — it was an escape route from an impossible binary.

The UAE added a second layer of financial coercion with a demand for repayment of a loan of $3.5 billion. Pakistan has, in recent years, leaned heavily on Gulf state largesse to keep its balance of payments from collapsing, and Abu Dhabi’s patience with Islamabad’s economic mismanagement has not been unconditional. With loan repayments looming and the UAE signalling its expectations, Pakistan needed to demonstrate its worth as a regional interlocutor. A country performing diplomacy is a country justifying its credit lines. This is not statesmanship; it is debt management by other means.

Compounding these pressures was Pakistan’s unresolved catastrophe on its western flank. The resurgence of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has stretched Pakistani security forces thin, traumatised border communities, and forced the military establishment into an exhausting, resource-draining counter-insurgency that has no clean resolution in sight. A Pakistan managing an active Taliban insurgency domestically is a Pakistan that cannot project confident, autonomous foreign policy. Its mediation role in the Iran conflict was partly a way of reasserting relevance — of reminding the world that Pakistan still matters — at a moment when its internal credibility was haemorrhaging.

Then there is China, whose influence on Pakistani decision-making is rarely acknowledged with sufficient candour. Beijing’s equities in the Iran situation were significant: Chinese energy deals, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor’s sensitivity to regional instability, and China’s broader interest in managing American power projection in West Asia all meant that Beijing had views about what Pakistan should and should not do. Chinese pressure, unlike Saudi or Emirati pressure, does not always arrive loudly. It comes through the quiet conditioning of financial dependence, through the CPEC leverage, through the unspoken understanding that Islamabad’s foreign policy space exists largely at Beijing’s sufferance. When Pakistan moved towards the mediation role, it was difficult to disentangle that movement from the ambient pressure of a patron whose interests were served by such positioning.

Against this backdrop of multiple compulsions, India’s approach looks rather different from the caricature of passivity. New Delhi’s primary concern during the conflict was the security of its maritime trade, particularly the unhindered passage of its commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. This is a vital national interest: the Strait is the jugular vein of India’s energy imports, and any disruption would send oil prices surging in ways that India’s large and vulnerable economy could ill afford.

India engaged diplomatically to protect this interest — quietly, bilaterally and without theatrics. It did not allow itself to be conscripted into any camp’s narrative. It did not perform loyalty to Washington or to Riyadh or to Tehran. It focused on the thing that mattered most to its citizens: that oil kept flowing and ships kept moving. This is not passivity — it is the exercise of strategic autonomy in its truest sense. A country that acts on its own interests, rather than the interests of its creditors, its military patrons, or its infrastructure investors, is demonstrating exactly the kind of independent foreign policy that the comparison with Pakistan implicitly claims to celebrate.

The suggestion that India should have emulated Pakistan’s mediating posture fundamentally misunderstands both countries’ situations. Pakistan mediated because it had no room to do anything else — squeezed by Saudi obligations, Emirati loans, Afghan insecurity, rising oil costs, and Chinese strategic direction, it performed diplomacy as a form of managed helplessness. India, unencumbered by those dependencies, was free to pursue its actual national interest. That is not a mark against New Delhi. That is precisely the point.

(Hindol Sengupta is professor and executive dean at the School of International Affairs, and director of the Jindal India Institute, at O. P. Jindal Global University. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)