As American-Israeli strikes under Operation Epic Fury continue to pound Iranian targets and the Strait of Hormuz convulses the global economy, Pakistan has become the channel through which a 15-point American ceasefire framework is apparently being negotiated with Tehran. Pakistan Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar confirmed that messages were exchanged between Washington and Tehran through Islamabad.
A country with lines into both camps, willing to be useful in a dangerous space, had made itself relevant in a crisis it had no direct stake in. Islamabad is holding the wire, to use an old phrase.
In New Delhi, the reaction was a familiar compound of public irritation, stoic caution from former diplomats, and a government that spoke only to reject any ‘dalal nation’ role. India, which constantly speaks of strategic autonomy and its indispensable role in a multipolar world, was not part of that conversation. It was watching.
This should prompt a question that Indian foreign policy commentary rarely asks directly: when did we stop volunteering for the difficult chair?
The answer requires a short trip to 1950.
A quick peek into history
That year, Ambassador KM Panikkar in Beijing passed on a message that Washington did not want to hear. China had warned that it would enter the Korean War if UN forces crossed the 38th parallel. Panikkar transmitted the warning accurately and promptly.
Dean Acheson, former United States Secretary of State, dismissed him as unreliable. General Douglas MacArthur, commanding UN forces, was contemptuous and certain that China would not act — and said so. The UN forces crossed the parallel. China entered anyway. The war’s catastrophic second phase followed. Tens of thousands of additional lives on the ground were lost. President Truman lost confidence in his Commander. MacArthur was recalled. His strategic overconfidence had helped create a disaster he could not contain.
India had carried the wire correctly, even if the role didn’t help prevent avoidable casualties among boots on the ground.
Four years later, India institutionalised that custodial instinct at Geneva.
In 1954, the great powers gathered at Geneva to end the First Indochina War. France had been bled white at Dien Bien Phu. America was calculating its next move. China and the Soviet Union were watching carefully. The risk of a wider war — American airpower against Chinese ground forces, a Korea repeated in a different jungle — was real and present.
India was seven years old. It had no army that could affect the outcome, no economy that could anchor a settlement, no seat at the table of great powers. What it had was Jawaharlal Nehru, and a conviction that non-alignment was not merely an absence of commitment but a positive force — that a recently decolonised Asian state, trusted by neither bloc but acceptable to both, could do things that the blocs could not do for themselves.
India did not just vote for a settlement between the parties. It accepted the burden of supervising one. Three International Commissions for Supervision and Control were established — one each for Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia — with India as Chair, Canada representing the Western perspective, and Poland, the communist bloc. India provided the civilian and military leadership, the logistics, and the communications infrastructure for all three. Nearly a thousand Indian personnel were deployed across three war-torn countries to make a fragile ceasefire legible to itself.
The country that did this was, by any material measure, far less capable than the India of today. Its officers were kept on shoestring allowances. Their Polish counterparts, backed by a state determined to prove its socialist loyalty, had funds and hospitality the Indians could only envy.
When the time came to reciprocate, the Indians discovered their allowances barely covered mess bills. They showed up anyway. They kept the lines open. At a Commission meeting in 1956, the Polish Ambassador—the representative of the communist bloc, the ideological adversary—rose to praise the Indian Corps of Signals for its patience, skill, and efficiency. The Canadian Ambassador called the Indian contribution a credit to the Service.
This was not soft power in the contemporary sense—the careful, calibrated projection of influence at acceptable cost. This was something older and more demanding: the willingness to put scarce military and diplomatic resources into being not just a stakeholder in international order but a custodian of it. To sit in the chair that nobody wanted to sit in. To hold the wire between people who did not trust each other.
That posture did not survive the decade.
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Structural constraints
By the mid-1960s, the Indochina commissions had decayed into propaganda for the blocs, and the Second Indochina War mocked the settlements India had underwritten. When 1962 shattered the belief that moral standing could substitute for power, Delhi’s appetite for exposed custodial roles evaporated with it. The lesson drawn was not unreasonable: custodial ambition is expensive, and the bills come due in ways you cannot predict when you volunteer.
What replaced it was something more prudent and more transactional. Today, India is enmeshed everywhere — in the Quad, in BRICS, in Gulf energy and Russian arms — and yet in the single most dangerous crisis now underway, it is a spectator, while Pakistan relays messages between a President and an amorphous leadership.
The formulation India’s strategists prefer is strategic autonomy. The formulation of its rival across is strategic one-upmanship. The gap between those two descriptions is where India’s foreign policy appears to live.
The structural constraints are real and should be named honestly. India’s unresolved competition with China — Pakistan’s principal patron — means any move toward Washington is read in Beijing as alignment, and any move toward Tehran is read in Washington as equivocation. A decade of subordinating Iranian equities to American sanctions pressure has cost India the trust that back-channel utility requires.
The result is leverage nowhere in the crisis that matters. Pakistan’s strategic promiscuity, built over decades of existential insecurity, is precisely its current utility, and India’s principled autonomy has made it, paradoxically, less free.
One influential defence of India’s current posture, offered by former Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, is that India should not compete for Pakistan’s conduit role but instead aim at something more valuable: credibility across divides, the ability to speak to all sides without being owned by anyone. A conduit carries messages. It does not define outcomes. India should be shaping context, not chasing visibility.
This is a serious argument with a genuine historical foundation. The 1954 India that chaired the Indochina commissions was valuable precisely because it rose above blocs and divides. Nirupama Rao is invoking the same logic: preserve the asset, deploy it at the moment of maximum leverage.
But credibility across divides is a strategic asset only in motion. Preserved but undeployed, it is not influential. It is illiquid. And reputation, unlike wire, does not carry a signal. The question to ask of the credibility thesis is not whether India has it — it probably does, in residual form — but what specific outcome in the current crisis India is shaping with it. If the answer is none visible, the argument collapses into a rationalisation of inaction dressed as a superior strategy.
There is a concept in naval strategy that, unless a force is prepared to draw the enemy to itself, opportunities to engage or shape the battle will not present themselves. A fleet that stays in harbour, preserving itself from risk, controls nothing and compels nothing. It is a fleet in being — latent, careful, and strategically inert. The credibility-across-divides thesis, in its current passive form, is India’s fleet in being. It preserves the asset by never committing it. But undeployed credibility, like an undeployed fleet, does not shape the environment; it merely occupies. Panikkar did not stay in the harbour. Neither did India in 1954.
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Strategy or reticence
The Pakistan comparison is instructive not because Islamabad is doing something admirable. A country with such domestic chaos and a history of playing every side simultaneously has its own complex motives in any back-channel, but because the contrast is clarifying. Pakistan elbows its way into the room, even when it’s uncomfortable. India declines rooms that might compromise its positioning. One of these is a strategy. The other is reticence.
The Indochina commissions eventually failed. The wire India held in 1954 could not ultimately bear the weight of a conflict that neither bloc was willing to resolve. Custodial ambition has limits, and 1954 was not a golden age — it was a young republic making an ambitious bet on a form of influence it could barely afford.
But the bet was made. The Chair was occupied. The hand was on the wire.
India is today immeasurably better resourced to make such bets than it was in 1950 or 1954. It has the economy, the military weight, the diplomatic bandwidth, and — as the former Ambassador rightly notes — the credibility across divides that Pakistan can never quite claim. The question its foreign policy establishment has not yet answered is: why, in the consequential crisis of 2026, does credibility sit in reserve while Islamabad carries the mail?
Credibility across divides is what India had in 1950 and 1954, too. The difference is that then, we had the gumption to cash it in.
The author is a former Flag Officer Naval Aviation, Chief of Staff at the integrated HQ Andaman and Nicobar Command, and Chief Instructor (Navy) at DSSC Wellington. He tweets @sudhirpillai__Views are personal.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)