No ‘Dalali’, no voice: Jaishankar’s snark can’t steal Islamabad’s ceasefire limelight

Israel has bombed Lebanon despite a temporary ceasefire between the US and Iran, putting a fragile Pakistan-brokered truce in West Asia at risk. After the no-holds-barred Israeli bombing that killed over 100 people, Iran has blocked the Strait of Hormuz once more. 

If the ceasefire holds, talks may be held in Islamabad on April 10. The resultant peace agreement – if there is one – will be called the Islamabad Accord. 

A team of US negotiators headed by Vice President JD Vance, including Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, will reportedly travel to the Pakistani capital for talks with Iranian officials, who will be led by Foreign Minister Syed Abbas Araghchi.

Many versions are circulating about how the truce came about. Though Trump seemed to have accepted all of Iran’s 10-point list of demands, a report in the Financial Times cast Pakistan as a US proxy. 

Other reports spoke of Pakistan as a proxy of China. 

A report in The Guardian brought it all together — Trump’s desperation for a ceasefire, the need to involve China as a “guarantor”, and Pakistan’s part in bringing everyone on board. In all versions, Pakistan's Field Marshal Asim Munir and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif are reported to have played pivotal roles. They are also now frantically trying to save the ceasefire.

Pakistan's centrality to the negotiated two-week truce has thrust the country under a flattering spotlight, quite different from its other image as the address of most internationally-sanctioned terrorist entities. 

Pakistan's moment

All this was only a year after Operation Sindoor, India's response to the terrorist atrocity at Pahalgam. Delhi said then it had established a “new normal” in dealing with cross-border terrorism through its military response, which escalated from the previous ones after the Uri attack in 2016 and the Pulwama bombing in 2019. Henceforth, India said, every act of terror on its territory would be considered an act of war by Pakistan.

“Terrorists will not be treated as proxies,” Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar said in Parliament. After the ceasefire, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that the operation had only been paused. The Indus Waters Treaty continues to remain in “abeyance”.

Pakistan's emergence, at least for now, as the new good boy of the region can be traced back to that moment on May 10 last year, when its civilian and military leaders welcomed Trump's claim that he had brokered the ceasefire after four days of hostilities, while India denied it. Trump took a shine to Munir, and the rest is well-documented.

Pakistan's new visibility is a 180-degree turn from its notoriety for nearly three decades as the “terror factory” of the world. It has engaged in high-wire diplomatic missions as a mediator in the past, notably as the go-between for the US-China detente of 1972. But this time, its task was more delicate, given the number of players involved, and Trump's desperation for a “victory” against Iran, and Iran's extraordinary determination to hang in.

Irrespective of whether it was acting as Trump's front office or China's or for itself, the ceasefire is a huge diplomatic milestone for Pakistan. According to a report in Dawn, Prime Minister Sharif and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar spoke with more than a dozen world leaders and senior officials in Washington, Moscow, Beijing, key European capitals, Gulf Cooperation Council states, Turkey and Egypt, in an effort to build consensus around a limited ceasefire as a projected first step before negotiations. The foreign ministers of Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia met in Islamabad last week as the mediation efforts gathered pace.

Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, and Trump both thanked Pakistan. In a tweet on April 4 in which he clarified Pakistan’s role in English, with a reel of Iranians holding “Pakistan Shukriya” banners, Araghchi appended the phrase “Pakistan Zindabad” in the Nastaliq script.

Several reports describe Munir, Pakistan's de facto ruler, as playing a key role in engaging with both Trump and Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, while maintaining contact with Iran's military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, ensuring that diplomatic channels between the two warring sides remained open.

For Pakistan, the domestic repercussions of the war were as important in its push for the ceasefire as the brownie points for its do-gooding. Aside from the economic shock of the war, the pact with Saudi hung over it like a shadow, threatening to draw it directly into a war in which it can take sides only at its own peril. Some, like the Pakistani analyst Ayesha Siddiqa, have argued that, in fact, Pakistan effectively used its mediation effort to side-step operationalising the defence agreement. Its Shia minority, comprising 20 percent of the total population, has been increasingly restive over the bombing of Iran. Pakistan and Iran share a 1000 km border.

“New normal” is new look Pakistan, not Op Sindoor

Over the last decade, the Modi government has counted the rebuilding of ties with Gulf countries, especially the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, as a huge achievement of its foreign policy. India needed these key members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on its side to counter Pakistan’s efforts to turn the grouping against Delhi over Kashmir.

At the same time, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were growing impatient with bailing out Pakistan from repeated financial crises. The two Gulf biggies did not see this as a zero-sum game, but in the Indian narrative, the two got linked causally to feed the delusion that Modi’s diplomacy had successfully sidelined Pakistan in the Gulf region.

This is why India reeled in shock when Pakistan signed a “mutual strategic defence agreement” with Saudi Arabia last year. During the current crisis, Pakistan's shuttle diplomacy, in addition to its nuclear weapons, has added to its stature in the Islamic world, though its new global profile is clearly dependent on Trump's pleasure. What this means is that if the world had little appetite for Delhi's “new normal” doctrine at the time of Operation Sindoor, it would have even less now.

Pakistan's peace-maker effects are bound to be felt in the immediate neighbourhood too, where Delhi has often projected its nuclear equal as a threat to regional stability and the main obstacle to the functioning of SAARC. But it will be harder to get them to endorse this view from Delhi.

In its statement welcoming the ceasefire, Bangladesh did not name Pakistan or China but said it “appreciates all parties involved in the diplomatic efforts”. Like Nepal, which also said it was supportive of “all efforts by the international community” aimed at promoting peace and stability in West Asia. The Indian statement also expressed hope that the ceasefire would lead to lasting peace in the region, but stood out for steering clear of any reference to the diplomatic efforts by other countries that secured the reprieve.

Indian space shrink

In Delhi, the bizarre efforts to downplay, even denigrate Pakistan's role, only showed up India's own lack of voice in the fast-changing geopolitics of its extended region. The remark by External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar that India could not act as a “dalal nation”, that is, play the role of a broker between countries, revealed how badly trapped India's foreign policy is in domestic considerations.

“We don’t run around asking countries what kind of brokerage (dalali) we can do,” Mr Jaishankar reportedly said. But he did not say that about Oman, which was also involved in a significant mediatory role until just hours before the US-Israeli attacks on Iran.

After the news broke of the ceasefire, several Indian media organisations pounced on Trump's remark that China was responsible for bringing Iran to the table. It says something about India's current state of mind that it can countenance a Chinese “brokered” ceasefire, and use it to downplay Pakistani “dalaali”.

The reality is that while China quietly deployed its vast diplomatic resources in the Gulf region and Iran, and sent a special envoy to the region, it complemented and supported Pakistan's efforts and also teamed up with Islamabad to put forward a joint initial five-point initiative for restoring peace and stability.

The combined Pakistani-Chinese effort should in fact worry India more. It underlines the shrinking strategic space of a country once considered a leading voice in the region, one that also spoke for many nations in the developing world, but not heard from in the current crisis. Even now, it is not too late for India to recognise the changing regional environment.

India needs a new Pak policy

For a start, it could thank Pakistan by name for its long slog to prevent a publicly threatened genocide by Trump earlier this week, even though the success of its effort is not yet guaranteed, and failure looms on the horizon. Even if the efforts fail, as they well might given Israel's continuing belligerence, Munir has won already. His hold on Pakistan was cemented after Operation Sindoor. His success as a global “peace-maker” could even make him popular at home.

Delhi needs to get out of its current groupthink on Pakistan. It must ask itself how Munir might wield his new found role as a global diplomat. Will he make use of it to focus international attention, specifically Trump’s, on Kashmir next? This means that India urgently needs a new template for its Pakistan policy. Operation Sindoor and its promise of 'forever war' is so last year.

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