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South Asia rarely knows what to do with a moment that is not zero-sum.

In a region as combustible as ours, that should be an obvious truth. Yet South Asia has long been trapped in the habit of reading every move through a zero-sum lens. That is why India should look more carefully at the Islamabad process and what its success could mean for the region.

Pakistan’s role in facilitating a ceasefire and hosting the U.S.-Iran talks has already altered the regional conversation, even if the diplomacy remains fragile and incomplete. Pakistan’s foreign ministry has publicly described its role as helping facilitate engagement after peace efforts that led to the U.S.-Iran ceasefire, and Pakistani officials have said they remain committed to keeping both sides talking. Reuters, AP and other international outlets have likewise reported Pakistan’s central mediating role, even as the next round of talks remains uncertain.

In India, the reaction has been mixed: official restraint, quiet discomfort, and in some quarters, a familiar instinct to dismiss Pakistan’s relevance. Indian media itself has noted “disquiet in Delhi,” while The Wire observed that New Delhi welcomed the ceasefire but did so without naming Pakistan as mediator. At the same time, India’s Ministry of External Affairs has publicly reiterated that it welcomes all developments that lead to peace and stability in West Asia and continues to follow the situation closely.

But this is precisely the wrong moment for old reflexes. India does not have to applaud Pakistan. It does not have to romanticise Pakistan’s motives. States do not mediate out of charity. They mediate because conflict at scale threatens their interests, their economy, their security, and their place in the region. Pakistan is no different. Yet that is exactly why India should want the Islamabad process to work.

For perhaps the first time in a while, Pakistan’s diplomatic success in this theatre would not be a zero-sum loss for India. It would be India’s gain too. And the region’s.

Strategic stability in West Asia is not a Pakistani interest alone. It is an Indian necessity

India has enormous stakes in the Gulf and wider West Asia: energy flows, maritime trade, shipping insurance costs, diaspora security, and domestic economic stability. The Strait of Hormuz remains the critical choke point in this picture, with AP noting that roughly a fifth of global oil shipments move through it. India’s own foreign ministry, in welcoming the ceasefire, underlined the importance of unimpeded freedom of navigation and the global flow of commerce through Hormuz. Indian officials also confirmed that the conflict had already forced large-scale assistance for Indian nationals leaving Iran.

So this is not somebody else’s war. Nor is it somebody else’s diplomacy. If the Islamabad process reduces even a fraction of the risk of renewed fighting, it serves a core Indian interest. It eases pressure on energy markets, lowers the temperature around shipping lanes, and reduces the chance that India will once again have to scramble to protect its citizens and economic lifelines from a crisis not of its making. That alone should be enough to displace the temptation to sneer from the sidelines.

A functioning channel in the region is better than a vacuum.

What matters here is not the optics but the choice. At a moment of consequence, both Washington and Tehran were willing to work through Pakistan. That does not confer exceptionalism, but it does indicate that Pakistan was, at the very least, seen as credible and connected enough to facilitate contact.

India should understand the value of that, not resent it. In a fragmented regional order, communication channels are strategic assets. They create off-ramps. They buy time. They slow down miscalculation. Even failed talks can be useful if they prevent total diplomatic collapse.

South Asia knows this too well. Crises become dangerous not only because states are aggressive, but because they become trapped in spirals of signalling, pride and domestic posturing. In game-theoretic terms, this begins to resemble a prisoner’s dilemma: each side, fearing exploitation by the other, chooses confrontation over cooperation, even when both would be better off with restraint. The result is a jointly suboptimal outcome: higher insecurity, higher costs, lower room for manoeuvre.

That logic does not stop at the India-Pakistan border. It operates across the region. If the Islamabad process helps preserve a channel between the U.S. and Iran, it interrupts exactly that self-defeating logic. It tells the region that even adversaries can be brought back into a room before escalation becomes irreversible. For India, that should not be an uncomfortable lesson. It should be a welcome one.

A region in crisis gains more from a stabilising Pakistan than from India’s preferred fiction of Pakistani irrelevance

This point may be the hardest for some in India to accept, because it requires abandoning a deeply ingrained habit: treating Pakistan’s external relevance as inherently threatening. It is not always so.

A Pakistan that sees diplomatic utility in stabilising its wider neighbourhood is not acting against India by definition. On the contrary, it is acting on a view of regional order that India should also find attractive: fewer open fronts, fewer cascading crises, more room for trade, energy security, and political management. Pakistan’s own public messaging around the talks has stressed durable peace, continued ceasefire, and prosperity “for the entire region and beyond.”

Of course, skepticism is fair. Pakistan and India remain adversaries, and the May 2025 war is too recent for easy language about trust. The relationship now carries the weight of fresh escalation, public bitterness and the sobering reminder that in South Asia, crises no longer unfold slowly enough to be managed by habit alone. None of that vanishes because Islamabad hosted talks between Washington and Tehran. But serious statecraft demands the ability to distinguish between rivalry and self-harm. If an adversary’s diplomatic success lowers the risk of wider conflict, protects sea lanes, stabilises energy flows, and restores some value to dialogue over coercion, then resisting it is out of reflex and reflex is costly.

In fact, one of the tragedies of South Asian statecraft has been the persistence of zero-sum thinking in situations that are plainly not zero-sum. Not every Pakistani gain is an Indian loss. Not every Indian move must be interpreted in Islamabad as encirclement. Sometimes the region faces a common strategic test, and the rational response is to judge outcomes, not flags.

This is one of those moments.

India can continue to understate Pakistan’s role if it wishes. Diplomacy often works through omission as much as declaration. But understatement should not become misreading. The larger point is not whether Pakistan deserves applause. The larger point is whether the process it is facilitating serves Indian interests.

Because if the Islamabad process holds, even imperfectly, India gets a less combustible West Asia, safer trade routes, lower energy anxiety, and a demonstration that dialogue still has utility in an age of maximalism. And if it fails, the costs will not stop at Pakistan’s doorstep.

The region is too interconnected now for smugness. Strategic stability is indivisible. A fire contained in one theatre is a relief for all its neighbours.

Pakistan may have entered this process for its own reasons. States always do. But that does not make the outcome parochial. In this case, Pakistan’s win would also be India’s win, and the region’s win, because what is being defended is not prestige. It is the possibility that diplomacy can still outrun catastrophe.

Rabia Akhtar is Dean Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Lahore. She is a Visiting Scholar at Managing the Atom, Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School.

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