By Uzma Ehtasham
There is an old saying in the bazaars of Lahore that a good neighbor is one who knows when to stay silent. However, what happens when the neighbor learns not just silence, but the art of the strategic whisper? That, in essence, is the question now haunting the high rises of South Block in New Delhi. For months, the Modi government has operated on a simple premise: that Pakistan, wracked by economic tremors and political spasms, could be rendered a pariah, a shout in a crowded room that everyone had learned to ignore. But a shout is one thing. A whisper that carries from Tehran to Washington, with a layover in Islamabad, is quite another.
The recent US-Iran talks hosted in Pakistan’s capital have done more than raise eyebrows. They have cracked the façade of India’s regional dominance wide open. And it is not just foreign observers who have noticed. The loudest, most searing indictment has come from within India’s own political bloodstream. When Jairam Ramesh, the Congress party’s general secretary, rises to accuse his own government of strategic incoherence and a poverty of genuine diplomatic depth, you know the fault line is not merely superficial. It is tectonic.
Let us sit with Mr Ramesh’s words for a moment, because they carry the weight of a man who has watched his country fumble an open goal. He spoke of humiliation so profound that it should make the government sink with shame. That is not the language of routine opposition bickering. That is the language of a patriot watching a ship steer itself onto the rocks while the captain insists he knows the way. What stings most, according to Mr Ramesh, is that New Delhi tried everything to sabotage Pakistan’s role as the venue for these talks. It lobbied, it leaned, it whispered its own dark warnings into Washington’s ear. And still, Islamabad emerged not diminished, but enhanced. The world saw a Pakistan that could hold the hand of the Islamic Republic and the superpower in the same room. That is not the work of a spoiler. That is the work of a statesman.
Mr Ramesh went further, and this is where his indictment becomes a mirror. He accused the Modi government of being blinded by a visceral hostility not just toward Pakistan, but toward Islam itself. Those are dangerous words to utter in a country where the ruling party has made Hindu nationalism its creed. But they are not merely provocative. They are diagnostic. For years, India’s West Asia policy has been a contradiction: eager to buy oil, desperate to court investment, yet unwilling to extend the basic diplomatic grace of understanding the region’s spiritual architecture. You cannot, as Mr Ramesh implied, spend your mornings blessing arms sales to Israel and your afternoons praying for stability in Tehran. The region sees the hypocrisy. And it has begun to act accordingly.
What the Congress leader described is a war psychosis, a state of permanent aggression that has left New Delhi not safer but more isolated. India, he argued, has launched no initiative for regional peace. It has squandered its BRICS platform. It has reduced its foreign policy to a single, obsessive note: harm Pakistan. And in that obsession, it has wrecked the peace of an entire neighborhood. The false-flag operations, the covert chatter, the relentless diplomatic lobbying to blacklist its neighbor—all of it has produced the opposite of its intended effect. Pakistan, refusing to be provoked, has stood its ground with a blend of restraint and sagacity that has, against all odds, made it the more responsible adult in the room.
Let us not romanticize this. Pakistan is no paradise of stability. Its economy has spent years on life support. Its politics are a theatre of perpetual crisis. But there is something quietly remarkable about a nation that, when pushed to the brink of war last year, chose not to bite the hook. India raised the temperature to near boiling. Pakistan opened a window. And the world noticed. Today, the global perception has shifted not because Pakistan has become perfect, but because it has become predictable in the best sense: conflict-averse, strategically patient, and unexpectedly reliable.
That leaves India in an unaccustomed pose. For decades, it was Pakistan that struggled to be heard, that fought against the label of instability. Now the labels have begun to swap owners. India’s aggression, its treatment of minorities, its suffocation of occupied Kashmir—these are no longer side issues. They are central to any honest assessment of who threatens the peace. The world’s human rights organizations, so often silent when the violator is a rising economic power, must now stir themselves. Justice in Kashmir is not a bilateral matter. It is a test of the international community’s conscience.
What, then, is to be done? For Pakistan, the answer is clear but arduous. The diplomatic capital it has earned must be converted into domestic currency. Economic revival, national cohesion, internal stability—these are the foundations upon which global respect is made durable. A country that can host US-Iran talks must also be a country where its own citizens feel the warmth of a functioning state. That is the next, harder challenge.
For India, the path is steeper. It requires an admission that its current trajectory leads not to greatness but to a gilded loneliness. It requires seeing Pakistan not as an obstacle to be removed, but as a neighbor to be lived with. War solves nothing. It never has. The only sustainable peace is built on justice, tolerance, and the quiet, unglamorous work of mutual respect. That work begins not in Islamabad or New Delhi, but in the honest recognition that a rising tide of hostility drowns everyone. The Congress party has held up the mirror. The question now is whether anyone in power has the courage to look.
(The writer is a public health professional, journalist, and possesses expertise in health communication, having keen interest in national and international affairs, can be reached at uzma@metro-morning.com)
