Doha, Qatar – Thumping his fist on a lectern, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued a direct challenge to the leaders of Pakistan.
“India has been successful in isolating you, and we will intensify those efforts,” he said, addressing a large rally of supporters in the southern Indian state of Kerala, as dusk set in. “We will make sure that you are isolated around the world.”
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It was September 2016, and Modi was responding to an attack by armed fighters in Indian-administered Kashmir days earlier, in which 18 Indian soldiers had been killed. “The leaders of Pakistan should listen: The sacrifice of our 18 soldiers will not go in vain,” the Indian leader said.
Yet a decade later, Pakistan stands far from isolated: It is a close strategic ally of China, where the Pakistani prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, visited this week, and has reemerged as a trusted partner of the United States under President Donald Trump.
Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir and Sharif have both visited Trump at the White House over the past year. Islamabad is the principal mediator between the US and Iran amid their ongoing war. Trump has also frequently praised the Pakistani leadership.
In part, say analysts, that’s a reflection of Pakistan’s success in wooing Trump, and in capitalising on key geopolitical events to make itself an important diplomatic player for superpowers and regional players alike. But equally, say analysts, Pakistan’s growing diplomatic stature underscores missteps by Modi’s administration.
“Certainly, India’s strategy of undercutting and indeed isolating Pakistan, regionally and globally, has backfired in a big way,” Michael Kugelman, a senior fellow on South Asia at the Atlantic Council think tank, told Al Jazeera.
The ceasefire and the Nobel nomination
On May 10, 2025, Trump announced that he had secured a ceasefire between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan.
“After a long night of talks mediated by the United States, I am pleased to announce that India and Pakistan have agreed to a FULL AND IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE,” he posted on his Truth Social platform.
Shortly after, Sharif, the Pakistani PM, thanked Trump’s “leadership and proactive role” in securing the truce that ended four days of intense fighting involving ballistic missiles, fighter jets and drones. It was the worst fighting between India and Pakistan in decades: Dozens of people were killed on both sides of their heavily militarised border.
The conflict erupted after the Indian military carried out attacks on “terror” sites deep inside Pakistani territory, in response to an attack by gunmen who killed 26 tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir.
But unlike Sharif, Modi, who had cultivated a personal rapport with the US president – whom he had met just months earlier in the Oval Office – chose to remain silent, even as India’s foreign secretary confirmed the ceasefire.
Days later, the US president offered to work with the two arch foes to find a solution to the Kashmir issue, which has defined India-Pakistan relations since 1947, the year the two South Asian nations achieved independence from British colonial rule.
For India, Trump’s attempts to portray himself as a peacemaker between New Delhi and Islamabad were troubling: India has long insisted that its disputes with its neighbour were strictly bilateral, for the two countries to resolve among themselves – though US former President Bill Clinton had played a role in ending the 1999 Kargil War.
In June, Modi was visiting Canada when Trump asked him to also fly over to Washington. Modi turned down the offer. He instead told the US president over the phone that New Delhi wouldn’t accept third-party mediation, and that the ceasefire in May was solely the result of bilateral conversations with Pakistan.
Yet that tit-for-tat spiral of claims around the May truce continued. Trump has since insisted on more than 30 occasions that he brokered the ceasefire between India and Pakistan. He has claimed that he averted a nuclear war that could have killed millions. The US president also asserted that Indian fighter jets were shot down on the first day of the conflict, echoing the Pakistani narrative of downing several Indian planes.
New Delhi also failed to convince the international community on Pakistan’s role in the attack that triggered the May 2025 fighting in the first place, analysts say.
“The world did not step back and encourage India to carry out strikes… World capitals noted that India did not provide proof of any Pakistani complicity in the Pahalgam attack,” Kugelman of the Atlantic Council said, referring to the scenic town in Indian-administered Kashmir where tourists were shot. Pakistan, he said, appeared to have won “the global battle of narratives”.
“The fact that Pakistan was able to hold its own in a conflict and shoot down several Indian jets … that’s something that got a lot of attention around the world, including in the White House,” he added.
New Delhi’s silence on the downing of the jets for almost three weeks further gave impetus to that perception. The country’s top general eventually acknowledged that several fighter planes were shot down by Pakistan, though India has never confirmed the number.
Analysts say Modi’s refusal to give credit to the US president for the truce strained US-India ties.
Pakistan, on the other hand, promptly acknowledged Trump’s efforts in achieving the truce and even nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize – an award the US president has said he deserved.
Trump, who had accused Pakistan of “deceit and lies” during his first term, has since repeatedly praised Pakistani leadership, including army chief Asim Munir who led the war efforts against India.
And to India’s dismay, Trump invited Munir to the White House for lunch – the first time that a Pakistani military chief who was not also president had been hosted by a US president. Trump has described Munir as his “favourite Field Marshal” and an “exceptional human being” – even as New Delhi portrays the Pakistani military chief as an architect of “terrorism” against India.
‘Terror and talks cannot go together’
For decades, the Indian government had followed a doctrine of “strategic restraint” with Pakistan.
As India opened its economy in the 1990s, it projected itself as a responsible rising power focused on economic issues. It used diplomacy and its rising economic profile to pressure Pakistan, with India eager to avoid an all-out war between the two nuclear-armed countries.
It was this doctrine that made India, under the Congress party-led government, refrain from attacking Pakistan in response to the 2008 Mumbai attacks. But Modi’s Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had, while in opposition, lambasted the Congress for that restraint.
Once in power, though, Modi too initially tried to engage Pakistan, invited then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to his inauguration and visited Lahore for the wedding of Sharif’s granddaughter.
But New Delhi recalibrated its approach after major armed attacks it blamed on Pakistan – starting with the 2016 one that prompted Modi to make the comments on isolating the country.
“Terror and talks cannot go together” became the Modi government’s mantra.
Instead, it lowered the threshold for a military response to attacks by armed groups that it accused Pakistan of backing. After the 2016 attacks, the Indian army carried out a raid inside Pakistan-administered Kashmir against what it claimed were camps used by armed groups to launch attacks against India.
Then, in 2019, Indian fighter jets carried out attacks in Pakistan’s Balakot after 40 Indian soldiers were killed in Indian-administered Kashmir’s Pulwama district – the response going beyond the actions of 2016.
For many years, India’s hardline stance against Pakistan appeared to be working, including during Trump’s first term and under the Joe Biden administration. Modi was frequently in Washington. Trump and Biden both visited India, while neither travelled to Pakistan.
In the wake of last year’s military conflict, those equations began to change.
More than 20 years of strategic ties between Washington and New Delhi were already strained by Trump’s tariff war, during which India was slapped with the highest levy in the world.
The tariffs have since come down amid trade negotiations. But the tensions linger.
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited India this week, he attended an event at the US Embassy to celebrate the US’s 250th Independence Day in New Delhi. Trump called in and said he “loves India, loves Modi”.
But Trump’s administration has continued to pressure India on trade.
On May 23, Rubio posted on X, saying India had committed to buying $500bn in US goods over the next five years, at a time when New Delhi’s foreign reserves have dropped. Moreover, Rubio justified Trump’s tariffs on India, citing their trade imbalance – India sells the US more than it buys from it.
In India, Rubio was also asked questions by journalists about the shadow of US relations with Pakistan over Washington’s ties with New Delhi. Rubio said he did not view US relations with “any country in the world as coming at the expense of our strategic alliance with India”.
India’s attempts to isolate Pakistan, though, have come at the expense of South Asia’s regional integration – even as broader shifts in New Delhi’s foreign and domestic policies have weakened its stature compared with its neighbour.
Setbacks and shifts
As Modi took the oath as prime minister for the first time in May 2014, his audience included leaders from across South Asia. The Indian leader described his foreign policy as one built on the concept of “neighbourhood first”.
But two years later, after the 2016 attack in which Indian soldiers were killed, Modi’s government announced that it would boycott a summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) because Islamabad was the host.
The summit was cancelled. And South Asia’s premier grouping has not held a meeting of its leaders since then. Instead, India has tried to promote BIMSTEC, a grouping of South Asian and Southeast Asian nations excluding Pakistan, which has struggled to grow into a powerful platform.
“India effectively abandoned SAARC in the pursuit of isolating Pakistan,” Ishtiaq Ahmad, professor emeritus of international relations at Islamabad’s Quaid-i-Azam University, said.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s diplomatic ties with Bangladesh have improved dramatically following the ouster of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who was seen as close to India.
Pakistan’s ties with China – the two have long been staunch strategic partners – further came to the fore during last year’s conflict. Pakistan used Chinese missile defence systems and jets.
Earlier this week, Chinese President Xi Jinping praised Beijing’s “unbreakable” ties with Pakistan during PM Sharif’s trip.
But India under Modi hasn’t only abandoned SAARC: Some analysts say New Delhi has also drifted away from its policy of strategic autonomy – that is, to work with all regional and global powers, while not getting pulled into any nation’s orbit.
Since the early 1960s, India led what came to be known as the Non-Aligned Movement – a grouping of 120 newly decolonised nations that chose not to join either the US- or Soviet Union-led alliances. Whether wars or sanctions, India only backed actions that were approved by the United Nations against other countries.
“In the past decade, India, owing to its economic potential, has become more self-assured and ambitious on the global stage, shifting from a balanced, largely non-aligned foreign policy” to a more “transactional” approach, Praveen Donthi, a senior analyst at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera.
The first signs of a break with that policy emerged under Modi’s predecessor, the Congress Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In 2013, as the Obama administration pushed countries to stop buying Iranian oil in a bid to pressure Tehran amid nuclear negotiations, India cut down its purchase of crude from Iran.
But after Trump imposed his “maximum pressure” sanctions against Iran in 2018, the Modi government completely stopped buying Iranian oil.
“These sanctions do not just harm India’s economy. They also seek to bend India’s foreign policy to another’s will, and are a blow to its proudly tenets of strategic autonomy,” Suhasini Haider, the diplomatic editor of The Hindu newspaper, one of India’s most respected publications, wrote on April 22.
Israel and Islamophobia
India has also shifted its position on the Israel-Palestine issue.
New Delhi was the first non-Arab capital to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the representative of the Palestinian people in 1974, and among the first in the world to recognise Palestinian statehood in 1988.
India established diplomatic ties with Israel only in 1992, though it had pursued clandestine cooperation, especially in security and defence, for several years before.
For two decades after the Cold War, it slowly built ties with Israel, but balanced that with firm and vocal support for the Palestinian cause.
Yet under Modi, India has become one of Israel’s closest allies – its largest weapons buyer. New Delhi has increasingly been abstaining from UN resolutions critical of Israel. At a summit of the BRICS grouping last month, it tried to dilute language on the Israel-Palestine conflict, a break from its historical position on the so-called two-state solution. It has not condemned the genocide in Gaza even once.
Just two days before the US and Israel launched their war on Iran in late February, Modi travelled to Israel. This came at a time when Israel is increasingly seen as a regional hegemon in the Middle East. India’s opposition parties called the trip “ill-timed”, as they argued it would show India as a partisan player in the region, which is the main source for its energy imports.
“The Iran war put India in a difficult position due to its growing ties with Israel,” Donthi said.
That public alignment with Israel under Modi, who has called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu his friend, despite an ICC arrest warrant, has complicated its standing with Gulf states, at precisely the moment Pakistan has deepened its security partnerships with the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
Amid Israel’s multiple wars – on Gaza and in the occupied West Bank, in Lebanon and on Iran, and its bombing of Qatar and Syria – Gulf nations have increasingly looked beyond their traditional reliance on a US security umbrella.
Last September, Saudi Arabia announced a mutual defence pact with Pakistan – the only Muslim nation with a nuclear weapon. Some reports have suggested that other Gulf nations and Turkiye – one of the most powerful militaries in the region – might also consider joining the Saudi-Pakistan defence agreement.
And last May’s war strengthened Pakistan’s image as a credible security provider: Demands for Pakistani fighter jets have since surged, while Chinese defence equipment has attracted the world’s attention.
Over in India, in the meantime, the Modi government’s increasingly aggressive anti-Muslim policies have amplified tensions with a range of its neighbours, from Bangladesh to the Maldives, and led to occasional rebukes from Gulf nations.
In May 2022, BJP then-spokeswoman Nupur Sharma made derogatory remarks against Prophet Muhammad, prompting outrage across the Gulf region, where Indian envoys were summoned and public condemnations were issued. The BJP sidelined Sharma after the incident to calm anger across the Muslim world.
Since Modi came to power in 2014, lynchings of Muslims, demolition of mosques, state-led disenfranchisement, and clampdown on Muslim worshippers and festivals have dominated the headlines. Rights groups and watchdogs have raised concerns about the increasing abuse of minorities in India.
Pakistan seized on these anti-Muslim attacks to build its case against India. Under former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, Islamabad highlighted rising anti-Muslim rhetoric globally, including in India, at the UN. It led the campaign in coordination with the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to press the UN to declare March 15 as the International Day to Combat Islamophobia.
Pakistan woos Trump
Since Trump’s return to power in January 2025, Pakistan has wooed his administration with deals on critical minerals and crypto mining.
Last July, Pakistan signed a deal to supply rare earth elements – critical for emerging technologies but largely controlled by China – to the US. A US firm plans to invest $500m in Pakistani minerals.
In September 2025, army chief Munir, along with Pakistani Prime Minister Sharif, met Trump in the Oval Office. The Pakistani army chief was also invited to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Miami last December.
Masood Khan, former Pakistani envoy to the UN, said Islamabad has gained enormous ground in Washington in the past year, especially after the May war, because of its “astute diplomacy”.
“This bonhomie [between Trump and Asim Munir] was buttressed by agreements on critical minerals and cryptocurrency,” he told Al Jazeera.
For Pakistan, that “bonhomie” has helped break years of distrust that emerged from accusations in Washington that it played both sides during the so-called “war on terror”. After the September 11 attacks, Pakistan, under then-President Pervez Musharraf, was a key partner of the US in the war on Afghanistan.
But Islamabad was also accused of continuing to shelter and support the Afghan Taliban fighters. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was found and killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011 – an episode that deepened suspicions in the US about Islamabad.
Through that period, India – spanning multiple governments – accused Pakistan of being behind the armed rebellion against New Delhi’s rule in Indian-administered Kashmir, and tried to portray that uprising as a religious war linked to global “terror” organisations such as al-Qaeda.
For nearly two decades, India built a credible international case against Pakistan. Successive Indian governments tried to corner Pakistan at multilateral forums, including the UN, and pushed for scrutiny of Islamabad’s alleged “terror” funding. India amplified those efforts after the 2008 Mumbai attacks that left at least 165 people dead.
Islamabad faced global scrutiny over its links to armed groups and suffered reputational damage. Pakistan’s own security broke down as it faced blowback from armed groups. Investments dried up, global capitals issued travel warnings and sporting events were cancelled, isolating Pakistan – just as India wanted.
But “India assumed its post-9/11 narrative on Pakistan had become permanent,” Ahmad, from Quaid-i-Azam University, told Al Jazeera.
Instead, he said, Islamabad quietly began to rebuild its credibility, including by targeting leaders and financing of armed groups.
“It learned painfully from decades of extremist blowback, while increasingly repositioning itself around diplomacy, connectivity and economic integration rather than ideological confrontation,” he said.
Now, he said, Pakistan was “increasingly viewed as a country shaping regional outcomes rather than merely reacting to crises”.
“Pakistan is one of the few countries able to simultaneously engage Washington, Tehran, Riyadh and Beijing with credibility, which makes its current position far more sustainable than the post-9/11 moment,” he said.
Recent signs indicate India appears to be recognising the limitations of its approach: Reports suggest that ex-army generals and retired diplomats from both countries have met twice in the past three months.
A senior leader from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological mothership of Modi’s ruling BJP, has advocated for restarting dialogue with Pakistan – and former Indian army chief Manoj Mukund Naravane has backed that proposal.
Meanwhile, India has been trying to revive its critical relationship with the US, which has sputtered over the past year. Rubio’s visit to India, his first since taking charge as Trump’s top diplomat in January 2025, was a step aimed at that reset.
India-US tensions
But Rubio isn’t the big prize India has been hoping to host. During the same phone call with Trump in June 2025, when Modi insisted that the India-Pakistan ceasefire had been brokered bilaterally, the Indian leader invited the US president to visit New Delhi.
Almost a year later, Trump is yet to visit, even though he travelled to China last week and has said he would be ready to fly to Pakistan to sign a potential peace agreement with Iran.
It wasn’t always this way.
Over a quarter century, four US presidents: George W Bush, Barack Obama, Trump himself, and Joe Biden, oversaw a flourishing relationship with India. Washington saw India, a fast-growing economy of a billion-plus people, as a counterweight to rising China. All four US presidents visited India; Obama came twice. By contrast, no US president since Bush has visited Pakistan.
As a part of their converging interest in balancing China, the leaders of India and the US deepened the strategic partnership between their nations. India, historically dependent on Russia for the bulk of its weapons systems, increasingly started buying jets, missiles and other weapons from the US and its Western allies.
The US and India also joined hands with Japan and Australia to form the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, with the unstated but thinly veiled goal of containing China’s expanding footprint in the Asia Pacific region.
But since Trump’s return to power in his second term, he has focused much less on Asia. Vijay Gokhale, Indian former foreign secretary, wrote in The Times of India newspaper on May 13 that the US was losing interest in the Quad. A summit of the grouping’s leaders, for which Modi had invited Trump, was never held in 2025, and it is unclear when it will be held next – though Rubio attended a meeting of Quad foreign ministers while in New Delhi.
“India, it appears, does not geographically fit into the Trump administration’s evolving Indo-Pacific strategy. It has, likely, concluded that New Delhi is reluctant, and also lacks capacity to bear greater responsibility for security in the western Pacific. It’s readying alternatives,” wrote Gokhale.
Instead of Asia, Trump, in his second term, has invested most of his energy in a tariff war that has rocked global trade; an anti-immigration policy to cater to his MAGA base; and military operations against Venezuela and Iran.
Some experts say Modi’s refusal to give credit to the US president for the truce with Pakistan last year soured ties between them – they had previously twice attended rallies together, once in Houston, Texas, and then in Ahmedabad, India.
Trump has also accused India of protectionism, pressured New Delhi to stop buying cheap Russian crude oil and refused to extend a sanctions waiver for a major Indian port project in Iran. His administration has shut down the H-1B visa programme that disproportionately benefitted Indian IT professionals. And sections of Trump’s MAGA movement have increasingly turned to openly racist commentary against Indians.
‘Not over’
Still, say analysts, there is no guarantee that the current state of US ties with either India or Pakistan will last.
“Whether this diplomatic resurgence can translate into a broader reset in US-Pakistan relations that extends beyond the current administration and marks the beginning of a new chapter in how Pakistan is viewed in Washington is far less certain,” wrote journalist Ailia Zehra in The National Interest publication in early May.
Sreeram Chaulia, dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs, based in Sonipat, north of New Delhi, said India-US ties had suffered a setback but argued they could bounce back.
“The US-India strategic partnership is at its lowest point, but it doesn’t mean the partnership itself is over,” he told Al Jazeera. Bilateral trade, he pointed out, has crossed $200bn. India, he said, had joined Pax Silica, “a major US initiative to counter China’s dominance of semiconductors and critical minerals crucial for defence and AI”.
India announced a critical minerals framework among the Quad countries during Rubio’s recent trip.
From the economy to military exercises to intelligence sharing, the two nations remained close partners, he said.
“So, I would say parts of the US-India strategic partnership are going to continue to flourish, but not the full partnership as long as Trump is in power,” he said.
Chaulia also rejected suggestions that the US had re-hyphenated India and Pakistan – in essence, dealing with each through the lens of the India-Pakistan relationship.
“I don’t think the American system sees Pakistan as a peer equal of India,” Chaulia said, pointing out India is a fast-growing economy as opposed to Pakistan’s economic struggles.
US companies, Chaulia noted, had poured billions of dollars into the Indian economy; by contrast, he argued, US investment in Pakistan was negligible.
The way forward
Yet the central thorn in the India-Pakistan relationship, which periodically explodes into armed conflict between the neighbours, remains unresolved.
Mohamad Junaid, an associate professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, said the future of Kashmir was critical to settling India-Pakistan tensions.
“For Kashmiris, the goal will be to meet demilitarisation, increase in political freedoms, economic freedoms, and avoid being subject to violence and oppressive laws,” he said.
Kashmir is one of the most militarised regions in the world, with more than 750,000 Indian soldiers stationed in the picturesque Himalayan region. More than 60,000 people, most of them Kashmiri civilians, have been killed in the decades-old conflict. Rights groups have accused Indian forces of carrying out rights abuses against Kashmiris.
In 2019, the Modi government scrapped a constitutional provision that had hitherto given Kashmir a semi-autonomous status. Indian-administered Kashmir was split into two, and its statehood was taken away, placing it under the direct control of New Delhi.
“What is India getting from keeping Kashmir under the jackboot?” he asked.
Junaid said dialogue between India and Pakistan alone could resolve the future of Kashmir and the dispute between the two countries. At the moment, he said, “Kashmir is a powder keg.
“The security and prosperity of South Asia lies in mutual cooperation, toning down on hypernationalist rhetoric, deepening democratic culture, and recovering shared cultural and religious pluralism.
“That journey can begin in Kashmir, where a democratic resolution will create permanent peace in the subcontinent,” Junaid, who is of Kashmiri descent, added.
Achin Vanaik, a political scientist and activist, said India needed to “make a distinction between non-state actors and the official armed forces” of Pakistan. India, he argued, could seek punishment of specific armed groups through international mechanisms, such as the UN. Attacking Pakistan carried the risk of a dangerous escalation in a highly militarised nuclear region, he said.
He urged India and Pakistan to establish a 10km (6-mile) demilitarised zone on both sides of the de facto border (Line of Control), supervised by an international peacekeeping force.
Donthi from the ICG warned that new conflicts between the neighbours are inevitable unless they address their core disputes.
“The India-Pakistan relationship has long been hostage to domestic politics and is arguably at its lowest point,” he said. With China clearly backing Pakistan militarily, India can no longer “afford to view Pakistan only through a bilateral lens”, he added.
There’s only one way to break the cycle of attacks, war, and a diplomatic chill, suggested Donthi.
“India and Pakistan have to establish high-level back channels,” he said, “to begin addressing each other’s concerns and potential triggers of conflict.”
Additional reporting by Abid Hussain from Islamabad.
