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Pakistan policy must rest on positioning, not isolation

The key to negate Pakistan’s influence would be to make India’s already existing security and defence relations stronger

World leaders during the 26th Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit in Bishkek on September 1, 2026. (Photo: ANI via X/@narendramodi)

Written by: Udayan Das

4 min readSep 7, 2026 07:35 AM IST First published on: Sep 7, 2026 at 06:31 AM IST

The recent Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit offers a useful reminder of the limits of India’s efforts to isolate Pakistan at the global level. Pakistan assumed the rotational presidency of a multilateral organisation which has counter-terrorism at its heart. Is Pakistan undercutting India’s relations with other states? Is India adequately expanding ties with other states to counter this? Strategically speaking, India’s policies have the right objectives. Weakening Islamabad on the global stage, ensuring sanctions, and rallying condemnation are common playbooks of statecraft. Where it is going wrong is in assuming that it is easy to effectively isolate a state. Interests drive state policy more than morality does. States are far more likely to react to an issue that affects their interests directly. Therefore, Pakistan remains a bilateral problem for India, and other states share little overlapping concern with New Delhi.

States also make themselves useful to others despite their differences. Take, for instance, US relations with Pakistan in the post-Cold War era. Washington has been harsh on Islamabad on several occasions, particularly on the issue of terrorism, and aid has been granted, suspended, curtailed, and restarted repeatedly. Yet the Americans remained engaged with Pakistan, largely because of their interests in Afghanistan. Nor has the Iran war been the first time Pakistan mediated between states; recall the famed realignment of the US and China during the Cold War. Flexible diplomacy can align interests despite moral complaints, and for states, that matters more.

A strategy focused solely on isolating Pakistan will not prove efficient for India. A more effective strategy is to steadily strip it of its ability to limit India’s options. Consider the relationship between India and the US over the last two decades. Washington did not abandon its engagement with Islamabad, but its engagement with New Delhi grew across a wide range of issues, involving economic, security, and political convergences. The de-hyphenation of India and Pakistan took place during this period. The US was also seen as decisively favouring India when it came to South Asia because of its overarching regional interests. The key to negate Pakistan’s influence would be to make India’s already existing security and defence relations stronger. Donald Trump’s tenure so far has not been the best for India; however, the deep strategic ties over the last two decades allow some consistency and reliability for India-US relations. This includes the existing issues of the defence partnership, critical and emerging technologies, along with fronts like the 2+2 and the Quad.

Saudi Arabia, too, has a long history of relations with Pakistan, yet India was still able to develop consistent relations with it, owing to economic and strategic convergences. In both cases, India’s positioning rendered Pakistan’s equations with these states largely irrelevant.

Isolation does not happen in a vacuum, but in relative terms. If one wishes to isolate a rival, stronger positioning is the key. A measure of this is when other states do the de-hyphenation, choose to engage with you more, and find greater interest in siding with you in a crisis. If these boxes are ticked, the rival is already isolated, regardless of official statements. This strategy should extend in multilateral forums like SCO and BRICS where India’s relations with other states need to be aligned.

The writer teaches in the Department of Political Science, St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous), Kolkata and is a visiting fellow, Asian Confluence, Shillong