It is interesting that when a Chinese reporter during the Tsinghua University's World Peace Forum in Beijing asked India's ambassador to China on why New Delhi haven't tried to broker peace in West Asia the way Islamabad has done between Washington and Tehran, Vikram Doraiswami didn’t escape from the question. He responded with a number.

The economies of the two countries "will tell you a lot," he said on Saturday, after declaring earlier that he did not think the comparison, if he might be a little direct, with Pakistan is a little... a little unfair. The implication of this was that, as India shares a subcontinent with Pakistan and a troubled history with the country, it should be measured against Pakistan on the same yardstick, which was a rather crass way to end a debate that has quietly been irritating Indian diplomats for months.

Doraiswami was waving at some not so small numbers. India's economy is now valued somewhere between $4.5 trillion, based on the IMF's forecast on this year's economy, and Pakistan's economy at approximately $410 billion or eleven times India. India has been maintaining a growth of 6.5-7 per cent per year, whereas Pakistan, which is still under an IMF stabilisation programme, has been struggling to keep growth at 2.5-3.6 per cent. The picture is just as one-sided with foreign direct investment India received over $45 billion last year, Pakistan closer to $1.5 billion, or about 30 times more. Even on debt servicing, the two countries are in different worlds Pakistan's government spends a jaw-dropping portion of its revenue just servicing the debts and paying interest to IMF and other creditors; whereas India, despite its own fiscal constraints, has some scope to manoeuvre and wriggle, which Islamabad has not had for years.

That backdrop is important because Pakistan's diplomatic moment did not come out of strength. It grew out of a sense of nearness and necessity. On Feb. 28, Islamabad sat by as the U.S. and Israel launched their military attack against Iran, a war they could not afford to allow to spread. Pakistan has a border of almost a thousand kilometres with Iran, it has almost half of the world's Shia population, and it relies heavily on remittances from the nearly five million Pakistanis working across the Arab world: these remittances are equivalent to the entire export income of Pakistan. All of this was at risk at the same time in a regional conflagration. In that sense, mediation was more of an instinct of survival than a diplomatic goal.

It did, but only to a certain extent. Field Marshal Asim Munir's calls in the hours before Washington's April 8 deadline for an attack on Iran helped lead to a ceasefire. Days later, Islamabad was the venue of the first direct, high-level talks between American and Iranian officials since 1979, when US Vice President JD Vance visited Pakistan for the event. The talks, which lasted for about 21 hours, failed to resolve the main issues of Iran's nuclear programme and the Strait of Hormuz. Since then, Pakistani officials have been doing a lot of shuttle running between Washington and Tehran with Riyadh, Ankara and Cairo providing assistance in this regard, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has told his own parliament that the negotiations had almost collapsed several times but were kept alive largely due to Munir's perseverance.

The mediation has given Pakistan relevance and this is something tangible. Once a fragile, debt-ridden country paraded by international observers, it is now wooed by capitals once it was parried. The warmth is as much personal as strategic Donald Trump has said he had his “favourite field marshal” Munir at the White House in a way unheard of for a military chief who is not head of state, and Pakistan is one of the roughly eight wars that he says he has won. Britain's foreign secretary visited Islamabad for the first time in four years. France, Canada and Australia have all stepped up the involvement. None of this because Pakistan settled the Iran war, the ceasefire is not yet secure and the issues of enrichment and Hormuz are not yet resolved, but because it made itself indispensable as a conduit when there was no one else who could speak to both.

That last bit is what Indian officials continue to harp on, and it's the one thing that the Pakistan comparison really doesn't hold. Islamabad could be the key mediator, because it maintains good ties with Washington and Tehran and, importantly, can't lose enough to care. It has no American bases on its soil, no diplomatic ties with Israel, and its economy is very little to protect such that the calculus of its involvement in a great-power contest was manageable. India's situation in West Asia is near the opposite. It imports the bulk of its defence, and has high tech links with Israel, a $50-billion-plus energy and trade partnership with the Gulf, and an economy that is highly dependent on every increase in crude prices that emerge out of the Strait of Hormuz, and about nine million citizens deployed all over the region. New Delhi would have no more to gain from playing an intermediary role between Washington and Tehran than it would to have its own relations, which it has maintained smoothly for the past two decades, exposed.

Doraiswami, unlike most Indian officials do in public, made this point more starkly than most, highlighting that India's approach to the Iran conflict, like its approach in the Ukraine war, has been to be engaged, present but not to step forward to act as a broker of outcomes. That's not passivity. It is another confirmation from planners in Delhi and Beijing that to be a mediator in another party's war is fraught with risks and no rewards, especially in a “crowded field” of mediators. There is too an unspoken recollection that helped shape this restraint: for all his assertions of having done nothing wrong, Trump's assertion that he mediated the ceasefire between India and Pakistan after the two countries went to war briefly last May is still facing challenges in Delhi. India has never been party to framing and has announced, at the very highest level, that it does not wish for, nor does it accept, any third party mediation in matters it considers to be exclusively bilateral. The Pakistanis have merely reinforced this instinct and, if anything, it has not increased envy, but rather watching Pakistan lean into the mediator position with Washington's blessing.

None of this occurred in a vacuum unconnected with economics, and Doraiswami's journey to Beijing was illustrative in that regard. Just a day later, he was on a different committee at the same forum, advocating for greater market access in China putting a case to Beijing to open up its pharma, IT and agri markets to Indian exporters. The trade picture gives the motivation. Last fiscal year, China has emerged as India's biggest trading partner, surpassing the U.S. with bilateral trade totaling $151.1 billion. But the trade ratio is highly lop-sided: India's exports to China have increased a healthy 36.66 percent to $19.47 billion, but so has its imports, resulting in the trade deficit reaching an all-time high of $112.16 billion, compared with $99.2 billion the previous year. What India is, in effect, trying to do is to have two parallel conversations with Beijing, one on geopolitical restraint and joint caution on stepping in to mediate other people's wars and the other on how to correct a trade dynamic that increasingly disadvantages Indian factories in favour of Beijing ones. Thirdly, Doraiswami has suggested that Chinese capital inflow into India has been “normalised” since post-2020 investment restrictions have been eased, which means economic rebalancing along with strategic caution.

Together, the statements made in Beijing seem less like disconnected comments and more like a consistent message that New Delhi has been delivering this year to whomever would listen: India's importance in the world is not a function of the number of ceasefires it brokers or the number of delegations it hosts, but on the strength of its economy and the depth of its trade ties and the discipline of avoiding conflicts that do not advance its interests. The mediation efforts have definitely given Pakistan's a seat at tables from where it was ousted for years and this is a fact, not the rhetoric. But it is a tale of a state turning geographical exposure and options into diplomatic capital. If Doraiswami is to be believed, the story of India is that the state is big enough not to need to.

How the Iran ceasefire plays out, and what happens to that restraint when West Asia's power pendulum eventually swings back to the gunplay, remains to be seen. For a nation with per-capita income still below average, and growth strategy based on low energy prices and clear remittance routes from the Gulf, it might be the more costly-sounding, but cheaper, option of sitting this one out.