Swami Vivekananda stood before the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893 and told an audience that had not expected to be instructed that the East possessed something the West had mislaid. Not technology. Not military reach. Something older: the capacity to hold complexity, to seek resolution rather than dominance, to see the human being before the enemy.
He would find March 2026 instructive. And not entirely encouraging.
The United States has conveyed its 15-point list of demands to Iran through Pakistan as intermediary. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt have gathered in Islamabad attempting to find a path out of a war that has shaken global energy markets to their foundations. The West, having started the fire, has outsourced the fire brigade.
But let us be clear about what Pakistan’s role actually is. This is not altruism. A country that spent decades running with the hare and hunting with the hounds - collecting American aid while harbouring those America hunted - does not suddenly become a principled peacemaker. It becomes an opportunist with a telephone. Pakistan is at the table because geography and necessity put it there, not because it has earned moral authority. I have seen, from my own time working in the US Congress on precisely these questions, how Pakistan’s relationship with instability has been its most reliable foreign policy instrument. The current mediation is that instrument in a different costume.
The more important absence is India’s.
I wrote in February that India’s ambition to be the tech broker between East and West was geopolitically significant: whoever sits in the middle writes the menu, even if they don’t own the kitchen.  India has the size, the credibility, the relationships, and the civilisational standing to be the nation that the world turns to in precisely this moment. It has cultivated ties with Washington, maintained dialogue with Tehran, and positioned itself as the voice of the Global South. It has, in short, done everything required to be indispensable.
And yet it is Islamabad, not New Delhi, hosting the foreign ministers.
Vivekananda’s challenge to his own people was never merely directed at the West. It was directed at those in the East who had internalised the habit of watching from the margins: who possessed the depth but lacked the resolve to deploy it. Strength without confidence, he understood, is simply potential squandered.
This war has produced the biggest oil shock in history.  The world is not short of firepower. It is short of wisdom. India has the standing to offer the latter. The question Vivekananda would press, were he writing this column, is not whether India is ready. It is whether India is willing.
Net-net: the East has what this moment needs. The tragedy would be leaving it unused while an opportunist takes the credit.
Alpesh B Patel OBE has advised governments and worked in the US Congress on foreign policy matters. He writes at politicalanimal.me