It was a balmy April 22, 2025, in Pahalgam, the picture postcard town in Kashmir. An attack that killed 26 people has spurred a fresh wave of tension between India and Pakistan. India responded quickly with Operation Sindoor which was an air raid that resulted in 31 casualties on the other side of the border (Al Jazeera, 2025). But in a surprising turn of events, Pakistan has used its UNSC seat to internationalize the Kashmir territorial issue, creating a fresh and potent diplomatic problem for India.
This year, India is clearly, on the defensive trying to manage the issues of the course with Pakistan’s UNSC platform. The “regional power” has just been exposed even as cracks show up in its bilateral transactions, US apathy becomes clear while international weariness for ceaseless South Asian brinkmanship increases. But behind the geopolitical chess game is the extant, recurring and tragic reality of a Kashmiri plight left unaddressed, ever silenced and marginalized amid the power plays.
Below, I dissect the complication of India’s 2025 diplomatic woes, itemizing the share of a quarter in the popularity of Four Degree. It provides a reading of the past, attempts to understand Pakistans strategic UNSC gambit, takes on the U.S. for being indifferent and suggests India must rethink its strategy to avoid becoming isolated on the global stage.
India’s Obsessional Bipolarity and the Simla Trap
Why India’s No Third Party Line Is Not Working
While India has demanded that disputes with Pakistan be resolved bilaterally, eschewing any third-party mediation, since the signing of the Simla Agreement in 1972. But 2025 has ushered in a wave of change that casts doubt on this strict approach. Moving to the UNSC has given Pakistan an unprecedented platform in which to escalate the Kashmir issue on the international stage, directly raising the stakes of the conflict and challenging India’s position of not internationalizing the issue for decades (Al Jazeera, 2025).
Other than that, India’s traditional liking for bilateralism has borne little fruit over the years. Intermediaries like the 1965 Tashkent Agreement and the 1999 Kargil deadlock simply put a temporary halt to violence, again without addressing the Kashmir disputes that lay beneath. The abrogation of Article 370 in 2019 has further estranged the Kashmiri people and weakened the rhetoric of bilateralism for India (Foreign Affairs, 2025). This inheritance shackles how India perforce adjusts to the new geo-political realities and push around non-permanent members of the UNSC à la Algeria and Greece (@TheTathya).
Yet critically, India’s position effaces Kashmiri agency, representing the issue as a bilateral squabble rather than a humanitarian disaster. By ignoring the suffering of Kashmiris, who have had their schools closed, their internet cut off, hundreds of thousands of soldiers brought in to the region, India is in danger of being diplomatically isolated. And it is Pakistan’s agitation at the UNSC that has shown up these blind spots, forcing the world to ask if India’s intransigence is being inflexible for peace, or just insulating its regional hubris.
Pakistan’s UNSC Gambit A Panic-Stricken but Vocal Gesture
Pakistan’s Use of Its UNSC Seat to Widen Kashmir
Winner: Pakistan’s time on the UNSC for 2025-2026 has afforded it a louder and bigger platform at a crucial time. On the 5th of May 2025, Pakistan organised a closed-door UNSC consultation on Kashmir, anxious of internationalising the decades old conflict (Security Council Report, 2025). With the support of China, Pakistan was able to prevent India from designating The Resistance Front (TRF) as a terrorist group through a UNSC statement (Foreign Policy, 2025).
But underneath the facade of diplomatic bustle is Pakistan’s economic desperation. With a crippling $70 billion debt crisis, dependence on IMF flash loans, and a weakened economy, Pakistan has traditionally used the Kashmir issue as a means to shift the conversation away from its own domestic failures (Al Jazeera, 2025). Reports indicate that it has largely not succeeded in securing significant international backing for its stance — e.g., ambivalent responses from important UNSC members (@sidhant).
Yet Pakistan’s case is plagued by contradictions. It eschews involvement in strikes such as Pahalgam but has difficulty reining in homegrown militancy. Its bellicose nuclear discourse is alarming the world and taking the shine off its moral pretensions. Though sympathetic to its structural limitations, the global community is weary of South Asian conflicts and provides little scope for Pakistan to achieve definitive successes (India Today, 2025).
In the end, Pakistan may have played too good a game. Its position at the UNSC will give it some leverage in the short-term, but it also highlights its reliance on patrons outside Afghanistan such as China. Pakistan must be able to walk a fine line or it risks alienating the only friends whose friendship it can really use.
The U.S. Vacuum and India’s Tightrope
Why America’s Hands-Off Policy Provides No Shelter for India
The Biden administration’s gradual withdrawal from overseas conflicts has created a void in South Asia that adds a level of complexity to India’s diplomatic hurdles. Until now, U.S. outreach has served to calm down such crises, such as after the 2019 Balakot airstrikes. And yet, in 2025, Washington appears to have little interest in meddling in the deteriorating India-Pakistan relations (India Today, 2025).
India is also aligned with the United States through its trade ($100 billion in 2018) and by participating in efforts such as the Quad, but the United States’s reaction has been chilly. For instance, the meeting between the Republican Senator Rubio and India’s EAM Subrahmanyam Jaishankar led to just a call for restrain but without any tangible results (Al Jazeera, 2025).
At the same time, China is a complicating factor in the region. 2): China supports Pakistan’s direction of the UNSC and indicates it shall cut down its assistance towards Pakistan economically trying to safeguard its regional hegemony (Foreign Policy, 2025). India finding it very difficult to manage these contradictions and pressurize peripheral non-permanent UNSC members, Denmark and South Kora (11/ @TheTathya).
India is paying the price for relying on American support. And with America’s turn inward, to focus on its domestic priorities, including protection of its trade, India is more exposed to history’s shifting winds. Yet it will only mobilize itself with its ally to the south to the extent that it actively engages: To do less is to risk being seen in the historical record as a detached one-dimensional observer of a crisis that can quickly degenerate into an uncontrollable nightmare.
Breaking the Deadlock: A New Route Out of Bilateralism
India, Rethinking Its Diplomatic Playbook
With pressures mounting, India needs to pivot into multilateral mode to counter Pakistan on the UNSC platform. Bilateralism has been India’s favoured framework for a long time, but the winds of change are coming. Persisting in its refusal of third-party mediation, such as the UN supervised ceasefires on the LoC, would have the effect of making India appear inflexible and uncaring of Kashmiri agony.
India could recoup some diplomatic capital, however, by supporting some limited multilateral mechanisms, while in turn promoting the centrality of Kashmiri voices in any dialogue. This shift would also erode Pakistan’s narrative and enhance India’s position on the world stage. It would also show a serious intent to lower regional temperature.
Externally, India needs to persuade the U.S. to offer a more active mediation, given its relationship with both India and Pakistan. At the same time, it could reoriented its posture toward China, by pursuing constrained cooperation that rewards Beijing for pressuring Islamabad.
But more importantly, the human cost of not doing so demands urgency. For a world that knows what India and Pakistan each have more than 300 nuclear warheads, perpetual brinkmanship heightens the level of risk to the irredentist. The wounds of Kashmir weep for the dialogue and accountability they are owed — not denial or delay.
Learning From Disunion. Will India Lead or Be Left Behind?
For decades India’s Kashmir policy has been its diplomatic anchor, but in 2025, it may become a deadweight. In Pakistan’s UNSC seat, one sees the pitfalls of India’s hard and fast policy and the story of a nation which becomes more insular at the same time that it stakes claim to being a global power.
The way to break free from this bind is for India to confront its contradictions, listen to Kashmiri voices, and adjust to a multilateral world. The stakes are as high as they can get. Will New Delhi rise to the occasion, or will history recall it as a leader that once showed promise but buckled under the weight of the moment?
Kashmir’s wounds call out for dialogue. The time to act is now.
The Significance of Dialogue in the Settlement of Kashmir Conflict
The Kashmir dispute has stretched on for more than 70 years and has inflicted immense suffering on the people in the region. No international or regional organization has so far been able to settle the dispute despite repeated efforts by international bodies and regional countries to end it.
One of the principal reasons behind this logjam has been India’s inflexible attitude. Rather than holding meaningful discussions with Pakistani and Kashmiri leaders, India has obstinately refused third party mediation and continued to assert that Kashmir is an “integral part of India”.
But, as has been noted before, India’s isolation in the comity of nations on account of this intransigent policy has become more and more apparent. Now that Pakistan has been give a seat in the United