A popular thread this week argues that a two-hour stopover in Delhi, by MBZ, proves that India has replaced Pakistan as the Gulf’s preferred partner, and more than that, has become the gateway to the entire non-Western axis. The imagery is cinematic: land, sign, leave; a Pakistan deal collapses days later; Moscow follows. Read as theatre, it is persuasive. Read as geopolitics, it is misleading. Two hours did not change the map. They revealed it.
Serious agreements are never written on the tarmac. When a head of state spends two hours anywhere, it is precisely because alignment already exists. The documents are negotiated months in advance. The ceremony is optional. Speed signals confidence, not conversion. The absence of banquets is not contempt; it is efficiency.
India is valuable to the Gulf because it is large, stable, demographically young, and not ideologically intrusive. It offers scale without sermons. That makes it an excellent partner. It does not make it a hub through which all other alignments must pass.
The cancellation of a Pakistani airport deal is not proof of civilisational replacement. It is proof of transactional discipline. Gulf capital is ruthless about timelines, risk, and execution. Pakistan’s problem here is not India. It is credibility, delay, and internal incoherence. To confuse that with humiliation by proxy is to mistake cause for coincidence.
The danger of reading this moment as triumphalist is that it flatters everyone’s worst instincts. Indians are invited to believe they have replaced Pakistan as a civilisational bridge. Pakistanis are invited to believe they have been publicly discarded. Americans are invited to believe blocs are forming neatly without their consent. None of this is true.
What we are seeing is not only a pivot but a compression of ceremony. In a post-ideological, sanction-saturated world, states prefer speed over symbolism. They separate substance from spectacle. Two hours is not an insult. It is a sign that nothing needed to be proven.
Could this be more driver by Trump than Modi ? Trump and his cronies vs rest.