South Asia’s Zero-Sum Trap

Representative Gemini AI Generated Image

In the realist decade of the 21st Century, zero sum traps were not unexpected. At the apex geopolitical level, China and the United States are in an announced G2—this was most famously stated by US President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the APEC Summit in South Korea last week. The US China competition and conflict scenario is naturally reflected across the world, and South Asia is also impacted by this phenomenon.

As the least integrated and developing region, the zero-sum trap harms large populations in the region - India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Nepal, and Bhutan.

No wonder there is a rapid collapse of governments in the most vulnerable part of the world. This region also has the distinction of fielding democracies, however flawed they may seem. India's peripatetic and perceptive National Security Adviser Shri Ajit Doval recently ascribed the collapse of these regimes to poor governance. Their inclination to engage in competition and conflict with each other is another factor. This shifts the focus of governments to adversarial relations rather than cooperation.

Historical reasons for this hostility exist, such as the India-Pakistan rivalry stemming from perceptions of inequities during the Partition of the Subcontinent in 1947, and subsequent splitting of Pakistan in 1971 with the formation of Bangladesh.

Seeking revenge, Islamabad, under de facto Army rule has unleashed what is best known as a proxy war of terror, with high-casualty attacks occurring regularly in Jammu and Kashmir and beyond including Mumbai 26/11. India has sought punitive retaliation, leading to a cycle of incessant skirmishes.

This pattern is apparently repeating in Afghanistan-Pakistan relations, with multiple outbreaks of violence in October 2025. Pakistan’s air strikes on Kabul have been followed by armed skirmishes on the so-called Durand Line, a border Afghanistan does not recognize—a legacy issue.

India and Bangladesh need not have adversarial relations, given that New Delhi is the only neighbor of Dhaka; Myanmar has only a small boundary with Bangladesh. It would seem relations between the two should be smooth, yet they too are caught in the trap, with interregnums for decades and may now be entering a new phase.

Fishing in these troubled waters is China, the giant economic and physical neighbor to some countries.

Unsurprisingly, the region is caught in a permanent spiral of doom, and this does not even touch on the maritime sphere so far.

Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Maldives see a pattern of India China competition even as the economies of these countries have been facing a constant need for transfusion of grants and aid. Breaking from this logjam is not easy given the structural debility of the economies and unwillingness of the elites to look beyond the immediate.

In this zero sum see-saw some times China seems to be on top and in others India. New Delhi will however have to up its game by expanding comprehensive national power as at the present rate of elephantine progress, the dragon is only expanding the lead. This means the United States will jump in once again and with the Trump administration focus on tariffs as a tool of leverage with disinclination for freebies in the form of aid, South Asian states find themselves at the bottom of the economic pyramid for years. Its a Trap that is not easy to escape.