CETRI
RELATIONS BETWEEN the countries of Southasia are being quietly redrawn. The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is dead, a China-backed bloc is taking shape, and India – estranged from Washington DC amid US president Donald Trump’s trade war with New Delhi and unable to meet his demands vis-à-vis ending its purchases of Russian oil – is unexpectedly drifting closer to Beijing. Meanwhile, Israel’s strike on Qatar in early September this year has ricocheted into the Subcontinent, pushing Saudi Arabia into a mutual defence pact with Pakistan that might also tilt the regional balance against India. The two external actors driving much of this transformation – China and Saudi Arabia – are themselves navigating perilous fault lines that could just as easily unravel their ambitions as consolidate them in the future.
Can Beijing really deliver on its ambitions to create a new Southasian bloc ? The question is important because of recent political shifts in Bangladesh and Nepal, which have both seen dramatic changes of ruling regime, and the uncertainty surrounding the political futures in other countries in the region. Beijing has been trying to resolve multiple Southasian entanglements that have a bearing on its interests, but has not been able to.
For instance, since the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan in 2021, relations between Kabul and Islamabad have soured, with cross-border terrorism emerging as the most explosive fault line. Shahbaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister, recently delivered an uncharacteristically blunt ultimatum to the Taliban regime : side with Pakistan or with the outlawed Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Kabul, for its part, has continued to deny sheltering or supporting the TTP, even as attacks by the group inside Pakistan continue to intensify. For China, which has been trying to fold both Pakistan and Afghanistan into its Belt and Road corridors, this feud threatens to derail the very foundation of its regional strategy. This seems to be currently focused on altering Southasia’s geopolitical landscape with a new regional bloc – a replacement for the largely defunct SAARC – that apparently includes both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
China has been trying to fill the vacuum left by SAARC’s dysfunction and in June – shortly after the armed conflict between India and Pakistan this year – organised a meeting with Pakistan and Bangladesh on various aspects of trilateral cooperation. This is being seen as the beginning of the new bloc that may not include India or, even if it does, will sideline it. However, a regional bloc fractured by mutual suspicion between Pakistan and Afghanistan and insurgent violence is hardly a reliable vehicle for Beijing’s ambitions.
SAUDI ARABIA’S Southasian balancing act is no less precarious. Riyadh’s new mutual-defence pact with Islamabad commits it to militarily backing Pakistan in the event of another India-Pakistan war – a commitment that sits quite uneasily alongside its flourishing economic partnership with New Delhi. India is already Saudi Arabia’s second-largest trading partner, importing over USD 31 billion worth of Saudi goods in the 2023–2024 financial year while exporting more than USD 11 billion worth in return. The relationship underpins both India’s energy security, with much of its oil coming from Saudi sources, and Saudi Arabia’s drive to diversify its economy away from an overwhelming reliance on oil. In other words, any move that visibly tilts Riyadh toward Pakistan would directly imperil one of its most valuable external partnerships.
Saudi Arabia’s trade ties with Pakistan pale in comparison. Pakistan’s exports to Saudi Arabia crossed USD 700 million and imports were around USD 3.6 billion in the 2024–2025 fiscal year. Much of Pakistan’s Saudi imports consist of oil and petrochemical products. Still, Riyadh now needs Pakistan’s military resources more than ever and is obliged to extend its support, including against its own key trading partner.
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All of this comes at a critical moment for the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 agenda, which aims to diversify the country’s economy and open up, to a degree, its society and culture. This plan depends heavily on stable energy markets, high foreign investment and strong commercial ties with emerging economies like India. Unlike during its earlier decades-long tilt towards Pakistan, rooted in religious affinity, Riyadh today has deep structural reasons to keep New Delhi onside – a contradiction that makes its new defence pact far more politically volatile than it appears.
The history of Saudi–Southasia ties underscores this contradiction. Riyadh leant heavily toward Pakistan for decades not just because of shared Islamic identity but also because of military cooperation. This included Pakistani officers training Saudi forces and the Pakistani military deploying its servicemen in the Saudi kingdom. Yet as India’s economy expanded after the early 1990s and its middle and lower classes became a major source of labour for the Gulf, Saudi Arabia recalibrated. Today, over 2.3 million Indians live and work in Saudi Arabia, sending billions of dollars home in remittances annually. This demographic factor alone makes it difficult for Riyadh to jeopardise ties with New Delhi.
The new defence pact with Islamabad, therefore, does not match the kingdom’s present-day economic and geopolitical imperatives. Yet Saudi Arabia must find a way to balance. Whether it can find the balance or not is a moot question.
The India–Pakistan jumble is not just Riyadh’s problem ; it is Beijing’s too. India’s estrangement from Washington DC has nudged it tactically closer to China, which also finds itself at the receiving end of Trump’s belligerent trade tactics, yet the two neighbours’ mutual strategic distrust remains intact. India and China have had long-standing border tensions, which escalated in 2020 after clashes between troops in Ladakh. Relations remained strained till August this year when India’s prime minister Narendra Modi met China’s president Xi Jinping at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, signalling a reset and a promise of deescalation.
Pakistan, China’s “iron brother”, increasingly relies on Beijing’s weapons systems for its military, and used Chinese-made aircraft to shoot down Indian jets in the latest India–Pakistan conflict this May. Beijing extended this support to Pakistan in recent times because it ostensibly saw India as Washington DC’s main ally in Southasia. If Beijing plans to include India in the new regional bloc, managing two partners who remain bitter adversaries is a fraught balancing act.
Far from consolidating their positions in Southasia with their recent moves, both China and Saudi Arabia risk being consumed by the regional rivalries they seek to sidestep at the moment. This is the central paradox of the emerging order in Southasia : external powers may aspire to redraw the region’s geopolitics in ways that work best for them, but unless they can reconcile its oldest conflicts they may instead find themselves dancing to their tune.
This points to a larger truth about Southasia’s role in global geopolitics. For decades, the region was treated by much of the world as marginal – at best the backyard of India, overshadowed by both West and East Asia. That perception is now outdated. As global power shifts, Southasia is emerging as a frontline arena where the ambitions of China, the Gulf states and the West collide. Its two billion people, massive energy needs, fragile states and unresolved conflicts make it too important to ignore. Yet precisely these factors also make it unmanageable.
If China and Saudi Arabia believe they can neatly incorporate Southasia into their respective orbits, they are likely to be disappointed. The region’s history shows that every external intervention – from the Cold War superpower rivalry to post-9/11 counterterrorism – has produced outcomes far messier than intended. Beijing may find its Belt and Road corridors blocked by insurgencies, while Riyadh may see its defence pact with Pakistan draw it into conflicts, including over Kashmir and the Indus Waters treaty’s suspension, which it can neither control nor force any power – especially India – to resolve. For both Saudi Arabia and China, the risk is not just failure but also messy entanglement where they could become, wittingly or unwittingly, parties to Southasia’s unresolved wars.
Southasia’s redrawing is real, but it is also precarious. China and Saudi Arabia may have the resources and ambition to reshape the region, but the forces they are faced with – terrorism, nationalism, economic fragility, the India–Pakistan rivalry – are larger than any single power can handle. A new order, if it emerges, may present less like a coherent bloc and more like a patchwork of uneasy alignments constantly at risk of rupture. For external powers, the temptation to redraw Southasia is understandable. But the lesson of history is clear : in this region, ambition rarely maps onto reality.
