Welcome to Foreign Policy’s South Asia Brief.

The highlights this week: The prospect of more stable U.S.-China relations raises questions for India, Pakistan’s main opposition party postpones a planned protest, and India’s Cockroach movement sets its eyes on a new target.

What Did the Trump-Xi Summit Mean for India?

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met at the White House and agreed to lower some tariffs, to partner on energy and trade, and to keep talking. Their summit showed that the rival superpowers are keen to ease bilateral tensions—or at least to better manage them.

What would relatively more stable U.S.-China relations mean for ties between Washington and New Delhi? Though a shifting status quo might pose new obstacles, it ultimately wouldn’t be an all-around bad thing for India.

To be sure, China is the glue that binds the strategic dimension of the U.S.-India partnership; Washington and New Delhi have long shared the view that Beijing’s growing power constitutes a threat. This has motivated growing U.S.-India defense cooperation and the resurgence of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, as well as stepped-up collaborations on technology.

With U.S.-India ties currently mired in tensions of their own and a persistent trust gap in New Delhi, undermining the strategic rationale for partnership could present more headaches.

However, the U.S.-India relationship is focused on a lot more than China. In recent years, bilateral ties have grown broader and more multifaceted. Trade, educational exchanges, and space are all significant areas of collaboration outside the strategic realm. One recent major achievement was the joint launch of a satellite last year.

Despite Russia-driven tensions over fuel, energy has long been a key area of U.S.-India cooperation, going back to the early 1990s, as bilateral ties were beginning to bounce back from a few decades of poor relations—well before the emergence of major competition with China.

Reduced U.S.-China tensions could also lessen the overall threat to Indian security interests. Effectively, China might feel less inclined to drag India into its rivalry with the United States.

That could translate to China refraining from provocations against India along their shared border or at sea that are meant to signal Beijing’s unhappiness about New Delhi’s security partnership with Washington. Indeed, this may be one reason why China staged the 2020 border incursion in Ladakh that precipitated the deadliest India-China violence since the 1960s.

All this may be putting the cart before the horse, though. The Trump-Xi summit may have reduced some tensions, but it won’t stop China from doing many of the things that concern both the United States and India—such as dominating rare-earth supply chains, disseminating surveillance technologies across the world, and staging naval maneuvers in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea.

Ultimately, both the United States and India are pursuing a limited detente with their common rival. India’s efforts have played out for nearly two years but accelerated as a hedging tactic against Trump’s unpredictability. In both cases, steps to reduce tensions have not eliminated core areas of divergence with Beijing—for New Delhi, their long disputed border, the issues of Taiwan and Tibet, and the Belt and Road Initiative.

There is still sufficient glue to keep the U.S.-India strategic partnership strong, but the biggest challenge lies in addressing the broader issues harming bilateral ties—not in managing the consequences of a more stable U.S.-China relationship. These include tariffs, Trump’s embrace of Pakistan, and India’s purchases of Russian oil.

In that regard, the new Russia sanctions bill—which authorizes Trump to slap tariffs of up to 100 percent on countries for importing Russian oil—is a bigger red flag for U.S.-India ties than Xi’s White House summit.

What We’re Following

Pakistani opposition postpones march. Pakistan’s opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party announced last Friday that it would postpone a planned march on Islamabad, shifting it by one week to Oct. 4. The protest is expected to begin in the northern city of Peshawar and continue to the capital, calling for the release of imprisoned former Prime Minister and PTI leader Imran Khan.

PTI gave various explanations for delaying the so-called long march, from vague logistical factors to wanting to trick the government into expending resources on a “futile effort” ahead of the previously announced date. One PTI leader, Naeem Haider Panjutha, even said the new plan was a better option because protesters could mark Khan’s birthday, Oct. 5.

But the newspaper Dawn reports that unnamed PTI leaders cited other reasons that raise further questions about the viability of the protests. They reportedly include a lack of preparedness, transport, and even equipment to remove street blockades, as well as “incentives” offered by the government to postpone the march.

PTI protests have been rare since Khan was jailed in August 2023. When they have happened, security forces have responded with violence. Growing anger over Khan’s continued imprisonment, worsening health, and lack of access to his family suggests that his party is committed to mobilizing this time. But the apparent limitations risk robbing the protests of momentum.

Cockroach movement threatens fresh protests. Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of India’s Cockroach Janta Party, demanded the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar last week. The call for Kumar to step down came after an Indian Express report alleging improprieties in a revision of voter rolls that began last year.

According to the report, India’s two other election commissioners raised more than a dozen formal objections to the process, with none addressed by the commission. Dipke, who called Kumar the “biggest threat” to India’s democracy, threatened to launch protests on Friday if Kumar didn’t resign by Sept. 26. Kumar remains in his post.

The Cockroach movement’s mass protests over the summer led to the resignation of India’s education minister in July and exposed a political vulnerability often masked by the popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The last thing that Modi’s government wants right now is a fresh protest campaign.

The stakes are high: Modi and the BJP are gearing up for key state elections in the coming months, including polls in Uttar Pradesh—India’s most populous state and long a BJP bastion—early next year.

Sri Lanka’s controversial judicial reforms. Sri Lanka’s Parliament voted to pass contentious legal reforms last week. The most controversial change raises the mandatory retirement ages for judges by two years. The reforms also include plans to expand the number of courthouses and judicial sector staff, as well as to recruit thousands of additional police officers.

Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake says the reforms are necessary to speed up trials amid a backlog of more than 1 million cases. In Sri Lanka, criminal proceedings can reportedly take more than 17 years to conclude.

Opponents of the reforms, which include the Bar Association of Sri Lanka, say they imperil a free and independent judiciary. They have pointed to the fact that the changes will extend the tenure of current Chief Justice Preethi Padman Surasena, who was due to retire at the end of this year.

However, the political opposition may have its own reasons for taking on the reforms: The government is ramping up corruption investigations that involve former President and later Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, a member of the Rajapaksa family dynasty who had held power for years before he was toppled by mass protests in 2022.

Under the Radar

Several terrorist assaults have recently rocked northwestern Pakistan and captured attention. But last week, there was an overlooked attack farther to the south, in Balochistan province, with significant implications not just for security but also for public health.

On Sept. 22, gunmen shot and killed two police officers assigned to guard polio vaccinators who were part of a door-to door campaign that began the previous day, with aims to inoculate 31 million children. Pakistan is one of only two countries still grappling with endemic polio cases. (Afghanistan is the other.)

Pakistan has had major successes in curbing the disease in recent years, with the number of new cases coming down and the country edging closer to full eradication. But a worsening security climate is contributing to its challenges in crossing that finish line. An uptick in terrorism in Pakistan in the last five years has included a few attacks on vaccination efforts.

Though no one claimed responsibility for last week’s attack, but the likely culprit is Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan—the most potent group operating in Pakistan today and one that has threatened and targeted polio vaccination campaigns in the past.

FP’s Most Read This Week

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• The Twilight of the Francis Fukuyama Era by Jeremi Suri

Regional Voices

In the Print, journalist Bidisha Bhattacharya discusses how simple price considerations have prompted some Indian drivers to opt for electric power over gasoline. “The rationale for this sequence is straightforward,” she writes. “Although an electric vehicle incurs a higher initial purchase cost, its operational expenses are lower.”

A Daily Star editorial calls on Bangladesh to tread carefully when it comes to addressing teen delinquency. “It is imperative that the government devise a cautious and balanced strategy that encourages parents to take greater responsibility for their children while also creating an enabling environment in which young people can prepare for a better future,” it argues.

In Dawn, scholar Niaz Murtaza lays out the precarious economic state of play in Pakistan. “We face two risky paths: hobble on with slow growth and risk unrest, or rush recklessly into import-led growth to court a dollar crisis and unrest,” he writes.