South Asia 2040

For South Asia, 2024 was an eventful year. A pro-democracy student uprising in Bangladesh ousted Sheikh Hasina who took refuge in India. Sri Lankans voted in President Anura Dissanayake from a party that once waged a Marxist insurgency.

In India, voters withheld whole-hearted support for the BJP’s divisive religious extremism. But the defeat of the AAP in Delhi this month showed that the ruling party will go to length to influence elections.

Pakistan, Bhutan, and the Maldives also had elections last year. And in Nepal, the two biggest parties, the Nepali Congress (NC) and the UML ousted the Maoists and formed their own coalition government, appointing K P Oli as the country’s 14th Prime Minister in 15 years.

All this is happening against the backdrop of a breakdown in the post-World War II global order, with the rise of populist anti-migration climate deniers undermining democracies.

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Smaller South Asian nations now risk becoming geo-strategic battlegrounds for regional rivals India and China as they compete to fill the vacuum left by America’s retreat.

In the Maldives, relations with New Delhi soured after the election in 2024 of Mohamed Muizzu, seen to be pro-China. Chinese ‘debt trap diplomacy’ is said to have contributed to Sri Lanka’s economic collapse.

In Nepal, China has openly supported unity among Communist parties, while India and the West tried to split them. The suspension of USAID and MCC may lead to greater Chinese and Indian engagement (read: interference) in Kathmandu’s unstable politics.

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In November the Stockholm-based International IDEA and the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) convened the ‘Democracy in South Asia Outlook Forum’ in Colombo to ponder the direction South Asian democracy might be heading in the next 15 years.

Civil society, media, activists and academics brainstormed about four scenarios for 2040: Decline, Continuation, Disciplined Improvement and Transformation. The conclusions have been published in IDEA’s South Asia Democratic Futures report, summarised here:

Decline is a scenario in which democratic decay will mean governments and media will be completely under crony-capitalist control by 2040, and censorship will be the norm. AI will determine media content, elections will only reflect the politics of patronage. Irreversible ecological breakdown will exceed the capacity of governments to set right on their own. India-China tensions will spill over into conflict in South Asia.

Continuation is business as usual in South Asia. Politics will be increasingly dominated by authoritarians and populists, governments will continue to rely on foreign financing, outmigration will accelerate, pollution will have rendered the region’s urban centres unliveable by 2040.

Disciplined Improvement is a slightly better situation in which regional alliances, collaboration, civic engagement, and a new generation of leadership will respond more effectively to catastrophic weather events, mass migration and conflict. The polycrisis will prompt governments to work together by reviving regional cooperation through SAARC. Air quality will be so bad that India and Pakistan will be forced to cooperate and clean up.

Transformation envisions South Asia as a centre of democratic progress and innovation by 2040, a ‘solarpunk’ society, where nature, technology, and social harmony coexist. The West’s anti-migration wave will reverse the brain drain, with youth-led action against the climate crisis. Regional cooperation, even rapprochement between India and China will fill the gap left by the declining influence of the West.

Which way South Asia will go will depend on the leaders we elect or throw out in the coming decade. Policy reforms and action today will determine where we will be as a region in 2040. South Asia must not allow democracy to be dismantled, and trends in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal offer hope. But India’s gravitational pull, and how it deals with China that will determine the region’s fate.

Recent aid cuts and the West’s apathy towards cleansing and conflict in Gaza and Ukraine exposes the erosion of the moral values it says it espouses. Smaller South Asian countries like Nepal are on our own to deal with the crises in democracy, development and climate.

The USAID and MCC cuts are a sobering reminder that while India and China may step in, their support will also have strings attached. We have to put our own economic and political house in order, keep neighbours happy, and at arm’s length.

Fifteen years is not too far away to determine our collective democratic destiny.

Shristi Karki