When two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.

The Swahili proverb—when two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled—captures the pathology of asymmetric power. When titanic entities clash, the costs of their friction are externalised onto those who are smallest, weakest and without any say in the dispute. Whether among empires, corporations or families, the logic is unchanged: the powerful pursue ambition or settle scores, while the peripheral bear the ruin.

The Historical Theatre of Proxy Warfare

The geopolitical arena provides the most vivid manifestation of this asymmetry. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union, restrained by the fear of nuclear escalation (later formalised as Mutually Assured Destruction), avoided direct military engagement. Instead, they transformed the post-colonial developing world into their ideological battleground. In Vietnam, the Korean Peninsula, and Afghanistan, sovereign territories were reduced to proxy arenas. Millions of civilians who had no stake in the ideological schism between capitalism and communism lost their lives, livelihoods, and futures.

Afghanistan serves as a tragic testament to this dynamic. The superpower rivalry of the late twentieth century dismantled its nascent state institutions, unleashed radicalisation, and left behind an unexploded landscape of ordnance and civil strife that continues to haunt the Afghan population decades after the original contenders withdrew. The elephants fought elsewhere, but the Afghan soil remains scarred.

Contemporary Rivalries and the Shocks of Deglobalisation

Today the battle lines run through trade routes, technology standards and supply chains. The friction between the United States and China—tariff wars, weaponised export controls and technological decoupling—threatens global commerce. Developing economies in Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa that depend on both are caught in the crossfire, as secondary sanctions and fractured supply networks push them toward zero-sum alignments.

This vulnerability was laid bare by the war that followed Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. While rooted in European security architecture and great-power contestation, the immediate fallout reverberated across the Global South. Blockades in the Black Sea—eased only partly by the UN-brokered Black Sea Grain Initiative of July 2022, which lapsed a year later—and disruptions to fertilizer and hydrocarbon supply chains triggered catastrophic food and energy inflation. Import-dependent nations in the Horn of Africa, as well as South Asian economies already grappling with macroeconomic stress, faced acute food insecurity, balance-of-payments crises, and social unrest. The conflict was conceived in the capitals of powerful states, but its human toll was paid at kitchen tables across the developing world.

Corporate Asymmetries in the Marketplace

The metaphor extends seamlessly into the economic sphere, where market dominance mirrors geopolitical hegemony. In the modern marketplace, aggressive price wars and predatory practices between corporate behemoths frequently decimate the surrounding ecosystem. When dominant e-commerce platforms, telecommunications giants, or retail conglomerates engage in deep-discounting battles to capture market share, the primary victims are Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), neighbourhood retail vendors, and unorganised suppliers who lack the capital buffers to survive prolonged margin compression.

In the platform economy, the tug-of-war between venture-backed aggregators squeezes gig workers and delivery partners, who lack bargaining power and bear the brunt of reduced incentives and arbitrary fees. Regulators such as the Competition Commission of India (CCI)—which in 2022 penalised Google ₹1,337.76 crore for abusing its dominance in the Android ecosystem—increasingly step in, acknowledging that unregulated corporate combat erodes the agency of the smallest participants.

The Ecological Divide and Asymmetric Costs

Perhaps the starkest structural manifestation of this proverb is the global climate crisis. The planetary atmospheric commons has been degraded predominantly by the historic and continuing emissions of industrialized and major economic powers. Yet, the existential burden of climate catastrophe falls disproportionately on those who contributed the least to global carbon budgets.

Small Island Developing States (SIDS) like Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Maldives face territorial extinction from rising seas, while Least Developed Countries (LDCs) suffer intensifying droughts, floods and desertification despite contributing a negligible share of historic emissions. The UNFCCC principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDR-RC), and the hard-fought Loss and Damage Fund—agreed at COP27 in 2022 and operationalised at COP28 in 2023—reflect the moral demand that those who caused the damage compensate the trampled periphery.

Collateral at the Microcosmic Scale

The dynamic operates in the micro-spaces of society too. In bitter marital breakdowns and custody battles, children become emotional collateral, absorbing trauma they can neither comprehend nor escape. Whenever institutional giants clash—factions polarising the electorate or entrenched caste hierarchies disputing local authority—it is the daily-wage worker, the marginalised community and the ordinary citizen whose peace is forfeited.

Agency of the Grass: From Vulnerability to Strategic Resilience

However, to view the "grass" merely as passive, helpless fodder is to surrender to fatalism. The central question for the vulnerable is how to cultivate resilience, assert agency, and alter the structural power balance.

India’s own foreign policy evolution offers a compelling template. Emerging into independence during the peak of the Cold War, India refused to be co-opted into superpower military blocs, pioneering the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). In the contemporary multi-polar era, India has adapted this philosophy into the doctrine of Strategic Autonomy and multi-alignment. By engaging with diverse power centres on issue-based convergences—retaining ties with traditional partners while forging strategic coalitions such as the Quad—India demonstrates how an emerging power can avoid becoming an instrument in the rivalries of others. Deft grass can even gain from the contest: during the Cold War, India secured Soviet help for the Bhilai steel plant and American food aid under PL-480. Furthermore, by championing the Voice of the Global South Summit and successfully integrating the African Union into the G20 during its 2023 Presidency, India has worked to institutionalise the collective bargaining power of developing nations.

Beyond individual statecraft, the protection of the vulnerable demands robust multilateral frameworks. Small and middle nations survive not by the benevolence of the strong, but through a rules-based international order. Restoring the World Trade Organization's dispute settlement system, whose Appellate Body has been paralysed since December 2019, establishing binding international treaties on technology transfer, and institutionalising global safety nets for debt relief are indispensable. In domestic markets, strict antitrust enforcement, effective implementation of the Code on Social Security, 2020—one of the four labour codes in force since 21 November 2025, which for the first time recognises gig and platform workers—and strong support structures for MSMEs provide regulatory armour to prevent market concentration from crushing smaller enterprises.

Conclusion

Power, when unmediated by ethics and institutional accountability, tends inexorably toward self-absorption, blinding the powerful to the collateral devastation they inflict. The enduring relevance of the proverb lies in its warning against the uncritical acceptance of hierarchy. If the global order, the marketplace, and society at large are to achieve genuine stability, the interests of the powerful cannot be pursued at the expense of the vulnerable.

True resilience lies in empowering the grass—through collective solidarity, legal safeguards, and strategic autonomy—so that the ground upon which the powerful tread ceases to be an expendable battleground, and becomes instead a fortified foundation that commands respect and restrains conflict.