Pakistan, Feb. 18 -- For years, India has strutted onto the global stage, propped up by foreign backers who handed it the script of China's counterweight without ensuring it had the means to play the part. In its eagerness to flex its muscles, India has plundered its own backyard-ravaging the fragile Himalayan ecosystem and manipulating rivers at its neighbours' expense-only to find itself up a creek without a paddle. The fallout? A region teetering on environmental catastrophe, fraying diplomatic ties, and a self-inflicted vulnerability to China's cold, calculated countermoves.

India's geopolitical ambitions have been brewing since the Partition plan, which granted it the most strategic geography of the subcontinent and control over the...