The Swahili original - wapiganapo tembo wawili, ziumia nyika - was probably coined by people who had watched it happen literally. Two bulls contest a territory; the ground where they wrestle is left bare for a season. The proverb survived because human beings kept recognising the pattern: the powerful quarrel, and the cost is collected from those who were never consulted.

There is a crueller companion proverb from the same region: when elephants make love, the grass suffers too. Whether the mighty fight or embrace, the grass is under them. Any honest account of power has to begin there.

Great powers quarrel; small nations pay

The twentieth century was a long demonstration. Two superpowers never fought each other directly; they fought everywhere else. Korea was divided, Vietnam was defoliated, Angola and Mozambique were armed, Afghanistan was turned into a training ground whose graduates are still with us. The dead were almost never American or Russian. Proxy war is the technology by which elephants transfer the cost of their fight to grass.

The pattern did not retire with the Cold War. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the missiles fell in Europe but hunger arrived in Africa and Asia: wheat and sunflower oil disrupted, fertiliser prices doubled, energy repriced globally. Countries with no interest whatsoever in the Black Sea - Egypt, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh - imported the crisis through their food and fuel bills. Sri Lanka's default in 2022 had domestic causes, but the external shock that broke it was manufactured elsewhere. Sanctions follow the same logic: designed to punish a regime, they are metabolised by ordinary people. The sanctions decade in Iraq is remembered less for its effect on Saddam Hussein than for what happened to Iraqi children's health.

Today's version is quieter and technological. The contest over semiconductors, export controls, rare earths and undersea cables forces every developing economy to choose sides in a fight it cannot influence and cannot win. A country that wants both Chinese hardware and American software finds that neutrality is being priced out of the market. Add to that the tariff wars, currency volatility, and the weaponisation of payment systems, and the meaning of the proverb becomes concrete: the grass is not merely trampled, it is being asked to grow in the direction the elephants prefer.

The same proverb, at every scale

Its power is that it does not belong only to geopolitics.

In economics, when two conglomerates fight a price war, the consumer briefly gains and the small retailer disappears; when the war ends, a duopoly sets the price. Platform battles burn investor money and leave gig workers with algorithmically shrinking pay. Trade wars between giants close the ladder for late industrialisers.

In domestic politics, Centre-State confrontations delay projects, block funds and leave a citizen queuing at a counter that has no authority to help her. Executive-judiciary standoffs freeze appointments while five crore cases wait. Ruling party and opposition shout across a well, the House is adjourned, and a bill that would have regulated something dangerous is passed in eleven minutes without scrutiny. Every hour of political theatre is billed silently to the people whose problem was on the agenda.

In institutions and offices, two seniors feuding is the reliable cause of junior misery; the file no one will sign belongs to a citizen.

In families, the most exact application of all: when parents fight, the child is the ground. Divorce statistics are about adults; the developmental research is about children.

In society, when two communities riot, the dead are overwhelmingly the poor of both. The industrialist's house is guarded; the daily-wager's cart is burnt. Communal violence is the clearest case of grass being trampled by elephants who then send condolences.

In the environment, the countries least responsible for emissions are the most exposed to their effects. Small island states measure great-power climate procrastination in centimetres of sea level. Upstream - downstream water disputes - the Nile and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, the Indus, the Cauvery between two Indian states - end with the farmer at the tail of the canal receiving nothing while capitals exchange affidavits.

Grass is not as helpless as the proverb suggests

Here the metaphor must be pushed further, because taken literally it teaches fatalism - and history does not support fatalism. Grass has three advantages. It is numerous, it bends, and it comes back. The elephants' fight lasts a season; grass holds the soil for centuries. Every strategy of the weak in international politics is an elaboration of these properties.

The first is collective bargaining. The Non-Aligned Movement was an attempt by newly free nations to refuse the choice being forced upon them; the G-77, OPEC, ASEAN centrality, the African Union and the small-island alliance AOSIS all work on the principle that grass in quantity is not soft. AOSIS's persistence is the reason a Loss and Damage fund exists at all.

The second is strategic autonomy, the refusal to be anybody's grass. India's practice - buying discounted Russian oil while deepening technology partnerships with the United States, joining the Quad while remaining in BRICS and the SCO, hosting the G20 while insisting that the African Union be given permanent membership, convening the Voice of the Global South Summit - is precisely the attempt to convert a battlefield into bargaining space. Non-alignment was never neutrality; it was the assertion that the grass, too, has interests.

The third is rules. Multilateralism, however battered, is the invention by which the weak convert force into procedure: the UN Charter, the ICJ, WTO dispute settlement, the Law of the Sea. Every one of these institutions is currently being weakened by the strong, and every one of them matters most to the weak. This is why UN Security Council reform, IMF quota rectification and a functioning WTO appellate body are not abstract diplomatic hobbies; they are the grass demanding a referee.

And at home, the same logic: panchayats, unions, self-help groups, RTI activists, a free press and a working local court are the instruments by which ordinary people acquire weight in fights between large forces. Social audit under MGNREGA and the jan sunwai tradition from Rajasthan exist because the trampled discovered they could count.

Conclusion

The proverb is a warning to two audiences at once. To the powerful, it is a moral summons: your quarrel is not private. The state, the corporation, the party and the parent each occupy a position where their conflict is externalised onto someone with no exit. Restraint, in such positions, is not weakness - it is the elementary condition of legitimacy. The Buddha said that victory breeds hatred because the defeated live in pain; the proverb notes something worse, that even the uninvolved live in pain.

To the trampled, it is a call to organise rather than to lament. Grass survives elephants. It does so by being everywhere, by bending in the storm, and by holding on to the soil that both animals need.

India, having been grass for two centuries and now being counted among the large, is uniquely placed to say both halves of this out loud. A country whose diplomatic vocabulary includes Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam and whose recent history includes famine and empire has both the standing and the duty to insist on the one arrangement in which no one is grass - a world where disputes are settled by rules the small helped write, and where the ground everybody stands on is treated as worth protecting.