Although US President Bill Clinton had nonchalantly floated the imagery of South Asia as “the most dangerous place in the world” in the wake of the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in 1998, his views were outrightly rejected by India (Babington and Constable 2000). Besides, China emerged as a stabilizing force in the region as it instigated its shuttle diplomacy between India and Pakistan not only after the nuclear tests in 1998 but also after the Mumbai attack in 2008. Even as the disputed Kashmir remains a nuclear flashpoint (notwithstanding the US offer to “help” resolve this lingering issue), several topical incidences—for example, the Doklam standoff, Pulwama attack, Ladakh clash, Taliban takeover, arms race, trade war, pandemic blame-game, and Russia–Ukraine crisis—have triggered fresh patterns of quadrilateral interactions between four key (non-)state actors in South Asia, namely, India, Pakistan, China, and the US. While the competitive and cooperative trends underpinning these quadrilateral interactions are difficult to fathom in terms of traditional Western realism (which considers the sphere of “the international” as fraught with dualistic self-other enmity), this chapter evokes a non-dualistic Global International Relations (IR) theory inspired by the Indian philosophy of Advaita to appraise India’s strategic response to the ongoing US–China rivalry in South Asia: unlike the dualistic Western IR theories based on a fundamental self–other distinction, the non-dualistic Advaita Global IR theory ties the self and the other together with a globe marked with single hidden connectedness. Since India is increasingly recognized as a rising power in world politics, a systematic study of its strategic response to the ongoing US–China rivalry in South Asia is decisive for making sense of the overall global transformations. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section illustrates the historical trajectory of geopolitical rivalries in South Asia. The second section identifies the topical issues that have cropped up as departure points in this conventional historical trajectory. Finally, the third section employs the Advaita Global IR theory (which refutes the Western style of IR hooked on the fixed logic of self–other enmity, friendship, or neutrality) to facilitate an improved investigation of these topical issues, thereby providing an alternative intellectual framework to interpret the contemporary postures of US–China contestations in world politics.