Opinion Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: Why the South Asian neighbourhood is on edge
In a deep ideological sense, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh are joined at the hip. India uses the fires in Pakistan and Bangladesh to shore up the claims of a Hindu state, and the ‘India’ card is still a potent defining feature of their identity. But they must remember: State sponsored religious nationalism will always turn authoritarian
India, for its part, is doing the utterly myopic thing. 
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South Asia is at a precipice. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are now vulnerable to the fatal kiss of religious nationalism destroying both democracy and decency in their societies. It is anathema for an Indian audience to think of these three countries on the same plane. But, with varying degrees of intensity, they are now displaying symptoms of the same political disease. Each of the three countries seems to already have, or is in the process of creating, the background conditions for significant religious conflict. Each of them seems to be now determined to reopen the settlement of 1947, not in the direction of freedom and human rights, but the denouement of targeted conflict, almost as if to complete the logic of partition, not to undo it. And their ideological fates are intertwined. India may, with all its arrogant bluster, claim to be a big power that transcends its region. But its fundamental insecurities, its domestic politics, and increasingly its identity, is so tied to its neighbourhood that this claim is almost laughable.
Let us start with Bangladesh. Sheikh Hasina had lost popular legitimacy, or at least deprived herself of the means to establish it. But it is still an open question what kind of successor regime will be institutionalised in its wake. Bangladesh may still overcome its present hurdles, but there are three ominous signs. The first is that the strategy of the new regime seems to be moving not towards building an inclusive democracy, but to keep on engaging in the same cycles of recrimination between the Awami League and its opponents that have marked Bangladesh’s history, a cycle of recrimination that never ends well for democracy. Second, Islamists seem to have gained much more visible space, and there is no political force that can marginalise them. There is greater risk to minorities, especially Hindus in Bangladesh. The Bangladeshi elites deny this charge as simply Indian disinformation, used to discredit the regime and used by the BJP for domestic politics in India.
It is true that the Indian state has a vested interest in exaggeration. But the response in large sections of Bangladesh’s elites to a genuine concern is dispiriting because it has all the elements of a familiar South Asian play book. When it comes to communal targeting, it goes something like this: Claim that reports are exaggerated (though exaggeration might be less of a sin than denial), or whataboutery (nothing has fundamentally changed) or root causes (they were not targeted as Hindus but were collateral damage in the violence against Awami League supporters) or pretexts (there are genuine non-communal reasons to be worried about of some of the ISKCON figures). Or finally a performative secularism, where the leader gives a statement that ticks a box, while not addressing fundamental insecurities. All of our societies are masters at this playbook, it is the way we do communalism without thinking of ourselves as communal.
India, for its part, is doing the utterly myopic thing. For good or for ill, Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarianism collapsed under its own weight. It is in India’s interest not to use Bangladesh to flame sectarian fires, but to find a solution. And no solution will be forthcoming if India is, ex-ante, openly hostile to what, for good or for ill, is the de facto government of Bangladesh. In fact, it will only jeopardise the fate of Hindu minorities. India is right to be concerned about the fate of minorities in Bangladesh. But our interest in them is not humanitarian, it is also cut of a deeper communal cloth. India’s concern at the fate of minorities at this point is a bit like the US being concerned about the fate of international law.
Its entire ideological orientation is now towards majoritarianism and creating the conditions for conflict. The government literally finds a new pretext to needle minorities: Lynching, bulldozers, hate speech, normalising of prejudice, claiming more mosques and now the Waqf issue. The Waqf Board may need reform but that is not the point. The modus operandi of the government is to keep pushing minorities into disempowerment and marginalisation. This is an open playbook.
Ayodhya was not the satiation of Hindu nationalism. Because it was a victory achieved through sheer power, and not a political settlement, that playbook will now be generalised. The legitimation of violence and the degree of communal suffocation in India is at unprecedented levels. If those concerned about Bangladesh would admit this, their concern would come across as more sincere.
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The Pakistan story is, of course, familiar. In part, Hindutva takes inspiration from that story. Pakistan is an example of what happens when the meaning of religion becomes subordinated to maintaining the religious character of that state. The need for benchmarking a religious identity will constantly put all minorities at risk. In Pakistan all minorities are at risk, including Ahmadiyyas and Shias. The recent massacre in Kurram has a regional dimension, but it has a deep overlay of Shia-Sunni schism.
Pakistan has reached a point where the ideological basis of its state is bound to fail, or at best just stutter along. Overlay on top of that the gap between popular sentiment and the military’s legitimacy and you have the makings of a perpetual crisis. The need to benchmark the state to a religious identity, once it runs out of other minorities to target or cleanse, will turn on other groups. The only thing one can say about Pakistan is that its dark humour about its own potential dystopian state seems to be more potent and more openly critical than most people in India’s elites dare to be.
So, ironically in a deep ideological sense, these three countries are now once again tied at the hip. They are all potentially caught in a spiral where the identities they seek to craft as states will exacerbate conflict. India uses the fires in Pakistan and Bangladesh to shore up the claims of a Hindu state, and the “India” card is still a potent defining feature of their identity. There is only one abiding lesson in South Asian history: State sponsored religious nationalism will always turn authoritarian, and it will always destroy democracy and humanity.
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express
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