By John Dayal
India suddenly finds itself lonely in its vast south Asian subcontinent home. The neighborhood is in ferment. And there are fears that Islamic ideologies will dominate regional politics, and the security debate, for the first time since the British carved it up in 1947 on Hindu-Muslim population figures.
A focus on post-colonial economic development efforts to improve the human index had so far kept most countries in various stages of democratic evolution.
Friction and violence between ethnic and religious communities existed. But had seemed minimal compared to the genocidal magnitude of partition violence in 1947, and two civil wars. The one in 1971 created Bangladesh in what was East Pakistan. In Sri Lanka, it was between the majority Sinhala and the Tamils of the north and east of the island that began early in the 1980s and eventually ended thirty years later.
Bangladesh premier Sheikh Hasina had survived the coup in 1975 in which her father Bangabandhu Mujibur Rehman and almost his entire family were assassinated. She had taken refuge in India from where she returned years later to rule her country for close to twenty years, winning four elections as the head of the Awami League.
She was back in India late in the evening of Aug. 5, fleeing a mass uprising of the people, and on board a military transport plane, escorted by the Indian Air Force once she left Bangladesh airspace.
She is lucky to be alive. Her home was ravaged soon thereafter, and in what would have seemed blasphemous a day earlier, her father’s iconic statue was torn down in visuals reminiscent of the fall of Iraq’s Saddam Hussain. Mujib was no dictator. He was the father of the new nation.”India does not have a warm relationship with Zia and is positively hostile to the Jamaat”
The million or so young men and women, students, unemployed and just sheer angry, currently rule the roads in the capital Dhaka, and major cities such as Chittagong. These are children and grandchildren of the men, among them the few intellectuals, who survived the Pakistan army’s targeted terror on universities and academic and scientific establishments.
However, the manic way in which they tore down the statue of the founder leads many to think the values of the freedom struggle of 1971 may not have a sobering effect on their ideological mood.
India fears the Bangladesh Nationalist Party of former prime minister, Begum Khaleda Zia, may partner with Jamaat e Islami and other groups to eventually gain control of the country with an avowedly Islamic agenda.
The Jamaat has seen many of its leaders hanged by the Hasina government for colluding with the Pakistani army in genocide, mass raping, and war crimes in 1971. India does not have a warm relationship with Zia and is positively hostile to the Jamaat.
With early reports from Hindu and Christian groups in Bangladesh that they fear massive persecution in the coming days, India also fears a large-scale influx not only of the usual economic migrants but this time of many Hindus and Christians.
To “punish” Muslim migrants, the Narendra Modi government had tweaked citizenship laws to immediately integrate any Sikh, Christian, or Hindu who enter India from Bangladesh and Pakistan. Modi may like them if they are not Muslims, but his party men who rule in Assam and Tripura, both bordering Bangladesh, do not want any migrants, whatever their religion.
That is their policy in Myanmar where they support the military junta, despite its jailing of the political leadership. India had once nurtured another young woman who was a refugee in Delhi after the assassination of her famous father — Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi remains under house arrest, and human rights in her country are in limbo.
Myanmar army campaigns in the north and the west of the country have displaced several hundred thousand indigenous tribal people, many of them Christian, who have been seeking sheer in the Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur, where they face violence at the hands of the politically powerful Meitei majority community, and the state police.
Bhutan is politically quiescent. Nepal, its neighbor and India’s too, is politically volatile. It has just seen a change in government with KP Sharma Oli once again as prime minister.
Nepal and Bhutan are aggressively courted by China, which is building much-needed road and bridge infrastructure for them. The same roads also bring forward Beijing’s military elements very close to India’s borders.
Nepal, which has in recent years shown its anger at heavy-handed and patronizing Indian foreign policy and development aid, is currently annoyed because India is stopping the recruitment of Nepalese citizens for its “Gurkha” regiments.
These are the same Gurkha clans who were recruited by the United Kingdom and are currently guarding Buckingham Palace and King Charles in London. Their remittances are much needed in the small landlocked Himalayan nation.
It is in its western neighborhood that India finds alarming developments that it fears escalate threats to its security, but also have a major impact on its domestic situation.
With Afghanistan now firmly in the talons of the Taliban, India has for the first time in two and a half decades found itself without any interlocutor in Kabul. It still has some international development projects in Afghan districts, but they do not plug the routes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir which brings arms and militants to India’s vulnerable districts of Jammu and Kashmir.
Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country with a population of around 220 million, has been in turmoil since the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf government of former international cricketer Imran Khan was sacked. The military remains the power behind the government which it helped cobble together after the fractured results of the general election. Khan is in jail, and his party is without power.
The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) led by Shehbaz Sharif is ruling in coalition with the Pakistan People’s Party founded by the late Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and currently helmed by his son-in-law Asif Ali Zardari, the current president of the republic, and grandson Bilawal Bhutto Zardari.
Pakistan faces continuous threats from terrorist groups like Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and ISIS-K. Bombings and terrorist attacks are frequent, with observers saying there were some 250 incidents in 2023, resulting in over 500 deaths.
At least 15 people were on death row for blasphemy, a law often misused to target minorities.
The Indian government rates Pakistan as its biggest threat, not so much for its military strength backed both by China and the US, as for its hand in terrorism in the Indian Punjab and the northern districts of what was once the state of Jammu and Kashmir and has since been downgraded to the status of two union territories administered by lieutenant governors who are assisted by police, bureaucrats and army commanders.
The political response by the Modi government and the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party is not just to sharply raise the military presence in the north, but also to use the Unlawful Activities Act and other draconian laws against several groups of people elsewhere in the country. Muslim youth, university students, and activists are the main targets.
The political rhetoric has also sharpened the Islamophobic temperature within the country, resulting in acrimonious election campaigns. The current parliament sees a much-sobered Narendra Modi with a minority of 240 seats in a coalition government. But there has been little toning down of the religious and nationalist rhetoric which is taking its toll on religious minorities in the country.
To add insult to injury, the Maldives, the tiny country of atolls in the Indian Ocean, with a population of about 530,000, has sharpened its Islamic identity and has told India to remove every vestige of its military presence from its soil.
The Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan too, are warm with China.
India has a very complex relationship with China. It has replaced China as the most populous country in the world, but its dependence on China has increased. Despite hostility along its northern and eastern borders, India’s economy is plugged deeply into China’s superior infrastructure in electronics and digital technology. Its defense equipment, some say, may have a quarter of its critical components from China.
But Modi has taken India firmly into the United States security structures in the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It is called Quad, the acronym for Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. Quad members, including the United States, Japan, India, and Australia, have articulated a “shared vision for a Free and Open Indo-Pacific” and a “rules-based maritime order in the East and South China seas” to counter Chinese maritime claims.
This multilateral coalition challenges China’s strategy by potentially unifying resistance across the Indo-Pacific. The Quad coordinates its tactics with the US Pacific Deterrence Initiative, including land-based anti-ship missiles in allied countries. There are plans, according to reports, toward an intelligence-sharing arrangement with the “Five Eyes” partnership focused on China.