5 - Religion and Violence in Modern South Asia

Summary

Recent decades have seen the rise of violence related to Hindu nationalist movements in India, the Muslim Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the militant Khalistan movement of Sikhs in India’s Punjab, and Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in the region. These movements have competed in the context of a secular political order that was the legacy of British colonial rule, once embraced by founding leaders such as Pakistan’s Muhammad Ali Jinnah and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, who advocated the nationalism of ‘secularism and socialism’. Though each of these political ideologies has its own history and internal dynamics, each is also related to the others. They have arisen as mutual responses to one another and to the global influences of colonialism, transnational religion, and globalization that have buffeted South Asian politics in recent years.