From Pakistan there is mixed news. Recent headlines on the country juxtaposed with news from India prompts the thought that the kind of fascism that Pakistanis have been fighting against is now erupting across India. The encouraging news from Pakistan includes its second award at the Oscars, the execution of convicted killer Mumtaz Qadri (arguments against the death penalty notwithstanding) despite the militant rightwing support for him, and the recovery of the kidnapped son of Qadri's victim Salmaan Taseer, killed for alleged blasphemy. The bad news includes the horrific suicide attack, allegedly by Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan Jamaatul Ahrar, on Gulshan-i-Iqbal Park in Lahore on 27 March 2016.
From India, the bad news includes a spate of attacks by the cultural rightwing on Muslims, Dalits, intellectuals and rationalists over recent months. As a result, dozens of Indian intellectuals have returned state-awards in protest against the government's silence – or complicity – in such attacks. These rightwing attacks on free speech sparked student protests across the country; the harassment of the Dalit students and the suicide of Rohith Vemula at Hyderabad Central University (HCU) fed into the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) crisis, where police, in February, arrested the President of the student union and five other students on charges of sedition. The current trend in India of sedition allegations and chest-thumping nationalism willing-to-kill for perceived dishonor to nationhood is particularly worrying for Southasians who believe in democratic values.
It appears sedition has become the new blasphemy – where the possibility or even threat of such an accusation frames political discourse. Blasphemy in Pakistan and sedition in India are two faces of the same hyper-nationalist coin. But this conflation of nationalism with religion is not new in the region, and goes back to Partition. As Pakistan was carved out as a 'homeland for Indian Muslims', the Hindu population in India, an already Hindu-majority country (albeit one that developed a secular constitution) increased in proportion to its Muslims.
Pakistani leaders established nationhood on the basis of religion – the main factor distinguishing it from India – and they built a narrative entwining Islam and patriotism. Though, rightwing forces in India tried to do the same with Bharat Mata and Hinduism, they were kept in check by the secular constitution as well as the long running democratic political process. Southasians have seen such insidious mix of religion and politics all too often, in Pakistan (blasphemy murders since 1992) and Bangladesh (attacks on atheist bloggers over the last couple of years). In India too there have been horrific bloodbaths on the pretext of religious and nationalistic pride (massacre of Sikhs in 1984, Muslims in Gujarat, 2002 among others). And, of course, 1947 when India and Pakistan's birth were marred by the murder, abduction and rape of millions on either side of the newly demarcated border that partitioned Punjab and Bengal.