South Asia Archive

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing series about religious minorities in various countries around the world. On April 13, two lawmakers from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, resigned amid nationwide blowback over their public support for a group of Hindu men accused of the rape and murder of an 8-year-old Muslim girl. The party’s leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, broke his silence on the episode the same day, saying “no culprit will be spared.” The high-profile case has raised concerns about worsening intercommunal tensions in India under the right-wing, Hindu nationalist BJP. In January, Human […]

When the world’s fastest-growing refugee crisis barreled into a sleepy coastal town in southern Bangladesh last August, the prime minister in Dhaka pledged that her impoverished country would go without food if that was what it took to help the Rohingya fleeing violence from the army in Myanmar. Almost nine months later, that welcome is starting to wear thin as the exodus far exceeds past influxes of Rohingya refugees and settles into a prolonged, seemingly intractable situation, taxing one of the world’s poorest and most densely populated countries. Bangladesh, no stranger to the Myanmar military’s paroxysms of ethno-nationalist violence, has […]

In mid-March, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif traveled to Islamabad for a three-day visit, heading a 30-member Iranian delegation. During talks with Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, Zarif pledged to increase bilateral trade between Iran and Pakistan from around $1.16 billion today to $5 billion by 2021. They also discussed other areas of cooperation. In an email interview, Payam Mohseni, the director of the Iran Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, discusses how Iran and Pakistan’s mutual desire for a deeper relationship must contend with regional rivalries. WPR: What is the […]

The Maldives, a country known far more as a honeymoon hotspot in the Indian Ocean than as a hub of political crisis, is back to “business as usual,” according to its president, Abdulla Yameen, following the lifting of a 45-day state of emergency on March 22. But with one former president forced into exile, another joining two Supreme Court justices in indefinite detention, and 31 of 45 opposition lawmakers still either in jail or facing trial, it looks like anything but that. After weeks of unrest, the government of the Maldives has bought the current calm with the last dregs […]

In late March, Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena was in Pakistan for a three-day visit that included attending the country’s Republic Day celebrations as the guest of honor, a sign of deepening ties between the two South Asian nations. The visit was seen as an attempt to build on defense cooperation that has been especially strong since the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war. In an email interview, Michael Kugelman, the deputy director of the Asia Program and senior associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, discusses bilateral relations between Sri Lanka and Pakistan and […]