India and its neighbours have a shared responsibility to stop the terrorism

Pramudith D Rupasinghe

Curbing the resurgent terror fronts in South Asia is no longer a matter of one country’s internal law and order—it is a shared defence imperative, and the alternative is a deeper, more dangerous fracture along the line Partition first drew.

Eighty years after Lord Mountbatten’s pen redrew the map of South Asia, the wound of 1947 has never fully closed. It was reopened by the war in 1971, tested repeatedly by cross-border terrorism, and is now being pried at again—this time by a resurgence of jihadist symbolism, transnational militant networks, and intelligence rivalries that stretch from Rawalpindi to Dhaka to Kashmir. What is unfolding in Bangladesh over the past two years—reports of Hamas-linked gatherings, the mass production and public hoisting of al Qaeda, ISIS and Hamas flags, and allegations of a revived Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) playbook exploiting a fragile government—is not a Bangladesh problem alone. It is a subcontinental one and treating it as anything less is precisely how the crack Mountbatten left behind widens into a chasm.

A Wound Reopened, Not Created

Partition was never merely a border. It was an unfinished argument about who belongs where, an argument that has periodically been reignited by war, insurgency and, most corrosively, by the instrumentalisation of religious identity for strategic ends. Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment has, for decades, treated that unfinished argument as a resource—something to be reactivated whenever domestic weakness at home demands external distraction, or whenever a rival’s rise (first India’s, and now reportedly Bangladesh’s) needs blunting.