South Asian Violence in Global Perspective
These movements of religious politics and their accompanying incidents of violence have persisted in what has come to be called the global era of the twenty-first century. It is a period in world history in which transnational forces challenge national institutions and communities, and in which the very notion of the nation state as the prime unit of world political order is being reassessed.
A critical aspect of contemporary globalisation is the de-nationalisation of demographic communities. Today everyone can live everywhere, and they often do. It is a phenomenon that affects the established societies of Europe as well as emerging nations of South Asia.Religion is often part of these far-flung globalised political discussions. And it can also be a factor in the immigrant communities' responses to their situations. In some cases the sense of alienation that immigrants experience is overcome by identifying with a struggle for a religious or ethnic nationalism back home. Paradoxically, the support for such movements can be even stronger in the diaspora than in the homeland. This was often the case with the Sikh Khalistan movement, which was monetarily supported by Sikh communities in the USA and the UK, where the symbols of the movement were created. The first currency printed in the name of Khalistan, for instance, was minted in England. The BJP also received widespread support from Hindus living abroad. Sri Lankans living abroad supported both sides of the struggle in Sri Lanka, especially in the UK, where Sinhalese Buddhists supported one side and Sri Lankan Tamils supported the other.
The global diaspora of ethnic and religious communities has also created something of a global backlash. Often the voices of support for such rightwing protests are strident; occasionally their political strength is substantial; and on some tragic occasions the rhetoric moves some desperate extremists to violent actions, even terrorism.
An attack in the United States in 2012 was aimed at a gurdwara (a Sikh temple) in the suburbs of Milwaukee, where a member of a racist Christian subculture killed seven, including himself.The killer, Wade Michael Page, thought he was preserving a pure American culture in the face of multicultural globalism. Ironically it was Sikhs - who in the 1980s were attacking the secular state of India to create their own religiously pure homeland - who were the targets of this Christian terrorist in America who saw them as a problem in his own notion of national purity.Thus the South Asian experience with religious politics - interesting in its own right - also is instructive about the rise of religious violence globally in the decades at the end of the twentieth and the start of the twenty-first centuries. Secularism as an ideology has not been seen as a neutral actor, it seems, either in South Asia or in other parts of the world where religious politics have often emerged as a response to what are perceived to be attempts to remove traditional aspects of religious culture from the public sphere. Hence the rise of religious politics in South Asia tells us much about this particular moment of late modernity, where it may well be not so much a passing fancy as a bellwether of new postmodern and postsecular identities and new forms of imagined transnational publics in a shifting global order that tragically is often violent.