Though the rise of religious violence has been a global phenomenon in the modern period, perhaps nowhere is the arena of competition among contest­ing religious and secular politics greater than in South Asia.

Recent decades have seen violence related to the rise of Hindu nationalism movements in India, the Muslim Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the militant Khalistan movement of Sikhs in India's Punjab, and Buddhism 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 globalisation that have buffeted South Asian politics in recent years.

More on the topic Though the rise of religious violence has been a global phenomenon in the modern period, perhaps nowhere is the arena of competition among contest­ing religious and secular politics greater than in South Asia.:

1. The Invention of Religious Politics in South Asia
2. This chapter examines robbery at sea as a long-standing global phenomenon, tracing patterns of waterborne violence as they developed in eastern and western seas from ancient to modern times, with an emphasis on the early modern period.
3. Religious values and secular politics
4. Religion and Violence in Modern South Asia
5. Doctrinal Justifications for Religious Violence in the Insei Period
6. THE SECULAR STATE AND RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY
7. South Asian Violence in Global Perspective
8. Religious Dynamics and the Politics of Violence in the Late Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Levant
9. Followers of Native American religions do not usually make stark distinctions between what is “religious” and what is “secular.”
10. Profanations: religious vs secular in the Temple of Western modernity
11. Communalism: Ethnic Violence in South Asia
12. Politics of Tribal Religious Identity
13. Religious violence
14. The South China Sea has been one of the busiest waterways in global his­tory; its pedigree is ancient, even as its modern geopolitical importance remains undisputed.
15. The theme ‘religion and violence' or ‘religious violence' gained worldwide attention after the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in 2001.1
16. Religious Revolts and Wars of Buddhist Peasants (Muromachi Period)
17. It is hard to dispute that the religious movement (or process of religious change) known as the European Reformation caused division and displace­ment on an unprecedented scale.[799]
18. Religious Violence and its Suppression
19. Organised Religious Violence
20. Religious Violence in the Early Twentieth Century