According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, South Asia is home to more than one-third of the world’s people who are 'food insecure'. The never-ending battles between the two main political parties could also be manipulated in order to politically paralyze Bangladesh and render it ungovernable, with all of the attendant consequences that this could have for China’s Silk Road maritime investments. To explain, Indian media has taken the lead in promoting the idea that Sri Lanka is caught in a Chinese debt trap, pointing to the island nation’s large debt to Beijing and contrasting that with the visibly meager benefits that it’s brought to the population. In South Asia, there is little hope for any amity between India and Pakistan, or of them reaching a solution to longstanding issues such as Kashmir and border disputes. The early part of the 21st-century is witnessing an astronomically rapid rise of China as a global superpower, aided and abetted by a combination of factors that most importantly include the United State’s own strategic missteps in the Middle East and the benign win-win comprehensive partnerships that Beijing has clinched all across the “Global South”. The transformed US strategy towards Asia has already raised eyebrows and anxiety in Asia since it might affect peace and security in the region, and South Asia is not exempted from these wider strategic plans. A complex, great game of new geopolitics is on. The Union Budget of India for 2012-13 allowed a hike for defence, which already stands at US$ 40.44 billion. The new political developments in India’s Sri Lanka policy may well assist rather than hinder China in establishing its influence in Sri Lanka. Western analysts and strategists attach considerable importance to the demographic factor in terms of the changes in the geopolitical landscape. The Line of control also known as working boundary, divides Indian Kashmir from Pakistani Kashmir. According to the survey, China’s economic clout and influence in South East Asia is steadily rising, and it is significantly ahead of other competitors. The 13-point demand made by the HIB is almost similar to that of the Taliban. ISSUES IN SOUTH ASIA engagement between the two, barring perhaps a few minor border skirmishes in selected areas. Alongside this, New Delhi has also tried to persuade the world that Pakistan is too dangerous of a country to do business with, obsessing over its history of security challenges and even clandestinely backing the very same terrorists that it disingenuously blames for supposedly “ruining” the country’s prosperity. There are many factors and key stakeholders from within as well as outside the region contributing threats to human security and denial of justice and peace in South Asia. In thinking about the geopolitical reconstruction of Asia there are five key trends defining the past decade: the ongoing rise of China and India, the weakening of the US, the ongoing contest over defining an Asian regional identity, and the emergence of balancing against China. The more alarming trend of religious intolerance, religious extremism and politicisation of religion and religionisation of politics has been evident in India in recent years, especially a trend of Hindutva ideology is gaining momentum in Indian politics. India is landlocked from the west and the north by its hostile neighbours, Pakistan and China. These have killed significant numbers of al-Qaeda leaders and senior militant commanders of both the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban, but also scores of innocent civilians. Madrassas have now become the breeding grounds of religious extremism; the authorities failed to nip it in the bud and it has now gone out of control. Click here to sign up for free updates on topics like this. The implications of Pakistan’s unbridled population growth, KP minister blasts Bilawal for ex-FATA development remarks, Nestlé making women in rural Pakistan financially secure, Government Wins Chairman and Deputy Chairman Positions in Senate, Revolutionizing Pakistan through austerity and entrepreneurship, Pakistan’s incompatibility with Federal form of government, Prince William, Harry ‘in talks’ reportedly after Meghan Markle interview, $3.5 billion loss suffered by Kashmiris due to India’s military siege, Pakistan to UN, China successfully launches Long March-7A rocket on second attempt, Eye on China, Biden holds first summit of Quad alliance. The US prefers to maintain a stronger regional presence, whether through drones or Special Forces, than it ever did in the 1990s. Agriculture, rapid urbanisation, cooling of power plants, fracking of oil and gas wells all take water from a diminishing supply. As for the security angle about CPEC, Pakistan isn’t the destabilized state that India paints it as, but foreign entrepreneurs who aren’t aware of this might easily be scared away from trading with it as a result, which is exactly what New Delhi is hoping will happen. The scenario could see parts of the country internationally partitioned into broadly autonomous sub-state entities with de-facto independence via “Identity Federalism”, just like the two regions of Bosnia. Escalations of militarisation and arms-build up have been on the increase in South Asia in recent years where the increase in defence spending has now become another prevalent phenomenon. Russian…. Following the parliamentary elections held in early January this year, Bangladesh continues to face violence and political unrest. The region had four times as many battle deaths as the next-deadliest region, sub-Saharan Africa. It is now widely perceived that Bangladesh has fast become a new centre of terrorism under the BNP-Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI) government over the years, especially since a move to turn Bangladesh into a Wahabi Islamic country. Militant Hybrid War threats inside of the relevant regions of Myanmar such as Rakhine and Shan States could certainly disrupt CMEC, but the greatest danger comes from one of the likely scenarios for the civil war’s resolution. Read more: CPEC’s vulnerabilities: Can Pakistan carve a way out? Both countries have agreed to widen their defence and security ties and training cooperation between their militaries. The situations of ethnic conflict and sectarian violence in Myanmar's Rakhine and Shan states are examples of racial and religious intolerance plaguing a deeply fractured nation still struggling to emerge from half a century of military rule. In this context, the question raised by M.J. Akbar is pertinent: “Indians and Pakistanis are the same people, but why have the two countries moved on two different trajectories? Internal security problems in South Asian countries and their ramifications for regional security are influenced by the overwhelming asymmetry in power relations among South Asian countries. At the same time, both India and China have a common interest in stabilizing Afghanistan, mainly for their economic advantages. Over the years, governments in these countries, whether democratically elected or military, have used religion, ethnicity and caste in order to strengthen their base and maintain their power. At the same time, India extended only a total assistance of US $1.45 billion between 2007 and 2012; of this amount, $1.12 billion was loan assistance and 326 million were grants. During the same period, the Indian government allowed the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to set up its office in Delhi. They also claimed that Pakistan had a right to act as the king-maker in Afghanistan, since it had played a dominant role in forcing the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. That’s blatantly false; but the advantage that “infowars” have over other types of warfare is that they don’t have to relate to anything objectively real, they just have to appear convincing and prompt the desired responses from one’s target audience. Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka are countries in which India has knowingly or unknowing abandoned its strategic space to China over the years. Last year, Nepal's highest-ranking military officer returned from China with many promises. When political tensions spilled over into violence, hundreds of people lost their lives. Having completed a review of OBOR’s mainland South Asian projects, it’s now time to touch upon its maritime dimensions; such as the inroads that China is making in Bangladesh, particularly its port of Chittagong. South Asia, one of the most heavily populated and diverse regions on the planet, has a common and shared cultural background and experience. Nowadays, external players such as the US and India are supporting former, President Mohamed Nasheed in his incipient Color Revolution against the incumbent President Abdulla Yameen, thus demonstrating an interplay of political and military pressure against Chinese interests. As regards water-sharing, what all three countries have in common is the dominant attitude of India. Moreover, these countries are facing an unprecedented increase in religious extremism, intolerance and religious conflicts. It is a product of privately funded madrassas supported by radical Islamist groups from outside and inside, especially the JEI. The framework agreement on India-US Defence Relations signed in Washington on 8 July 2005 was a major step to harness India to serve the US strategic goals in Asia. Mustansar Hussain Tasir is geopolitical, a regional security analyst based in Islamabad, Pakistan. Ultimately, the route will link the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor to the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Corridor, which will improve the standard of living of the majority of inhabitants. India successfully tested another Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, Agni V, in April last year; this has the capacity of blowing up targets at a distance of 5,500 kilometres and beyond. Since final approval of the US-India nuclear deal in 2008, which effectively legitimized India as a nuclear power, naval cooperation between the two countries has increased. The driving idea behind this strategy isn’t to “subvert” India but to strengthen its complex economic interdependence with China so as to make any American-encouraged provocations against Beijing’s interests equally counterproductive to New Delhi’s own vested interests. With nuclear tests conducted both in India and Pakistan, there was a major geopolitical upheaval, attracting international attention and intervention in the region. Every South Asian state with the exception of Bhutan is part of one or the other Silk Road plan, though, out of all of them, India has the distinction of being the only country that is against this multipolar cooperative effort. The growing trend of religious intolerance and religious conflicts hinder peace and communal harmony. The increasing trend towards a politics of violence and extremism in South Asia is mainly the result of faulty national policies. In addition, the USA’s interest in the end of the ongoing ethnic conflicts in Sri Lanka was not viewed as an act of a real concern or a genuine search for conflict-resolution, but as being mainly due to a special interest in establishing a naval base in Trincomalee, the world’s third-largest natural harbour. It is likely that most readers are well aware of the Afghan-based terrorist threats (like TTP & ISIS) that afflict the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Balochistan, but these elements could also be extended to destabilize Gilgit-Baltistan as well. Out of this, about $4.76 billion or 94 per cent was extended during the period from 2005 to 2012, according to the Sri Lanka Ministry of Finance and Planning’s External Resources Department’s 2012 report. China has also been claiming Tawang, home of an ancient Buddhist monastery, in Arunachal Pradesh. Ethnic and religious conflicts and violence kill people in different parts of Pakistan almost every day. Why China added The Belt & Road Initiative to its Constitution? Unsurprisingly, he and his movement are presently being utilized to wage a low-intensity multidimensional proxy war designed to create a climate of uncertainty that could ward off future investments. Rather than inherently opposing the strikes, its leadership, in particular its military, seeks greater control over target selection. China, which has long been ambivalent about the Taliban, not least due to its own problems with its Muslims majority in the Xinjiang region, will play both ends. This strong growth, according to the World Bank, has translated into declining poverty and remarkable advances in human development. The Army is equipped with Chinese tanks, the Navy with Chinese frigates and missile boats and the Air Force with Chinese fighter jets. Russian…, “We can think about renaming CPEC” China offers India, West Bengal Is The Bottleneck Of India’s “Act East” Strategy, Will the Chinese string of pearls policy allow it to dominate…, India is wrong to accuse IRGC for attack on Israeli embassy. Human pressures together with changing hydrology and land resources have distinct impact on the production of food grain and resilience of ecosystems. This ambitious initiative aims to expand China’s mainland and maritime trade routes to the furthest corners of the world, solidify them in terms of tangible connective infrastructure projects that unleash its partners’ full economic potential, and ultimately use this new network as the basis for constructing multipolar institutions to complement, compete with, and then finally replace their existing unipolar counterparts. It’s this latter group that was previously instrumentalized by India during the events of late 2015, in order to pressure the new federal government to redraw its internal borders, to give the “Mad- hesis” extraordinarily broad autonomy and enhanced political power in the state. In fact, India was the only country to decline attending the OBOR Summit in May 2017, supposedly due to its opposition to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) transiting through the Pakistani province of Gilgit-Baltistan, that New Delhi claims as its own, as per the country’s maximalist approach to the Kashmir conflict. Why should the civil society be concerned about the concept of geopolitics? China has been claiming some 90,000 sq. Chinese language teaching and cultural spread are also in the pipeline, especially through the initiative of opening a Confucius Centre in Colombo. The country was under military rule for 15 years. It should be assumed that the Himalayan Silk Road will not extend to either West Bengal or Bangladesh so long as the Indian government remains vehemently opposed to OBOR, so the possibility of overland connectivity between Bangladesh and China should be precluded for all practical intents and purposes. Due to India’s strategic blunder of neglecting its smaller neighbours or leaving their concerns unattended, these countries are now more under the influence of China. As for nearby Sri Lanka and the Maldives, these two island nations sit along the Sea Lines of Communication (SLOC) that connect East Asia with the African, Middle Eastern, and European marketplaces, though their Silk Road importance will relatively lessen with time once CPEC begins rerouting these trans-oceanic trade networks to Gwadar and thenceforth to the Chinese mainland. When control over natural resources by local and multinational companies is taken by force, the original owners of the land, especially the indigenous communities, are driven out of their ancestral lands. external power in South and East Asia. This is often to punish enemies, but sometimes, allegedly, to protect militants who enjoy good relations with, or support from, the military – leaders of the Haqqani network, for example, or some Pakistani Taliban groups with whom the military has made peace deals. The pre-eminence of India in the South Asian region has been contested by its regional archrival Pakistan. South Asia covers diversified climatic zones and experiences an array of climate change impacts. South Asia is the least economically integrated region in the world, with regional trade accounting for only 5% of the overall trade. Ethnic Muslims have been the victims since the violence began in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state last year, and this has now spread to eastern Myanmar’s Shan state. China is investing a multi-billion-dollar project to develop hydro-power in Nepal. During the visit of Chinese leaders last year to Delhi, they spoke of “strategic” and “maturing” relations of mutual trust and of China's and India's shared regional interests. This archipelago state experienced a severe Hybrid War crisis in late 2015 when riots, violence, and assassination attempts engulfed the normally peaceful country, but the opposition still failed to seize power even under those circumstances. According to Robert M. Cutler – a scholar of Political Science at Carleton University, the terms South Asia, Southwest Asia, and Central Asia are distinct, but the confusion and disagreements have arisen due to the geopolitical movement to enlarge these regions into Greater South Asia, Greater Southwest Asia, and Greater Central Asia. If we want to meaningfully speak of ‘geopolitics’ in South Asia, the term’s essence and complexity need to be unpacked contextually to go beyond the settings of traditional and conceptual definitions. There are two ways that India has been engaging with the region in terms of geopolitical strategy. Geopolitics is also centred on the social and political relationships formed among people and their countries. World Bank reports claim that South Asia has experienced a long period of robust economic growth, averaging 6 per cent a year over the past 20 years. When the US decided to make Pakistan the frontline state and ally against the war on terror, the BJP-led government came forward to propose India as a junior partner for US strategic interests in the region. Pakistan hopes that it can reinsert the Taliban into a position of primacy in Afghanistan and it will push hard in this direction, but it will have to face difficulties. In 2011, China assisted Pakistan in successfully launching Pakistan’s communication satellite, Paksat-1R, into space from its Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in Sichuan province. This hostile state of affairs is very unbecoming for a nominal BRICS “ally”, that India is supposed to be. CPEC’s vulnerabilities: Can Pakistan carve a way out? Read more: “We can think about renaming CPEC” China offers India. The youth-led movement took up five cases of violence against women and helped sensitise society and the political leadership around this issue; this is a positive sign of growing awareness and of a people’s resistance movement. As China established an intelligence-gathering station on Great Coco Island in Myanmar in 1992 to monitor Indian naval activity in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, free access to Chittagong port will have the additional value of inter-linking its electronic listening systems at Coco Island. By virtue of its sheer size, India has the advantage in controlling regional water resources it shares with other countries in the region. The number of people living on less than $1.25 a day fell in South Asia from 61 to 36 per cent between 1981 and 2008. Beginning with the most important one, CPEC is the flagship of the entire OBOR vision and will crucially allow China to connect with the Afro-Indian Ocean upon its completion, thereby detouring around the bottlenecked Strait of Malacca and liberating the People’s Republic from the strategic blackmail that the US Navy is presently exerting on it. From China’s perspective, Southeast Asia is attractive, vulnerable and nearby. Yet, the peace and security of South Asia are by no means wholly assured. These countries are characterised by multi-ethnic societies with striking internal divisions along ethnic, linguistic, regional, communal and sectarian lines. It has the world’s largest working-age population, a quarter of the world’s middle-class consumers and the largest number of poor and undernourished people in the world. The end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, especially the collapse of the global bipolar geopolitical structure, changed the geopolitical contours of South Asia too. The increased volatility in Bangladesh politics makes it likely that religious extremism will grow in the coming days. Besides this, Bangladesh still has a bundle of Hybrid War problems within its own borders, such as the trend towards terrorism that’s turning the country into “Bangla-Daesh”. The main geopolitical challenges in Asia will concern relations between the U.S., Japan, and China. Attacks against religious minorities is the Wahhabi/Moududi creed of non-tolerance of any other religion. kms of Arunachal Pradesh as its own and this has become a constant source of tension in China-India relations. Framing CPEC as “Punjab-centric” and a form of “neo-colonialism”, however, aren’t helpful in any way, but addressing the deal-making shortcomings that inevitably pop up when pioneering a $65 billion series of investments could prevent a repeat of those same experiences. This suspicion stems from China’s strengthened territorial claims in both the South China Sea and East China Sea, including rapid land reclamation to enlarge the islands and reefs in the South China Sea that alarmed the other claimant states, the US and Japan, and the militarisation of claimed islands, through the deployment of anti-aircraft missile systems on Woody Island. In addition, the communist coalition that recently won the country’s elections is regarded as being friendly to China, and India could try to sow distrust and division between these previously feuding groups in its drive to redirect the Nepalese government away from its balancing strategy and back towards its erstwhile sole dependency on New Delhi. China’s more assertive territorial claims caused anxiety recently in several of the South East and North East Asian countries as did the provocative strategy applied in the case of its territorial claim with India. Now the dynamics is changed. Religion has re-emerged as a dominant factor in geopolitics and national and international politics. The religious dimensions of the Sri Lankan Civil War still continue to affect post-war reconstruction and reconciliation as ethnicity and religion are intertwined. His book, “Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change”, extensively analyzes the situations in Syria and Ukraine and claims to prove that they represent a new model of strategic warfare being waged by the US. Read more: West Bengal Is The Bottleneck Of India’s “Act East” Strategy. It is sufficient to point out that all of the South Asian states, that host China’s OBOR projects, satisfy the criteria of being diverse in the ethnic, religious, historical, socio-economic, geographic & administrative or political sense, thus making them vulnerable to Hybrid Wars. The nature of armed conflicts in certain other contexts concern power- sharing incompatibility over territory and governance as well as exploitation of natural resources by private, state-sponsored or multinational companies. By 2013, the People’s Republic realized that it would have to affect permanent institutional and economic change, in the region around it, if it was to stand any chance of retaining its newfound position in the face of growing American opposition to its worldwide role, which is why President Xi announced his country’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) global vision of New Silk Road connectivity. He is a scholar at School of Politics and IR, Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad. Yet geopolitical realities have many other strings attached to the issues normally identified or included within the classical framework of the definition of geopolitics. China’s economic strength has been transforming its position in the world in different ways and this is more evident in South Asia too. India is encouraging the population to have unrealistic expectations about the Chinese investments in their island, and then guiding them towards anti-Chinese discontent when these false hopes are dispelled. This is a timeline of country and capital changes around the world since 1900. The withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan will soon affect the military balance between Pakistan, India and China, and this will have wider geopolitical and geo-strategic ramifications in this sub-region. The Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and South America are facing chronic water shortages because of decades of bad management, waste or overuse. To the contrary, the situation still remains tense in some of the borderland regions, with the conflict in northern Rakhine State being the most prominent among them. This thorny issue perpetuates South Asia’s geopolitical asymmetry, and external powers have been using this rift for their own gains. Similar figures for China’s and the US’s population is a matter of concern for the geopolitical situation in South Asia. There are many phrases in Chinese that characterize the “Nanyang” (“South … Following the 5 January election, Hindus and their worship places were attacked by the JEI and BNP in Pabna, Faridpur, Lalmonirhat and Khagrachari districts. The aspiring leader (Nasheed) also promised to reconsider his country’s involvement in the Silk Road. Even so, the risk for Hybrid War is still high in Baluchistan, because of the internal dangers stemming from this region, particularly with regard to the separatist sentiment that can be stoked by externally based social media agitators, with defined targets, in order to encourage terrorist attacks. Various water-sharing treaties exist in South Asia, for example, the Indus Water Treaty between India and Pakistan; the India-Bangladesh dispute over the Ganges River; and an India and Nepal sharing arrangement regarding the Mahakali river waters. The passage of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 2013 and the Sexual Harassment of Women in the Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 were positive signs that affirm the faith in legal systems. China sees its foothold in Bangladesh as a part of its quest to establish its regional power profile; and as a means to challenge India in its own backyard. Over the past twenty years, the concept of human security has become dominant. This has given a momentum to the arms race and has further destabilized the region. Women and the minorities have no rights. The growing military relations between China and Bangladesh have regional security implications and Dhaka is now heavily depending on Beijing for its defence requirements and development needs. The sub-region remains paradoxical in many ways. The politics of Bangladesh has been volatile for long time. The influx of small arms and narcotics are considered as major reasons for several conflicts and violence. President Rajapaksa’s strategy now is to favour China as a counterweight to reduce his dependence on India, especially when India’s Sri Lanka policy is so heavily influenced by the strong anti-Sri Lankan flavour of Tamil Nadu politics. From a base in Chittagong, it will be easy for China to monitor Indian missile tests at Chandipur-at-sea near Balasore on the Indian east coast and also to monitor India’s naval activity in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. In the midst of growing uncertainty and political stalemate in Bangladesh, the usually moderate and tolerant country has been facing an increasing trend of religious extremism. lack of 'region-ness' in South Asia can also be understood in terms of another related phenomenon, that is, the persistence of myriad social, economic and political problems in practically each and every South Asian state. Sixty-six years after the partition of India, the tension in Indo-Pak relations still continues. Although this threat eventually subsided and didn’t develop into a second civil war, the prospect nevertheless remains for it to do so at a future time. Today, South Asia’s human security is threatened and hampered due to various factors. That’s why these two states still occupy a significant place in China’s Silk Road geopolitics and will continue to do so in the future. To that end, China naturally envisions the neighboring South Asian region as a launching pad for many of its OBOR projects. It is important that people at ever strata of society must take a keen interest in understanding the emerging geopolitical contexts of every situation as these emerging trends and issues are intensifying dehumanisation at various levels of society. His other areas of focus include tactics of regime change, color revolutions and unconventional warfare used across the world. The Hatf VII cruise missile has a range of 700 kilometres (440 miles), can carry conventional warheads and has stealth capabilities. He specializes in Russian affairs and geopolitics, specifically the US strategy in Eurasia. Indeed, matters have taken a turn for the worse following the attack last year on Indian border guards in Pathankot, and subsequently Uri, by alleged Pakistani militants. Religion is returning to the centre-stage in the civil and political life of almost all South Asian nations. Moving eastward and keeping to the mainland for the moment, the next most relevant project could colloquially be called the Himalayan Silk Road, which reflects China’s desire to expand its high-speed railway system from the Tibet Autonomous Region to landlocked Nepal, with the potential opportunity to possibly even one day stretch it to India’s West Bengal port of Kolkata or Bangladesh. 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