Balochistan to Kashmir

In 2025, two seemingly disconnected acts of violence shattered the illusion of stability in the region. In March, militants hijacked a passenger train near the Bolan Pass in Balochistan, executing soldiers in cold blood. A month later, gunmen in Kashmir’s Pahalgam Valley massacred tourists.

In both Islamabad and New Delhi, the reaction was reflexive: condemn the violence, blame external enemies, declare the situation contained. But South Asia’s leaders are not fighting terrorists alone. They are fighting the consequences of their own betrayals.

Across Balochistan, Kashmir, Manipur, and beyond, decades of enforced disappearances, broken promises, and brute militarisation have hollowed out the social contracts meant to hold these nations together. The grievances that drove rebellions from the 1940s through the 1990s – demands for dignity, recognition, and political agency – were never meaningfully addressed. They were buried beneath asphalt and propaganda, paved over by development projects and security checkpoints.

States may claim victory. But their victories are mirages, dissolving the moment anyone looks too closely. South Asia’s unfinished wars are not relics of a violent past. They are live ammunition, loaded into the future.

Balochistan has been at war with Pakistan for most of its modern history. Rich in gas, minerals, and coastline, the province has been plundered for decades under the language of national development.

Projects like the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) promise progress but deliver exclusion: minerals are mined, ports are secured, but Baloch homes are raided.

The insurgency endures not because of foreign conspiracies, as Islamabad endlessly insists, but because the Pakistani state remains incapable of seeing its Baloch citizens as anything other than a security problem to be managed.

In Kashmir, the Indian government claims to have “normalised” the valley after revoking its autonomy in 2019. It looks a lot like occupation. Soldiers outnumber local leaders, dissent is criminalised, internet shutdowns suffocate public life. Tourism campaigns and investment summits cannot erase a generation raised under curfew and surveillance.

Manipur’s descent into ethnic bloodshed in 2023 exposed another fault line Delhi prefers to ignore. Long-simmering tensions between the Meitei and Kuki communities erupted into violence that shattered any illusions of northeastern integration. The central government’s delayed, politicised response made clear what many Manipuris had always suspected: they are citizens of India only when convenient.

Even the Rohingya, stateless and exiled from Myanmar, find themselves entangled in South Asia’s ethnonationalist calculus. Fleeing genocide, they are criminalised anew in Bangladesh and India – trapped between the countries that reject them and the memories that refuse to let them go.

South Asia’s states have excelled at suppressing rebellion. But failed at extinguishing the reasons rebellions rise in the first place. And the wars South Asia tries to forget at home have found new life abroad.

Across Canada, Australia, Britain, and the United States, diasporic communities have become memory-keepers and, increasingly, the agitators for the struggles their home states would rather erase.

Khalistan flags fly outside Indian consulates in Vancouver and Melbourne. Tamil activists march through London, demanding accountability for the massacres in Mullivaikkal. Kashmiri protests in Washington and New York refuse to let India’s crackdown slip into diplomatic amnesia.

For host countries, these movements pose uncomfortable questions. Freedom of expression collides with fears of extremism. Clashes erupt between communities carrying wounds that their new homelands.

Meanwhile, South Asian states pursue their adversaries across borders. India faces allegations of targeting Sikh activists for assassination in Canada and the United States. Pakistan continues to court Kashmiri separatists abroad while crushing Baloch dissent at home. Sri Lanka lobbies furiously to brand Tamil diaspora organisations as fronts for terrorism, even as it stonewalls investigations into its own wartime atrocities.

The old insurgencies have not been defeated. They have been globalised. South Asia’s governments have long mistaken silence for stability.

In Punjab, India broke the back of the Khalistan insurgency through brute force. The fields grew green again, the trains ran on time. But the wounds were never closed, the movement’s heart beats not in Amritsar but in Brampton and Surrey.

In Sri Lanka, the military crushed the Tamil Tigers with overwhelming brutality in 2009. Tamil families still search for their missing, still mourn their dead – and still organise across the diaspora for justice that remains undelivered.

In Kashmir, Delhi boasts of new highways and investment corridors, showcasing the region as a trophy of unity. But when the visitors leave and the cameras are packed away, the checkpoints, the raids, and the quiet despair remain.

Victory parades fade. Grievance endures. Suppressing insurgency may end battles. It does not end the ideas that fueled them. In a region where history is rarely past, and memory is rarely voluntary, states that rule through repression are only ever buying time. And often, not very much.

South Asia’s unfinished wars are not accidents. They are the inevitable consequences of states that confuse conquest with consent, and erasure with reconciliation. They cannot legislate memory out of existence.

Every disappeared son in Balochistan, every half-widow in Kashmir, every refugee child born stateless in a Rohingya camp carries forward the memory of betrayal – a memory that outlives soldiers, politicians, and peace accords alike.

The region’s future will not be decided by GDP figures or infrastructure projects alone. It will be decided by whether its governments can summon the political courage to face the truths they have long suppressed – or whether they will continue down a path where forgetting is demanded, and rebellion becomes inevitable.

Shyam Tekwani is a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii. This article was originally published on DKI APCSS Security Nexus. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of DKI APCSS, the Department of Defense, or the US Government. The appearance of external hyperlinks does not constitute endorsement by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) of the linked websites, or the information, products, or services contained therein. DoD does not exercise any editorial, security, or other control over the information you may find at these sites.