The bloody road to today's borders in South Asia - and how to move in the direction of peace

From the partition of British India to the civil war in Sri Lanka, attempts  to impose national borders in accordance with ethnic, linguistic, or religious identities in South Asia have spawned wars and crimes against humanity. They have also resulted in  almost unimaginable suffering and bloodshed from the mid-20th century until today: Hindu nationalists in India launch physical attacks against Christians and especially Muslims, falsely accusing them of carrying out fraudulent conversions, duping Hindu women into marriage, and cow slaughter; in Pakistan, religious minorities, including minority Muslim sects, are accused of blasphemy and often killed; rationalists in Bangladesh have been lynched; and minorities in Sri Lanka are being persecuted by Sinhala nationalists, who have forcibly cremated Muslim victims of Covid-19. Such attempts are all the more preposterous in a region where migration and the mixing of peoples and cultures have been occurring from time immemorial. As an activist who comes from Sri Lanka and lives in India, I have been involved in campaigns in both countries against the toxic ideologies and restrictive ethno-religious  identities – Hindu, Muslim, Sinhalese, Tamil – that cultivate much of this violence.