South Asia faces a defining crisis. What appears as a sudden theocratic surge is no accident, it's the logical endpoint when democracies fail the desperate. The Taliban now bans girls from school. India's Hindu nationalist movement scapegoats 200 million Muslims for unemployment and food shortages it created. And Bangladesh stands at the precipice, watching Jamaat-e-Islami which is ideologically committed to theocracy position itself as salvation.

The pattern is not new. It's cyclical. It's weaponizable. And it's about to reshape the region.

Afghanistan: The Systemic Erasure Of Women's Voices

Since August 2021, the Taliban has systematized marginalization through over 70 written decrees affecting over 2.2 million women. Girls cannot attend secondary school, making Afghanistan the only country on earth with such a ban. Universities are closed to women. Entire majors are forbidden as their content Is being rewritten under an islamic framework including: journalism, law, economics and women's studies, even banning all books written by women from Afghan Universities.

The brutality is precise because it's ideological. The justification for such a ban rotates from "temporary," "pending suitable environments," with promises renewed year after year. Each delay is incompetence by design, beginning with a slow strangulation of possibility. When girls cannot learn, they cannot question. When mothers are uneducated, entire generations inherit constraint.​

This is not just primitive rule. It's the industrialization of helplessness.

India: Corruption With A Religious Mask

In India, The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) unified the Hindu vote through a weaponized narrative that Indian poverty, unemployment and mass hunger is structural failure due to Muslim infiltration. This reframing worked. Modi swept to power in 2014 with an unprecedented Hindu voting bloc consolidated around religious identity rather than caste, class, or ideology.​

But the governance that followed revealed the truth. By 2024, 46% of Members of Parliament carried declared criminal cases. Food insecurity worsened and Youth unemployment remains catastrophic. The promise of democratized "development" evaporated. What remained was the narrative.​

The ruling party weaponized anti-terrorism and anti-corruption laws against political opponents, arresting activists like Umar Khalid who has been in jail without trial for over 5 years. Media channels tightened their alignment. Hindu nationalist organizations (the RSS, the Sangh Parivar) penetrated education, culture, and administrative systems with explicit government blessing. Courts bent while Journalists faced threats to their lives and raids in their homes.​

Hindutva—Hindu nationalism—became the answer to every failure of the state. It promised pride when delivery failed. It promised purpose where opportunity disappeared. And crucially, it offered someone to blame: Muslims, the "other," the scapegoat upon which all dysfunction could be hung.

This is not incidental to corruption but the reason it functions. Religious nationalism is the perfect smoke screen for institutional rot.

Bangladesh: The Crossroads That Could Either Make Or Break The Nation

In July 2024, Bangladesh erupted. Students protesting a government job quota system sparked a nationwide uprising that killed over 1,400 people, the bloodiest upheaval in Bangladesh since the 1971 independence war. Ousted prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, guilty of authoritarian crackdowns, crimes against humanity, and widespread corruption, fled to India. An interim government led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus took power with a mandate to reset the system.​

Three weeks into that interim government, in August 2024, Yunus lifted the ban on Jamaat-e-Islami. The party is Bangladesh's largest Islamist organization, historically opposed to the nation's independence from Pakistan even though Bangladeshi's were racially segregated due to color and treated as second class citizens.​​

On the surface, this appeared pragmatic. The ban on Jamaat was politically motivated, enacted by Sheikh Hasina in her final days. Yunus framed its removal as correcting institutional overreach.

The Concern however is that Jamaat-e-Islami's party charter still envisions replacing Bangladesh's constitutional secular order with Sharia-based governance. When asked to engage with reform proposals, the party proposed removing the word "pluralistic" from Bangladesh's constitution, the word that enshrines the nation's multireligious, multiethnic identity and replacing it with explicit "absolute trust and faith in Allah." Senior party leaders have also made contradictory statements about how far Islamic law should extend into governance, raising alarms about whether their recent claims of supporting minority rights reflect genuine reform or tactical repositioning.​

Within weeks of the ban's lifting, violence erupted. Between August 2024 and December 2025, thousands of incidents of violence against religious minorities have been recorded. Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and Ahmadis faced targeted attacks, mob violence, vandalism of temples, forced conversions and even arson. Some incidents were politically motivated revenge by remaining Hasina supporters. Much was religiously driven.

Then came the allegations of blasphemy. A Hindu Bangladeshi accused of insulting Islam was stripped, set on fire. The accusation was enough. The mob required nothing more.

Bangladesh's blasphemy laws are inherited colonial statutes that criminalize insults to religion and have evolved to become tools for extrajudicial violence. Minorities learned that religious law of any kind means your safety depends on the goodwill of the majority, and goodwill is always conditional.​

How Democratic Collapse Becomes Theocratic Rise

This is where the three stories converge into a single, terrifying pattern.

Failed democracies don't die in a climactic moment. They suffocate slowly, then die in plain sight while the world watches something else. In South Asia, the sequence is now legible.

First comes collapse of material hope. Food insecurity. Unemployment. Underemployment. Failed schools. Hospitals without medicines. Infrastructure that decays faster than it can be repaired. Governments that promise development but deliver theft. In Bangladesh, this played out for decades, the Awami League's corruption, Indian interference, institutional stagnation. In India, the promise of Modi's "development" evaporated into cronyism and widening inequality. In Afghanistan, war & the threat of violence itself is the material condition.

Second comes political exhaustion. When democratic institutions fail to deliver justice or accountability, citizens stop believing in them. Bangladeshi voters repeatedly elected "secular leaders" who promised reform and delivered only different forms of corruption. Indian voters, even those who rejected the BJP in 2014, saw little alternative that challenged the fundamental system. Afghans never had a stable democracy to lose. The exhaustion is the realization of citizens that the system itself is rigged.

Third comes the appeal of the absolute. When the world feels chaos-bound and institutions are untrustworthy, binary frameworks gain power. Jamaat-e-Islami doesn't present as "another political party offering modest reforms." It presents as transcendence, submission to "divine law" as a way to resolve chaos. Hindutva doesn't say "we'll make incremental improvements." It says "we will restore the Hindu nation to its true power." And the worst of all, the Taliban doesn't negotiate, it commands its citizens. These movements succeed because they offer certainty in times of radical uncertainty, presenting itself as word from beyond the earthly corruption that has betrayed everyone.

Religious fundamentalism, in this context, is not a return to the past. It's a desperate lunge for order when every rational path has failed.

Fourth comes the targeting of minorities. This is where the cycle becomes vicious rather than merely tragic. Minorities, religious, ethnic, sexual and intellectual become the scapegoats upon which majority anxiety is displaced. In India, Muslims are blamed for Hindu poverty. In Bangladesh, Hindus & other minorities are blamed for cultural pollution (or sexual transgression, or alleged blasphemy as the charge rotates). In Afghanistan, women's existence itself becomes a problem to be solved. With minorities blamed, violence becomes a form of problem-solving. Kill the scapegoats, the logic goes, and apparently order returns.

Fifth comes the insurgency. When one group is made to feel small enough, when they have little left to lose, they organize. They pick up arms. They form terror networks. In Kashmir, decades of Indian military occupation, arbitrary arrest, torture, and humiliation created the conditions for militant groups to recruit freely. The Indian government's response is more crackdowns, more securitization, eventually criminalizing dissent and Kashmir's call for independence, deepening Kashmiri resentment and feeding outlawed recruitment. The cycle spirals, violence justifies violence. Oppression produces insurgency. Insurgency produces crackdowns. Crackdowns produce more insurgency.​

This is the trajectory Bangladesh now risks. If Jamaat-e-Islami wins electoral power and minorities face systematic marginalization as both India and Afghanistan demonstrate is possible, Bangladeshi minorities will not passively accept erasure. History offers only one answer, they will rebel, just as outlawed terrorism outfits now operate across Kashmir, as Taliban resistance emerges in Afghan provinces, and as underground networks grow in India.

What Official Policy Conceals

Here is where the deep read matters. Jamaat-e-Islami's official position states it "believes in the equality of all religions." On paper, this is true. The BJP's official position is also secular constitutionalism with religious freedom for all. Also true on paper. Afghanistan's Taliban claims to have "Islamic duty" to educate both boys and girls.​

But the grassroots reality writes a different story.

Jamaat removed "pluralistic" from its constitutional proposal and pushed "absolute trust in Allah" not because the party disbelieves in equality, but because religious nationalism cannot tolerate the word that names diversity as foundational. It's not that minorities are explicitly banned from Jamaat's vision but the fact that pluralism is. Once pluralism is gone, minorities exist at the pleasure of the majority, not by constitutional right.

The BJP hasn't repealed secular constitutionalism, it's populated educational curricula with Hindu nationalist history, promoted RSS members into cultural institutions, and allowed communal violence to flourish with minimal prosecution. The result is secular law on paper, majoritarian religious supremacy in practice.​

The Taliban also hasn't said "Islam forbids women's education"; it has issued decree after decree adding restrictions until education for girls becomes impossible. The gap between stated policy and implementation is where theocracy actually lives.

If Bangladesh is to break the cycle, it requires long overdue Economic justice. Theocracy gains converts when the state cannot provide. Food security, employment, functioning schools and hospitals, these are not obstacles to religious nationalism but its antidotes. Bangladesh's interim government must deliver visible material improvement, or the appeal of salvation through submission will prove irresistible.

What's Actually at Stake

South Asia's turn toward theocracy reads like a return to the past. It is not. It is the shape of the future when democracies collapse. It is what happens when people have lost faith in the possibility of secular justice and turn to the promise of divine order. It is rationality under conditions of desperation.

You cannot defeat theocracy with contempt for the desperate. You defeat it by making democratic governance work. You defeat it by delivering the material conditions that make submission to religious authority feel optional rather than necessary. You defeat it by protecting minorities not because it is virtuous but because their erasure triggers the insurgencies that destabilize everything.

Bangladesh is at the precipice. The student uprising represented a rare moment: mass democratic energy, genuine hunger for accountability along with a willingness to sacrifice. That energy can be crystallized into institutional change, economic delivery, and genuine protection for minorities.

Or it can be absorbed into the machinery of theocracy, where the revolution's energy becomes the foundation for a different form of despotism, one that promises salvation and delivers submission.