From China’s perspective, Southeast Asia is attractive, vulnerable and nearby. Economic inequalities and deprivation have created frustration and insecurity among the masses, leading to an increasing criminalisation of society in which there are available targets for exploitation by extremist elements in and outside the governments. Just like the US “flipped” China against the USSR in the old Cold War by taking advantage of preexisting and longstanding issues between the two, it is now doing the same by turning India against China in the New Cold War over competitive connectivity projects. The main geopolitical challenges in Asia will concern relations between the U.S., Japan, and China. The trip served to highlight Beijing's growing political, economic and cultural influence in Nepal. It includes dates of declarations of independence, changes in country name, changes of capital city or name, and changes in territory such as the annexation, cession, concession, occupation, or secession of land. The BJP government offered port and airport facilities for the US armed forces when they began their military operations in Afghanistan after the September 11 terrorist attacks. This strong growth, according to the World Bank, has translated into declining poverty and remarkable advances in human development. Pakistan is interested in using Afghanistan as a base for training Jihadist groups outside its own territory. Terrorism and counter-terrorism have also been taking the lives of hundreds of people in South Asia every week. This advantage helps Beijing with access to raw materials and energy supplies from the Middle East and Africa through a series of choke points across South Asia from mainland China to Port Sudan. 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. China’s economic strength has been transforming its position in the world in different ways and this is more evident in South Asia too. He is a scholar at School of Politics and IR, Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad. India became the first country which welcomed the National Missile Defence programme announced by President Bush. All three of these regions surround Afghanistan and are thus vulnerable to the war-torn country’s problems spilling across their borders by design; even though the Pakistani military has done an excellent job in dealing with this. Drone strikes may disrupt FATA-based militant groups’ capacity to plan and execute cross-border attacks on NATO troops and to plot attacks against the US homeland, but they cannot solve the fundamental problem. The US involvement in South Asia has been unprecedented. 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. 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. In the late 1980s, Pakistani diplomats and intelligence officials aired the argument that an ultra-conservative Islamist government in Kabul would serve Western interests by blocking Soviet expansion. The BJP-led Vajpayee government later declared that India was a natural ally of the US and advanced the military collaboration to the level of a strategic alliance. Dr Haq, a prominent economist, brought out the 1994 UNDP report on human development which focussed on South Asia. The Line of control also known as working boundary, divides Indian Kashmir from Pakistani Kashmir. Nine years after the first US drone strike in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in 2004, the US refuses to officially acknowledge the CIA-run programme, while Pakistan denies consenting to it. According to the World Bank’s most recent poverty estimates, about 571 million people in the region survive on less than $1.25 a day, and they make up more than 44 per cent of the developing world’s poor. The pre-eminence of India in the South Asian region has been contested by its regional archrival Pakistan. However, India’s increasing naval presence in the Indian Ocean will hinder China’s ambitions. The Chinese government is officially sending Mandarin language teachers to Kathmandu to provide language training to Nepalese; this is being carried out under the auspices of the Confucius Institute, which promotes Chinese culture and language. Bangladesh armed forces are dependent on China’s military hardware. How should Pakistan Respond to Regional Hybrid War against it? 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. Feb 1, 2021. Happily, however, the Sino-Indian relations are on an upturn and the two countries have agreed to settle their border demarcation dispute peacefully (see Cheema, 1993). 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. Just like Myanmar, Sri Lanka is confronting “weaponized federalization” between its Tamil north-east and the Sinhala-majority in the rest of the country, though this scenario doesn’t seem to be too successful at the moment. The religious dimensions of the Sri Lankan Civil War still continue to affect post-war reconstruction and reconciliation as ethnicity and religion are intertwined. Three, you cannot have modernity without gender equality. This historical rivalry stretches over various issues ranging from dominance in the region, territorial disputes, and border disputes to the intractable problem of Kashmir. 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. We are independent and nonprofit. From this perspective, the emerging trends of geopolitics in South Asia cover a wider spectrum of issues interlinked to much the broader realities of this geographical sub-region as well as to the life of multitudes of South Asians, their struggle for the right to life with dignity and peace with justice. GPF is non-ideological, analyzes the world and forecasts the future using geopolitics: political, economic, military and geographic dimensions at the foundation of a nation. Pakistan’s attitude towards drones borders on the schizophrenic. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London), Asia's military spending for the first time in modern history overtook the European members of NATO last year. Attacks against religious minorities is the Wahhabi/Moududi creed of non-tolerance of any other religion. Religion is returning to the centre-stage in the civil and political life of almost all South Asian nations. Nevertheless,Sri Lanka and the Maldives will always remain important because China’s maritime trade across the Afro-Indian Ocean will never completely go away, and it will still take CPEC a while to become fully operational. With nuclear tests conducted both in India and Pakistan, there was a major geopolitical upheaval, attracting international attention and intervention in the region. Chinese companies are involved in a number of infrastructure, communication and port development projects of strategic importance funded by Chinese loans. Since 2004, there have been at least 350 drone strikes in FATA, mostly in the North Waziristan, South Waziristan and Kurram agencies. 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. 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. Tokyo, although in line with U.S. policies, could be a point of mediation between the … 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 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. Following the 5 January election, Hindus and their worship places were attacked by the JEI and BNP in Pabna, Faridpur, Lalmonirhat and Khagrachari districts. Read more: West Bengal Is The Bottleneck Of India’s “Act East” Strategy.