Dear reader, South Asia has been passing through a difficult time. Pakistan is staring at political uncertainty with Prime Minister Imran Khan losing a trust vote on Saturday night. He left office, "kicking and screaming", as this newspaper's headline said, after the Supreme Court ordered the vote. Khan had raised the spectre of a foreign hand and leaned on a ruling by the deputy speaker of the National Assembly to prevent the passage of the no-confidence vote in the House ('Dodgy declaration', April 4). In Sri Lanka, the economic crisis has turned into massive political unrest with people across age, faith and language marching on the streets against the Rajapaksa government to the slogan, 'Gota Go Home' ('Sliding in Lanka', April 5). Myanmar and Afghanistan are run by governments that usurped office through unconstitutional means. A precarious coalition is in office in Kathmandu - political instability has been a feature of Nepal since the country became a republic. Bangladesh has had a stable government, though marked by shades of authoritarianism. The political stability arguably has helped the country to stay on the course of prosperity. In her essay ('How Colombo lost the plot', April 9), Madura Rasaratnam reads the collapse of the Sri Lankan economy as the inevitable fallout of the majoritarian Sinhala Buddhist nationalism that has shaped the politics in the island nation for some time. The Rajapaksa family, which helmed the government during the last phase of the war with the LTTE, has come to symbolise its vision. It privileged a unitary vision of the nation over the idea of an inclusive multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, multi-faith federal Sri Lanka. The economic policies that Colombo has pursued in recent years flow from this vision. The 2019 Easter bombings and Covid, externalities that hurt the tourism sector, a major source of foreign currency, compounded a crisis that was already in the making. Rasaratnam writes: "Painful as it is, the only possible silver lining is that the crisis can serve as a reality check for the Sinhala nationalist leadership and electorate. The model of economic and political governance they have pursued is unsustainable, and the alternatives must be faced. The most pressing of these is the demilitarisation and normalisation of relations with the Tamils and Muslims. Sinhala political attention can perhaps then be turned to the other pressing failures of governance that have brought Sri Lanka to this state. The irony of Sri Lanka's push for total sovereign autonomy is that it has given international actors more leverage than they had before. International actors who really want to help Sri Lanka should use this leverage to push for tangible and non-reversible changes in the treatment of Tamils and Muslims whatever leadership emerges in Colombo. The Rajapaksas may be the principal protagonists of this crisis but the underlying script they have followed is a Sinhala Buddhist one and until Sri Lanka finds a new script it cannot find peace or stability." Mehmal Sarfraz ('Imran's no-ball', April 6) and C Raja Mohan ('The Samson option', April 5) write about the political crisis in Pakistan. Raja Mohan points out that "Imran Khan has embarked on a path no civilian leader has done - to confront the army's hegemony on a broad range of issues. In the run-up to the elections (assuming they are held soon), Khan is likely to double down on religious mobilisation and anti-Americanism". Sarfraz is scathing in her assessment of Imran Khan's tenure in office. April 3, the day the vote of no-confidence was disallowed, "will be remembered as the day the Constitution of Pakistan was subverted by a civilian government on the floor of the House", she writes. In office, Khan tried to control the media and amend the already draconian PECA law to make it much more draconian, she recalls. Instead of battling inflation and the financial crisis, Khan has opted "to create yet another crisis in the country", Sarfraz writes. At home, Yati Narsinghanand, the new icon of bigotry, was yet again in the news for a public address that was rich in communal dog whistles. The Express editorial ('Yati & Sabka Saath', April 5) says: "The BJP attributes its string of electoral successes to governance that, in the distribution of its benefits, is blind to differences of caste and community. Narsinghanand says just the opposite. An unambiguous message needs to be sent out that there are political - not just legal - penalties for promoting hate as he does. A red line needs to be drawn and enforced by the BJP's top political leadership that it will not stand for the demonisation of the minority." Narsinghanand is not a BJP leader and is dismissed as belonging to the "fringe". However, the mayor of South Delhi Municipal Corporation is very much a "mainstream" politician. His anxiety that the sale of meat in South Delhi during the Navaratri festival would hurt Hindu sentiments became a directive calling for meat shops to be shut during the festival. It's not known on what ground the mayor assumed custodianship of Hindu sentiments, but his words were eerily similar to the claims made by Karnataka BJP leaders such as C T Ravi who have been demonising halal food. The Express editorial ('Roll it back', April 7) describes the directive as "retrograde and unacceptable". Pooja Pillai ('Food for anxiety', April 7), explains how food and diet are invoked by right-wing groups to target minorities in today's India. She finds these bans as "driven solely by the desire to place a singular, pan-Indian Hindu identity over all the others that exist in the country". The various bans and restrictions, she argues, "are the very scaffolding on which the idea of pan-Indianness is constructed". In their essay ('Hinduism and governance', April 8), Nimai Mehta and Karti Sandilya argue that "India has been experiencing a fundamental churn in its vision of itself", which they describe as a broad "cultural-civilisation revival... coinciding with the opening of the Indian economy, post-1990". They read Hindutva as a "political-cultural reaction to post-Independence secularism" that had rejected "a dharmic view of life", and "manifested itself as a change of government in 2014 and was reaffirmed in 2019". Mehta and Sandilya believe that the churn and the values it represents promise "a return to a governance that is rooted in Hindu civilisational values but yet preserves the best aspects that have come from the West, such as separation of State and religion". Adoor Gopalakrishnan ('An image problem', April 5) writes that merging National Film Archives with the National Film Development Corporation of India will compromise the functioning of the institution. He called on the government to intervene and salvage the Archives. Meanwhile, HDFC and HDFC Bank have merged to turn into a "financial behemoth with a market capitalisation of around Rs 14 crore". The Express editorial ('Coming together', April 6) says that "the merger is in line with the broader trend of consolidation in the financial industry". Pranjul Bhandari ('Unequal burden of pain', April 7) calls for rejigging policy to reduce the pain of small, informal firms that are flailing because of high commodity prices. Please do read Sanjib Baruah's essay ('Goodbye AFSPA', April 4), Rajmohan Gandhi's reflection on the war in Ukraine ('Fragility of the strong', April 8) and Vikram Singh Mehta on Vladimir Putin ('Reading his mind', April 4), in case you missed them. Thank you, Amrith Lal The writer is a Senior Associate Editor with the Indian Express Opinion pages and writes on politics, public affairs and culture | 
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