Choles Ritchil, an activist and a leader of the Garo people living in the Modhupur Upozila under Tangail District in Bangladesh was found dead last month. Over the last three years, he had been leading a protest against the establishment of an Eco park in the forests around his village by the department of Forest. He was allegedly tortured brutally by the officers of the local army camp before dying.

Garos are a part of a large tribal minority, along with other hill people, known as pahadis, who are part of present-day Bangladesh, along side the large minority of Hindus. Bangladesh, as we know, was formerly East Pakistan and seceded from it after India fought a war against Pakistan in 1971. Its founder leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had said in his founding speech, “From today, you are all Bengalis.” Not all Bengalis are equal.

Pakistan is a country that was founded after the Muslim League demanded a separate homeland for Indian Muslims. Its founder claimed in his introductory speech that Pakistan would be a land where people from all communities and countries would be able to live together in peace and prosper together.

Within a few decades of his death Pakistan had been declared an Islamic Republic and after facing secessionist movements from its large minorities of Sindhis and Pathans of NWFP it is currently facing one of the biggest political crises in Baluchistan and Waziristan.

India, which gained its independence under the Congress party, asserted that it was a socialist republic, which would try and impart and equal treatment to all its citizens regardless of caste, community and religion. Yet some communities and regions in India today feel more discontented than others and several have launched an armed struggle against the central union many times over.

I am not asserting that the situation in all three countries, or in all of South Asia if you include Sri Lanka, is exactly the same. What intrigued me on a recent visit to Pakistan was the similarity of political rhetoric in spite of the differing organisations of politics in these countries.

India takes rightful pride in its democratic traditions, but the outcomes of its political progress has not left every Indian feeling equally satisfied. The question it threw, and continues to throw, at its discontented groups is to first assert their Indianness and only later articulate their grievances.

All these countries have emerged from an anti-colonial movement or a separatist movement or a movement for independence and the founders of all three countries asserted at the moment of their birth that now that independence had been achieved, all problems were in the past and all solutions in the future, we just had to wait patiently for the good times. Hence, a country like Pakistan, formed in the name of one religious community, continues to deny the existence of ethnic identities just as India continues to have problems dealing with regional aspirations and discontent.

Pakistan may be an Islamic republic and so is Bangladesh, but the political rhetoric in both countries, like India, asserts that it takes good care of its minorities and gives them sops in the form of special rights. They are allowed to worship in their own places, form social, but not political, groups, and practice, but not propagate their religion. Ironically, the forms though not the realities, in which these countries articulate their secularism is similar.

The organisation of politics and the functioning of the government also present many similarities. Like the Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, the Press Club in Lahore is a site of permanent demonstrations and processions and slogans, an every day practice, often with groups raising contradictory demands. Government functions and politicians often have a fawning group of supplicants and hangers on. Articulation of discontent can evoke the charge of being anti-national in all places.

The difference in India comes not so much from freedom of press, although both are closely related, as from political mobilisation. Democratic politics in India allows for a mechanism for solving problems, but also for a public articulation of grievances.

Is there something peculiar to South Asian countries in this manifestation of political rhetoric? Their ideological validation derives from resistance to some kind of hegemonic impulse, but once freedom is achieved, they insist on a new kind of hegemony where discontent must be channeled or limited to particular forms in order to be legitimate.

Or is there something about political processes in third world conditions, which insists on rhetoric of inclusion, but a practice of exclusion? The reaction to the performance of cricket teams in both India and Pakistan is a case in point.

While debates and consultations go on in India, the Pakistan cricket team is currently facing a host of inquiries too, in addition to the one instituted by the cricket board the Pakistani team is currently appearing before a committee of the national assembly.

At least, Bangladesh is different from both in this respect, it can, for the moment celebrate that difference.