ABSTRACT
The violent forms that radical movements are assuming in parts of South Asia today have a long tradition stretching back to the unresolved conflicts that were left behind in the wake of the transfer of power by the British colonial rulers to the nationalist leaders in the late 1940s. Since then, during the last half century or so,discord between the landless and the landed gentry,contention for power among different ethnic communities, and hostility between religious majority and minority groups, among other divisive matters, had off and on reached flashpoints in the postcolonial states.The governments of these South Asian states have been incapable of disentangling the roots of these conflicts which they inherited from the pre-Independence era,and have failed to resolve them through a democratic process.
