Analyzing State Violence in South Asia: Case Studies of Sri Lanka and Pakistan

Across South Asia, the state was meant to be the guardian of its citizens. Yet again and again, governments in the region have turned their coercive machinery – armies, intelligence agencies, emergency laws – against the very people they claim to protect. This is the uncomfortable heart of state violence: organised force used by a state against communities defined as threats, often minorities, dissenters, or entire regions. To understand why this pattern recurs, two cases stand out. Sri Lanka shows how majoritarian policy can push a marginalised community toward armed rebellion. Pakistan shows how a security establishment can weaponise militancy abroad while crushing dissent at home. Together they reveal how deeply state violence is woven into the fabric of post-colonial politics.

The colonial inheritance behind South Asia’s crises 🔗

Post-colonial states in South Asia did not start with a clean slate. They inherited borders drawn hastily by departing powers, administrative systems built to divide and rule, and multi-ethnic populations crammed into nation-states that struggled to represent everyone equally. Scholars who study the region argue that the failure of states to adequately incorporate ethnic minorities as full and equal citizens lies at the root of many separatist conflicts. When governments tried to assimilate diverse identities by force rather than accommodate them, the result was often the opposite of unity.

The British strategy of pitting communities against one another left an especially toxic residue. Research traces how the legacies of colonial administration continue to drive contemporary ethnic conflict long after independence. Arbitrary boundaries split some ethnic groups across new countries and trapped others as minorities inside states dominated by a different majority. Add competing nationalisms, unequal economic development, and weak democratic institutions, and the conditions for state violence were effectively built into the foundations of these new nations.

What state violence actually means 🔗

State violence is not limited to soldiers firing on crowds. It includes discriminatory laws that strip a group of language, jobs, or citizenship; military operations that treat an entire region as hostile territory; enforced disappearances; torture in custody; and the quiet sponsorship of armed proxies. The defining feature is that the coercive power of the state is directed at a target population, usually justified in the name of security or national unity. The two case studies below show this logic playing out very differently – one against an internal minority, the other through external proxies and internal repression at once.

Sri Lanka: when majoritarian policy bred armed rebellion 🔗

Sri Lanka is often described as one of the most enduring ethnic conflicts in post-colonial South Asia. On the surface it looks like a simple clash between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority. In reality, it was the slow accumulation of discriminatory state policies that transformed ordinary grievances into a brutal civil war.

From the Sinhala Only Act to institutionalised exclusion 🔗

Discrimination began almost immediately after independence in 1948. The Ceylon Citizenship Act effectively rendered hundreds of thousands of plantation Tamils of Indian origin stateless, denying them citizenship in the only country many had ever known. Then came the decisive blow: the Official Language Act of 1956, popularly called the Sinhala Only Act. By making Sinhala the sole official language and excluding Tamil, the law immediately disadvantaged Tamils in education and public employment. Tamil youth who had once competed for university places and government jobs suddenly found those doors narrowing.

This was not an accident of policy. It reflected a deliberate vision of Sri Lanka as a Sinhala-Buddhist nation-state. Successive constitutions deepened the exclusion, and attempts at compromise, such as pacts between Tamil and Sinhalese leaders, collapsed under pressure from the majority community. Discrimination, in other words, was written into the law itself.

The rise of the LTTE and a 26-year war 🔗

When peaceful protest and political negotiation repeatedly failed, militancy filled the vacuum. Velupillai Prabhakaran founded the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 1976, channelling Tamil grievances into an organised armed movement that fought for an independent state called Tamil Eelam in the island’s north and east. Anti-Tamil violence, especially the Black July pogrom of 1983, pushed thousands of young Tamils toward the insurgency and marked the start of a war that would last 26 years.

The conflict was savage on both sides. The LTTE pioneered suicide bombing and assassinated political leaders, while the Sri Lankan state responded with heavy military force, mass detention, and abuses against Tamil civilians. The fighting only ended in May 2009 when government forces militarily crushed the LTTE in a final offensive that drew international condemnation over the treatment of trapped civilians.

Victory without reconciliation 🔗

The end of the war did not bring justice or healing. In the aftermath, up to 300,000 Tamils were held in military-controlled camps, and the army retained control over large tracts of land in the north and east. Human rights monitors have documented how the post-war period saw continued surveillance, detention, and allegations of torture directed at the Tamil community. Sri Lanka’s experience is a warning that defeating an armed group militarily is not the same as resolving the political grievances that created it. State violence won the war but left the underlying wound open.

Pakistan: the military, the ISI and the strategy of proxies 🔗

Pakistan presents a different and more complex face of state violence. Here the problem is not only how the state treats a minority within its borders, but how a powerful military establishment has used militancy as an instrument of foreign and domestic policy. The result is a security architecture that destabilises the region and, increasingly, Pakistan itself.

The doctrine of strategic depth 🔗

At the centre of Pakistan’s security thinking is the concept of strategic depth. In essence, it describes the army’s long-running attempt to maintain a friendly or pliable government in Afghanistan so that Pakistan has a safe rear area in any conflict with India. The Cato Institute explains that throughout the 1990s, Pakistan provided diplomatic and material assistance to the Taliban as part of this strategic depth policy, even as officials publicly denied any such support.

The doctrine has a logic that goes beyond Afghanistan. By cultivating proxies, the military sought to counter India’s larger conventional forces through asymmetric means and to keep pressure on the disputed territory of Kashmir without risking open war.

Militants as instruments of statecraft 🔗

This strategy had deep roots in the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, when the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) channelled funding and weapons to mujahideen fighters. Analysts note that the training camps, radical seminaries, and logistical networks built during that war became permanent fixtures that outlived the Soviet withdrawal. Rather than being dismantled, that infrastructure was repurposed.

Over time, the establishment is widely accused of having distinguished between militant groups it considered useful and those it considered enemies – supporting factions oriented toward Afghanistan and Kashmir while fighting those that turned their guns on the Pakistani state. The danger of this double game is that proxies rarely stay obedient. Groups nurtured for external goals have mutated, fragmented, and sometimes attacked their former patrons, leaving Pakistan trapped in a cycle it helped create.

Turning inward: Balochistan and enforced disappearances 🔗

The most visible arena of internal state violence today is Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest and poorest province. Despite holding vast reserves of copper, gold, and natural gas, the region remains deeply impoverished and politically alienated. The Georgetown Journal of International Affairs argues that the military has consistently conflated all Baloch demands with separatism, branding even legitimate grievances as anti-state nationalism and responding with force rather than dialogue.

That force has taken the form of enforced disappearances, detention without due process, and extrajudicial killings. The scale is disputed, but figures range from the government’s own commission count of over 2,700 missing persons to Baloch claims of several thousand. Reporting also describes how repression increasingly targets nonviolent activists, students, and even women. Coverage by outlets such as Al Jazeera shows how each crackdown fuels fresh resentment, feeding the very insurgency the state claims to be suppressing.

Two faces of the same problem 🔗

Sri Lanka and Pakistan look very different, but the underlying pattern is strikingly similar. In both, a state confronted diversity and dissent with coercion rather than genuine inclusion. Sri Lanka used discriminatory law and then military power against an internal minority. Pakistan used proxies abroad while deploying disappearances and military operations against restive regions at home.

In both cases, force produced short-term security gains and long-term instability. Crushing the LTTE did not reconcile Tamils to the state; suppressing Baloch activists has not pacified Balochistan; sponsoring militants did not make Pakistan safer. The lesson that runs through both stories is that violence used as a substitute for political accommodation tends to reproduce the conditions for more violence. The colonial habit of governing through division, it seems, did not end with independence – it simply changed hands.

What do you think? If discriminatory policies and military force consistently deepen conflict rather than resolve it, why do post-colonial states keep reaching for these same tools? And where the state itself becomes a source of insecurity, what should “human security” really mean for the ordinary citizen caught in between?

References

1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01419870.2010.537357
2. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=27307
3. https://www.prcprague.cz/fcdataset/srilanka-tamileelam
4. https://www.hrw.org/asia/sri-lanka
5. https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/double-game-why-pakistan-supports-militants-resists-us-pressure-stop
6. https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-baloch-insurgency-in-pakistan-evolution-tactics-and-regional-security-implications/
7. https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2025/03/14/the-balochistan-quagmire-a-cycle-of-violence-political-mobilization-and-repression/
8. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/3/why-peace-remains-elusive-in-pakistans-troubled-balochistan