The Pulse | Society | South Asia

As Tehran Burns, South Asia Trembles

The U.S.-Israel war on Iran is testing South Asia’s energy security, remittance economies, and sectarian equilibrium — all at once.

People line up at the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in New Delhi to sign the condolences book in response to the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, New Delhi, India, March 6, 2026.

On February 28, the U.S. and Israel launched military strikes on Iran, which continue to date. Among those targeted in the strikes was Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and much of Iran’s political and military leadership. The U.S. has claimed to have devastated Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure, and will continue airstrikes to dismantle its missile capabilities.

The attack’s aftershocks were felt almost immediately across South Asia — on the streets and in mosques, as thousands came out in protest against Khamanei’s assassination. Khamenei, a Shia leader, commands respect among many across the Shia-Sunni divide due to his pro-Palestinian and anti-imperialist stance.

Importantly, the U.S.-Israel war on Iran has shaken central bank reserve calculations, freight insurance desks, and the mobile wallets of millions of South Asian migrant workers in the Gulf.

The war in Iran is not South Asia’s war. But three interlocking vulnerabilities — sectarian identity politics, energy import dependency, and remittance-driven economies underscore that the region cannot be a mere spectator. What is unfolding now is a stress test for South Asia’s social cohesion, economic resilience, and diplomatic independence, all simultaneously.

The conventional expectation, shaped by decades of Saudi-Iranian proxy competition and the bloody sectarian violence it spawned across Pakistan and Afghanistan, was that an assault on Iran, the nerve center of global Shia identity, would deepen the Shia-Sunni fault line in South Asia. What has happened instead is more complicated, and in some ways more instructive.

The most striking example comes from Bangladesh — a country that is over 90 percent Sunni, which has no significant Shia population to speak of. On March 1, the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s principal Islamist party and a quintessentially Sunni organization, staged a mass rally at Baitul Mukarram National Mosque in Dhaka to condemn what its leaders called a “heinous attack” on Iran. Jamaat Nayeb-e-Ameer ATM Azharul Islam declared that the assault on Iran “is not only against Iran and the Muslim world; it is against democracy, humanity and human rights.”

In India, the picture was equally striking. Marches and demonstrations mourning Khamenei were held across more than a dozen states and union territories from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh to Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. In Jammu and Kashmir, Sunni leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq condemned the killing of Khamenei and said that he stood in “solidarity against this killing.”  In Jharkhand, representatives of the Jharkhand Janadhikar Mahasabha, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, the Communist Party of India-Marxist and the Communist Party of India held a protest describing the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran as “criminal and violent.” The Indian National Congress also “unequivocally condemns the targeted assassination” of the Iranian leader. This was not sectarian Shia politics; it was a cross-ideological anti-imperialist coalition.

What explains this? Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis offers one lens, however imperfect. When the perceived aggressor is a U.S.-Israeli military coalition, Muslim identity — Sunni and Shia alike — can coalesce against a common external adversary. The war has, at least temporarily, reconfigured the axis of conflict in South Asian Muslim political consciousness: not Shia vs. Sunni, but Islam vs. Western military unilateralism.

Yet this solidarity has a brittle underside. The Pakistan case is a bit different. Pakistan is home to 15-20 percent Shia — over 35 million people — for whom Iran is a spiritual heartland, with thousands making annual pilgrimages to Iranian shrines. For Shias, Khamenei was not simply a political figure; he was part of their belief system, a “religious and spiritual guide.”

The sectarian conflict between Shia and Sunni has been well evident even in the recent past in Pakistan. In February 2026, the Islamic State of Khorasan Province struck a Shia mosque in Islamabad, killing 36 worshippers.

After Khamenei’s killing, Pakistan also witnessed violent protests, with security forces’ response leaving 20 demonstrators dead.

And in the longer shadow of the conflict, echoes of the Baloch Liberation Army-Azaad’s charter for a “Greater Balochistan,” presented in the wake of the Iran-Israel war of June 2025, signal that ethno-separatist entrepreneurs are already positioning themselves to exploit the vacuum.

A natural question then arises: while Shias in Bangladesh and India often express solidarity, why is the situation somewhat different in Pakistan? The answer lies in Pakistan’s long history of sectarian conflict and its geographical proximity to Iran. In India, the Muslim community itself is a minority, with approximately 20 million Shias — representing 10-15 percent of the total Muslim population — facing structural barriers to wider influence. In Bangladesh, the Shia population is even smaller, around 2 million or just 1-2 percent, leaving them largely on the margins.

South Asia’s energy security is likely to be........

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