Nothing is safe in the oil pipeline dogfight among the world’s imperialists and Indian-Pakistani rulers. The terrorist attack against the Sri Lanka national cricket team is one example. The rulers of India and Pakistan blame each other’s intelligence services for the attack. The Sri Lanka team replaced the Indian national team which pulled out after the recent Mumbai terrorist attack blamed on the ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence service).

Just a few days before this attack, a mass mutiny by Bangladesh’s border guard (the BRD) killed 74 army officers, almost the BRD’s entire top brass. Years of corruption by their officers — sent from the regular army — frustrated the soldiers, who were mistreated and starved while making a miserable $70/month and seeing the officers selling their rations on the open market.

The mutiny began in BRD headquarters in Dhaka, the country’s capital. Initially the military brass tried to storm the mutineers, but then the rebellion spread nation-wide, forcing the brass to negotiate with the rebels and even agree to their demands. After the rebellion ended, the army and the government began the arrest and hunting of over 1,000 rebel soldiers.

The BRD dates back to the 18th century when the British colonialists established the “Ramgarh Local Battalion.”  In 1971, East Pakistan, helped by India, went to war and broke with Pakistan, becoming Bangladesh. The BRD was used to patrol over 3,000 miles of border with India and Burma (Myanmar). The BRD, like the rest of South Asia’s armies, retained all the class divisions of the old British colonial armies. Officers came from the ruling class while rank-and-file soldiers came from the working class and poor peasantry.

Unfortunately, in the absence of any real communist leadership, when these soldiers turned their guns against their officers, they were open to being misled by pro-Pakistani Islamists. The collapse of the old world communist movement reflected itself in the opportunism of the pro-Soviet and Maoist groups in Bangladesh — which supported “progressive-lesser evil” bosses and disarmed workers and their allies politically. This created illusions about “reforming” capitalism and prevented a fight for workers’ power.

Early in January, after several years of military rule, a civilian government — considered to be pro-India — took power in Bangladesh. The mutiny was reportedly supported by forces within and outside the military who supported the country’s recent “Talibanization.” The new army chief, appointed by the civilian government, is considered “too secular” and pro-India and was clamping down on fundamentalists inside the military which are influenced by Pakistan and even by China.

Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan Sunday Times reported (3/1) that a U.S. Marine Expeditionary Force might be sent to northern Sri Lanka under the guise of evacuating refugees from the civil war in that island nation.  Thus, the U.S. could help the Sri Lankan army in its bloody “mop-up” operations against the nationalist Tamil guerrillas holed up in the island’s northern tip and fighting the government. U.S. rulers consider the Tamils terrorists.

However, it’s not the Tamil guerrillas that really worry the U.S. and India, but rather it’s China’s growing economic and military presence in Sri Lanka. China has supplied Sri Lanka with modern military hardware, including fighter planes, and is helping build a modern port at Hambantota in southern Sri Lanka, near one of the world’s most important oil-supply sea lanes.

All these bloody conflicts occur in a capitalist world wrecked by an economic tsunami. The Indian economy, supposedly an example of what free-market globalization could achieve, is now reeling from this crisis. Bangladesh is already one of the world’s poorest countries and has lost a lot of markets for its exports of textiles.

Workers and their allies in all of South Asia must break with all these bosses, their imperialist backers and all the Muslim and Hindu fundamentalists, and build a revolutionary communist leadership as the only way out of this hell.