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On Saturday 31 October, a group of men with machetes and meat cleavers walked into the office of Jagriti Prokashoni, a publishing house in Dhaka, Bangladesh. They murdered Faisal Arefin Dipan, who had published numerous secularist books. Earlier in the day, a similar assault on another publishing house left two writers and a publisher seriously injured. This outfit, too, had published books by atheists.

The attacks were the latest incidents in a worrying surge of extremist violence in the country this year that has particularly targeted secularists. Dipan had published Avijit Roy, who died after being attacked with his wife, Rafida Bonya Ahmed, in February. For Bangladesh’s small community of self-described “free thinkers”, it is terrifying. Many have stopped writing; others have left the country.

In the Autumn issue of the New Humanist, I covered the attacks on atheists in Bangladesh in some detail. When these brutal assaults began in 2013, they were closely tied to the country’s polarised political situation. Today, the campaign of violence is divorced from this context, the targeting of secularists an end in itself.

The aim of terrorism is to create terror. The attacks on atheists have been high profile, garnering international attention where bomb attacks often do not. And the Bangladeshi government has done very little to protect those at risk of attack. “We do not want to be seen as atheists,” Sajeeb Wazed, the son of the prime minister, said in May, justifying the government’s lack of action. Promises of police protection have not materialised. Many who receive threats do not go to the authorities at all for fear they will be arrested for blasphemy.

In much the same way as the Pakistani state has failed to move decisively against those who murder in the name of religion, the Bangladeshi government’s inaction serves as a tacit endorsement of these crimes, suggesting to the killers that they can operate with a degree of impunity. Extremists are emboldened and the violence is normalised.

In Pakistan, mob justice and vigilante attacks against those accused of blasphemy – even when they have not been charged or tried under these archaic laws – have become so commonplace as to be the norm. Perpetrators seldom face censure. With each incident, the country becomes an increasingly terrifying place for religious minorities.

This is happening against a wider context of rising intolerance in the Indian Subcontinent that is not limited to the Muslim population. In September, 50-year-old Mohammed Akhlaq was beaten to death in a village in northern India after a priest at a local Hindu temple announced on a loudspeaker that his family had slaughtered a calf and kept the meat in their fridge. (Many Hindus, who make up 80 per cent of India’s population, believe that cows are sacred.) His 22-year-old son, who was also attacked, has since undergone two brain surgeries. A local politician said the lynching was “an accident”. The prime minister Narendra Modi, whose political background is in hardline Hindu nationalist groups, remained silent.

This was not the first mob killing over rumours of cow slaughter in India. There have been other incidents too. In recent years, three atheist scholars who campaigned against religious superstition have been killed – and this in a supposedly secular nation.

Secularism is enshrined in the constitutions of India and Bangladesh; a secular but religious state was also an aim of Pakistan’s founders. There is a centuries-old tradition in the Subcontinent of cultures living side by side. Yet a strain of intolerance has always existed too: bigotry rooted in historical conflict and a rotating cycle of the subjugation and supremacy of competing religious traditions. These tensions were enforced by colonisation and then by Partition; divisions encouraged to cement power. Occasional outbursts of horrific communal violence have punctuated the Subcontinent since it was carved up at the end of the British Empire. Indeed, India and Pakistan were born amidst bloody Hindu-Muslim riots in 1947 that left an estimated 1 million people dead.

Today, this thread of intolerance – not geographically defined but woven throughout society – is allowed to fester and grow, by governments in all three countries, either through deliberate choice or a failure to take decisive action. The authorities in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh do not create this intolerance or violence, but they allow it to exist, occasionally cultivating it for their own ends, or tacitly encouraging it by being too afraid to stand up and say: no more.