Foreign Policy magazine has just released its 2009 list of failing states or those at risk of failure and South Asia makes for sobering reading.

All of India’s neighbours, except for tiny Bhutan, figure in the list of top 25 states that are faltering, although their rankings have improved marginally over the previous year.

So Afghanistan remains at number 7 in the table of failing states topped by Somalia. Pakistan is ranked 10th, just marginally better than its 9th position in last year’s table which perhaps reflects the belief that the state has begun to fight back the militants who threaten its existence.

(The higher you are on this list, based on 12 indicators measuring state cohesion and performance, the closer you are to failure)

You can see the full report of The Failed States Index 2009 here.

But just to distil it, here are the rankings for South Asian nations as they changed over the past year. Myanmar is ranked 13th which is what it was in 2008.

Bangladesh has moved down to 19th position from 12th the previous year, reflecting perhaps the return of an elected civilian government there.  But it remains at risk and as a Reuters analysis here points out there is a tendency to neglect the militant threat in Bangladesh, with all the attention focused on the violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Sri Lanka takes the 22nd spot and Nepal 25rd, both slightly less at risk this year than in 2008 but still very much in the world’s top 25 states.

And India? Foreign Policy puts it at 87th position, a healthy score for a country that some thought wouldn’t survive especially during the Sikh revolt of the 1980s, and other insurgencies in that period.

Giant neighbour China, according to the editors of the magazine, is more at risk with a score of 57.

[Photo of a U.S. Marine in southern Afghanistan]

Sheikh Hasina, the leader of an avowedly secular party, is set to return to power in Bangladesh, the 
other end of South Asia's arc of instability stretching from Afghanistan through Pakistan to India.

And because the teeming region, home to a fifth of the world's population, is so closely intertwined 
Hasina's election and the change that she has promised to bring to her country will almost certainly have a bearing across South Asia, but especially for India and Pakistan.

Bangladesh, as far as New Delhi is concerned, is the eastern launching pad for Islamist militants hostile  to it, complementing Pakistan on the west. So even if the heat is turned on the militants in Pakistan as India is  demanding following the attacks in Mumbai, they or their controllers can unleash groups such as  Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami  (HuJI) based in Bangladesh.

India's new Home Minister P. Chidambaram told a parliament debate this month that Bangladesh had a  responsibility to control the  HuJI.

Hasina has said she wouldn't allow her nation to be used to attack other countries, and her election has been welcomed in New Delhi. In particular the defeat of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the  largest Islamist party and an ally of Hasina's bitter rival Khaleda Zia, is seen as a sign that the country wants to stick to a secular democratic path. In that, New Delhi is hoping Hasina would act against the hardline forces who have attacked her as well .

But how far can she really go? She has a huge parlimentary majority but no politician in Bangladesh can been seen as doing India's bidding. India, which was instrumental in Bangladesh's birth as an independent nation from what was then East Pakistan, has over time been seen as a big brother, a hegemonic power.

Tensions are rarely far from the surface, with New Delhi routinely accusing Bangladesh of allowing tens of thousands of people to cross into its territory and live as illegal immigrants. Dhaka, in turn, accuses border guards of killing innocent Bangladeshis on the frontier, in the name of curbing infiltration.

This month the nations were feuding over the maritime border in the Bay of Bengal.

What of Pakistan? It has, as has "all weather ally" China, cultivated close ties with all of India's neighbours including Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. How will it, and especially the military-intelligence establishment view Hasina's return to power and her promise to crack down on hardline groups? The links of some of these groups such as the Huji go all the way to Pakistan, the Indians say.

And New Delhi is on a diplomatic offensive at the moment, trying to convince governments worldwide of the threat posed by these Pakistan-based  organisations.

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The bombings that killed 45 people in the communally sensitive city of Ahmedabad have shaken India’s establishment. It is now sinking in that India faces homegrown Islamist militant groups operating with a scale and sophistication unheard of in
previous years.   

A group called “India Mujahideen” claimed responsibility for the attacks, the same group that said it carried out the bombings in Jaipur in May that killed 63 people.

For years, India had been seen as country that had largely rejected the attractions of global militancy spurred on by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. President George W. Bush notably said there were no Indians in al Qaeda.

But mainly Hindu India is home to one of the world’s biggest Muslim populations, around 13 percent of its 1.1 billion people.

It only takes 0.0001 percent of India’s roughly 150 million Muslims to form a nucleus of 15,000 militants, as Uday Bhaskar, former director of New Delhi’s Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, told me.    

And the attacks on Ahmedabad may have involved dozens of people.    

“We have crossed the tipping point,” he said.

Has India being ignoring a simmering revolt from disaffected Muslim youth? Over the last two years there have been a wave of bombings, nearly all blamed by the government on some local Islamist groups funded or backed by Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Reading the Indian newspapers, they are quick to blame Pakistan and Bangladesh. The home-grown front — perhaps the banned Students Islamic Movement of India — is seen as having its roots abroad.   

But there has been signs of growing dissatisfaction within the Muslim community, especially since the 2002 riots in Gujarat when around 2,500 people, mainly Muslims, were massacred by Hindu mobs.

Take the Gujarat riots. Hardly anyone has been brought to justice. The Hindu-nationalist chief minister at the time, Narenda Modi, was accused of turning a blind eye during the riots, is now a rising political star in India.

Data also shows that Muslims are one of the poorest segments of Indian society, and some of the most neglected people.   

The years since Gujarat has also coincided with a rise in global Islamist consciousness, with television and the Internet providing people in remote Indian villages with news of what is going on in Iraq and Guantanamo.

Some commentators point to the fact that ultra-conservative versions of Islam like Wahabism have been making inroads into India in recent years.

There has been a “well-funded effort to bring these ideas and these ideologies to Muslim communities across India,” said Ajai Sahni of the Institute for Conflict Management.

In May, the Indian Mujahideen threatened senior Muslim clerics including Khalid Rasheed, head of the oldest madrasa, or Islamic religious school, in Lucknow, over their pacifist stance.

Rasheed said his peace movement had received support from the influential ultra conservative Darool-Uloom Deoband madrasa in northern India, whose strict interpretation of Islamic law is said to have inspired the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But how many young Muslim youths are now ignoring these clerics? How will these bombings in India’s most entrenched Hindu-nationalist state be received among alientated and poor Muslim youth in other parts of the country?

Or will the Indian Mujahideen tactics of bombing hospitals as well as many in their own Muslim community backfire?

For years India has always looked west to Pakistan when bombs exploded in its cities, powerless to influence its old foe.

Now, it is talking peace with Pakistan, and casting aspersions eastwards to Bangladesh, a country it helped establish and should have much more leverage over.

Isn’t it time for some serious diplomacy, to improve relations with Bangladesh and work together to combat violent Islamist extremism?

While homegrown Indian Islamists may have carried out the attack in Jaipur, and a previously unknown group calling itself the Indian Mujahideen has claimed responsibility, initial investigations have also thrown up a possible link to Bangladesh .

Police have released a sketch of a man in his mid-20s who was seen near the site of one of the bombings, who was apparently speaking Bengali. Dozens of Bangladeshi migrant workers have also been rounded up for questioning.

Police say they also see similarities between these blasts and others in Uttar Pradesh and Hyderabad last year, which were blamed on Indian Muslims backed by the Bangladeshi group Harkat-ul-Jihad al Islami.

HuJi, whose name means the Movement of Islamic Holy War, was first established in Pakistan to fight in the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and then moved into Kashmir.

Its Bangladeshi wing was reportedly set up in 1992 with direct assistance from Osama bin Laden. And its leader signed a 1998 fatwa sponsored by bin Laden that declared American citizens “legitimate targets for attack”.

Bangladesh has its own problems with HuJI. It blames the group for a grenade attack on a rally held by former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in 2004 in which 23 people were killed.

Dhaka’s government banned Harkat in 2005 and has arrested its leader Mufti Hannan.

Yet last September, when India drew links between HuJI and the Hyderabad bomb attacks, Bangladesh reacted angrily. The Indian media, it said, were “trying to portray Bangladesh as a hotbed of terrorism”.

“It has become a habit of Indian officials to blame Bangladesh for every terrorist action in India,” a foreign ministry official told Reuters.

In its latest report on terrorism, the U.S. State Department said India’s counterterrorism efforts “were hampered by its outdated and overburdened law enforcement and legal systems”.

Bangladesh was also trying to address the root causes of violent extremism within its borders, but the U.S. added that “mistrust between Bangladesh and India stymied potential counterterrorism cooperation between the two countries”.

Whether or not there was a Bangladeshi link to Jaipur, there is cause for concern in India about extremists in its eastern neighbour. Isn’t it time for a concerted effort to break down that “mistrust” and work with Dhaka to fight this menace?

Are militants, or even hawks within the Pakistani establishment, trying to undermine the peace process with India, now that President Pervez Musharraf has removed his uniform and civilians are squabbling for power?

The dust has scarcely settled on another horrific bomb attack in India, and the investigation has only just begun into the synchronised blasts in Jaipur that killed around 60 people .

It is still far too early to be drawing any firm conclusions, but the timing of the blasts is already making some people wonder whether Pakistan was involved.

The explosions came a week before India’s foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee was due to visit Islamabad to review the peace process, his first visit since a new, civilian government took over in Pakistan.

It also came just a few days after some of the worst violence this year in Kashmir . India was unhappy that its soldiers came under heavy fire from Pakistani last Thursday along the Line of Control as armed militants tried to sneak into Kashmir .

It was also ten years since India conducted five nuclear tests, on May 11 and 13, 1998.

Now that the army is no longer running Pakistan, is the powerful military intelligence agency, the ISI, flexing its muscles again and warning its new civilian “bosses” to abandon the cause of Kashmir at their peril?

South Asia has always been fertile ground for conspiracy theories, and I don’t want to be drawn too far down the route of Machiavellian fantasies.

The relatively sophisticated and synchronised nature of Tuesday’s attacks suggest the perpetrators could have received training abroad, perhaps in Bangladesh or Pakistan, security analysts tell me. But it was probably Indian nationals who carried out the attack, and there is no evidence of direct orders from abroad, they say. Nor does it have to be an ISI plot.

Islamist militant groups in both Pakistan and Bangladesh seem intent on fanning hatred between Muslims and Hindus in India, analysts and diplomats say, an effort which has largely been unsuccessful in recent years. They may be outside the control of the establishment in both countries, and there is evidence the militants have already turned on their former masters.

Nevertheless, the Indian establishment does see some worrying signals from across the border. Pakistan’s army chief Ashfaq Kayani was quoted this month as reaffirming the commitment of the army to the cause of Kashmir.And Sayed Salahuddin , head of the biggest Kashmiri guerrilla group Hizbul Mujahideen, derided the Indo-Pak peace process last month and vowed to continue a holy war against India.

India security analysts allege that militants are now queueing up to cross the Line of Control in Kashmir, perhaps bent on disrupting elections there later this year.

I have lived on both sides of the border and would welcome thoughts from people in both countries.Is the ISI up to dirty tricks? Or should India solve its own problems without always blaming a foreign hand?