Brown Pundits

In an unexpected way, this war has revived Brown Pundits. A site that had drifted into silence is now surging with life again—threads are active, arguments are sharp, and the intellectual pulse has returned. Conflict, for all its tragedy, has a way of clarifying identities and sharpening thought. It’s given many of us the urgency—and the material—to write. I’ll be resuming active moderation and will be onboarding new moderators and authors shortly. But one key requirement for any new authors & moderators (we are only 6 right now), beyond what is stated: you must be active. Lurking is fine, but contribution is what keeps this platform alive.

Three comments caught my attention, each illuminating a deeper tension at the heart of South Asia. But all point to the same truth: the deeper our wars go, the more we are forced to ask, what are we really fighting for? Continue reading Why Pakistanis Should Say Jai Hind: Civilizational Fractures in a Post-Nation South Asia

Ngl Kabir’s comments about the “Muslim Valley” kind of triggered me. It really does solidify Pakistan as a second class state for everyone who is not a Muslim (and that’s at least 5% of the population).

I find that majoritarianism unhealthy so I’m going to stick this picture of the above; Modi, for all his flaws, has presided over a shining decade for India, where it is recognised as an ascendant superpower while Pakistan is firmly a Chinese satellite.

Now that comments are back—let’s look at this dispassionately. Set aside emotion and accept a simple civilizational fact: South Asia should be plural, civil, and syncretic. Its unity lies in its AASI roots and Sanskritic inheritance, whether acknowledged or not. Otherwise who were the winners, losers and in-betweeners of this senseless conflict?

Prefacing the below with Xperia’s comment in the interests of neutrality and impartiality:

There is however a ton of evidence that Pakistani airfields were put out of operation, at least one hanger hit killing personnel inside. Runways blown up. C130 in flames.
This was was not a dogfight, it was a drone and missile war. The Indian defence was layered and effective. All airports operational and runways intact.
Op sec was also much better on the Indian side, you don’t have any pictures of army personnel firing missiles and jumping around next to locals.
Don’t worry so much about the stock prices. The Chinese market is propaganda in itself.

https://x.com/ConflictMoniter has good OSINT in case you want to take a look.
https://x.com/MenchOsint is more neutral and unbiased.

That said, the data circulating on Telegram suggests a major strategic recalibration is underway.

Without speculating on war origins, the result is seismic: India just suffered its worst aerial defeat. Five high-end aircraft—3 Rafales, 1 MiG-29, 1 Su-30—and 1 Israeli Heron drone were downed. None returned. This is more than battlefield loss. It’s a realignment.

1. Chinese Systems, Pakistani Trigger

For the first time, Pakistan deployed Chinese-made HQ-9B, LY-80, HQ-16 air defenses and J-10C, JF-17 fighters in live combat. All Indian aircraft were neutralized. Not a single Chinese platform was hit.

This wasn’t just retaliation. It was a demonstration. Rafales—France’s pride—were shot down for the first time in history. With zero Pakistani losses, China’s weapons just outperformed Western tech on a global stage.

2. Markets Reacted
• Dassault Aviation (Rafale): ↓ 1.6%
• Chengdu Aircraft Corp (J-10C): ↑ 18%

A $25M Chinese jet took out over $100M in Western tech. That resets the cost-benefit of warfare. Permanently.

3. Strategic Ripples
• Pakistan’s dependence on China is now military, not just economic.
• Chinese systems will gain traction in the Middle East, especially with Egypt.
• India’s strategic posture faces urgent questions—its French, Russian, Israeli kit just got field-tested—and failed.

The politics of Partition was not driven by the masses but by elite insecurities and ideological maximalism. The Muslim League and the RSS were mirror movements—each imagining purity, each refusing pluralism.

Against this tide stood Gandhi and Nehru: flawed, but fundamentally committed to a united, secular, socialist India. That republic—messy, crowded, imperfect—might have spanned 2 billion people today.

Instead, the war of elites birthed nations. And the cost was paid by peasants, mothers, porters, and children—those who never cast a vote in the halls where maps were redrawn.

Not out of weakness, but calculation. It’s waiting for the international community to bribe it into silence. One advantage of being quasi-democratic (like Russia or China) is the ability to sideline public opinion. Pakistan can afford to wait. India, by contrast, appears to be following an Israel-style doctrine. But Pakistan is more Prussia than Palestine and Modi feels much weaker from this episode (he promised a safe Kashmir).

Competing regional giants and nuclear powers, India and China are widely seen as long-term strategic rivals, sharing a 3,800 km (2,400 mile) Himalayan border that has been disputed since the 1950s and sparked a brief war in 1962. The most recent standoff began in 2020 and thawed only in October 2023, when both sides agreed to a formal patrolling agreement, placing limits on forward deployment and coordinated disengagement. Even between nuclear-armed antagonists, restraint is possible when war threatens mutual prosperity.

Likewise, Putin’s behavior post-Maidan in 2014 was not immediate escalation. Instead, Crimea was seized swiftly, but Russia spent eight years supporting separatists and waging hybrid war in Donbas before launching a full-scale invasion in 2022. It was restraint with intent, waiting for the West to appear divided or distracted.

It’s strange that every time the region stabilizes, something reignites tension. Why would China, India, or Pakistan want instability when wealth and growth depend on peace? Yet here we are.

The BJP base craves nothing short of Pakistan’s annihilation. That’s a fantasy; militarily, diplomatically, and strategically. Why shouldn’t India fully cooperate in an international investigation to determine who was behind the Pahalgam attack? The refusal suggests this moment is being used as a casus belli; leveraging the incident to project force in a world increasingly shaped by Trumpian-Putinesque instincts.

Even the postponement of the IPL was an indirect consequence of what Pakistan could do. This is not a toothless state. Pakistan is David with a nuke or more accurately, an incidental Prussia, hyper-militarized but calculating. The public isn’t rising up against its military; if anything, this round has shown that Pakistan can restrain itself without looking weak.

In fact, Pakistan has consistently been the more restrained nuclear power. Israel has spent two years trying to flatten Gaza with limited success. The U.S. stayed in Afghanistan and Iraq far too long, trapped by asymmetric warfare. These are textbook examples of tactical response leading to strategic drift.

Modi should study those cases. Retaliation may thrill headlines. But strategy lies in staying still until the storm passes and only then, deciding if and how to move.

On Pakistan’s second birth, India’s rising nationalism, and the politics of martyrdom

There’s a strange irony in history: the founder of Pakistan and the “strongest” Prime Minister of India may ultimately be remembered for the same thing—giving Pakistan life.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah birthed the state. Narendra Modi may have revived its soul. Because nothing steels a national identity like resistance. And nothing immortalizes a cause like martyrdom.

Blood in Pahalgam, Resolve in Islamabad

When civilians—children—are killed, as in the recent attacks in Pahalgam & Bahawalpur, the horror doesn’t demoralize. It clarifies. It creates martyrs. And martyrdom sanctifies. Pakistan, often in search of a purpose, just received one. What makes this even more striking is the dynamic behind it. Modi may need Pakistan—not as a partner, but as a perpetual foil. A pressure point. A mirror. A justification.Every strong nationalism needs its adversary:

• Israel has Hamas.
• The U.S. had the USSR.
• India, increasingly, needs Pakistan.

Nationhood hardens in opposition. This is what the “failed” projects of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia lacked: no existential other. No enemy, no glue. Even the most successful Willensnation—Switzerland, a country built by choice, not ethnicity—engaged in intense nation-building during the 1960s. Its wealth today isn’t just neutrality—it’s the compound interest of skipping two world wars. But in today’s world, Dubai may inherit Switzerland’s darker mantle—as the future capital of hot money and global shadow finance. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Canada’s national identity has paradoxically strengthened in Trump’s wake—a quiet rebellion through civility, as if to say: we are what he is not.

The Strategic Misstep?

Operation Sindoor. Suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty. Visa blocks. High Commission closures. Are these pressure points—or accelerants? The danger is that such moves only validate Pakistan’s siege narrative. And that narrative fuels its resilience. You can’t bomb a martyr complex. You can only confirm it. Continue reading Quaid, Modi, and the Operation Sindoor

These thoughts emerged as I was replying to the 100+ comments on Omar’s post, India and Pakistan, Back to the Future..

Flight, Fragility, and the First Bollywood Snake

My first memories of Pakistan are tangled with flight and childhood fiction. In 1990, as we escaped Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion, our car crossed into Pakistani Baluchistan carrying five adults and three children. After over a month in Iran (the family gardens of Shiraz are a blurry childhood memory), where we were understandably low-key about being Bahá’ís, I remember yelling out the car window the moment we crossed the border, “I’m Bahá’í! I’m Bahá’í!” My family laughed (I was the youngest and always the most impetuous). The story has been retold so often I don’t know where memory ends and performance begins.

But the innocence of that moment gave way quickly. I remember the poverty at the border: raw, overwhelming on both sides of Baluchistan. And then, in Karachi, came my first exposure to India—through a Bollywood film featuring a dancing girl in a Sari transforming into a snake. That, more than any textbook, was my introduction to Hinduism. Try as it might, Pakistan is the ineffable portal to Hindustan, a mirror that reflects what it cannot contain. These memories—flight, fragility, and fantasy—etched into me the idea that culture moves where politics cannot.

Restraint Is the Strategy: Rethinking Peace in South Asia

South Asia is home to nearly 2 billion people. It’s a region of nuclear states, frozen conflicts, and postcolonial trauma. Yet every time a cross-border terrorist attack kills 20 or 30 civilians, it makes global headlines. That’s not just because of the violence—but because the violence is rare. This isn’t an excuse. It’s a signal: South Asia has already learned restraint. The question is whether it can remember why.

The Bug in the Democratic Mind

After 9/11, the U.S. was angry. George W. Bush gave the people what they wanted: a war. Two, actually. Instead of a tactical mission to dismantle a terrorist network, America destabilized entire regions, wasted trillions, and incubated future threats.

This is the paradox of democracy:

• Populations demand retribution.

• Leaders comply.

• Strategy is hijacked by spectacle.

India must adopt a radically different approach. Treat Pakistan the way South Korea treats North Korea: sidestep, outperform, outgrow. Engagement legitimizes provocation. Retaliation restores parity. Indifference signals dominance. Continue reading Let Pakistan Throw Stones. India Should Build the Skyline.

Six years ago, I wrote an outraged post on BP when a British historian casually claimed that “the British created India” (we had a very thriving commentariat then); a breathtaking erasure of one of the world’s oldest civilizations.

Today, reading Francis Pike’s piece in The Spectator, I feel the same cold disdain. Pike repeats the same old colonial fantasy: that India was a “patchwork of principalities,” and that Nehru and Gandhi “invented” the myth of Indian unity. Let’s be clear: this is not history. It’s imperial nostalgia dressed up as analysis.

“India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Mahatma Gandhi both propagated the myth that India had always been a unified country.”

“More reflective commentators knew that this was hogwash.”

“It was the British who… for the first time introduced the rule of law and a democratic form of government.”

This is colonial gaslighting at its most refined. Continue reading The Myth of the British-Made India