US-Iran War (Open Thread)

Kabir · April 21, 2026 · 4 comments

1) Trump says truce expires ‘Wednesday evening Washington time’. 

US President Donald Trump has signalled an extension in the ceasefire with Iran, which was set to end on April 21 8pm ET.

He told Bloomberg in a phone interview that the truce expires on “Wednesday evening Washington time”.

But the president also said it’s “highly unlikely that I’d extend it” if no deal is reached before then, the report said.

It seemed that a second round of talks was going to happen.  Islamabad’s Red Zone is locked down in anticipation of the arrival of the American delegation.  JD Vance was supposedly returning to Islamabad.  But the US seizure of an Iran-flagged ship and Iran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz once again seems to have changed things.

2) Basharat Peer on Kashmir, Haider, Homebound, Iran, Modi, Erdogan & Why Democracies Break

[Note: Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night is one of the classic books about growing up as a Kashmiri Muslim in Indian-Administered Kashmir in the 1990s.

I’ve met Basharat Peer when he spoke at LUMS some years ago. He signed my copy of his book. ]

3) Remembering Asha Bhosle: A View From Pakistan 

Both countries’ polities remain locked in an unending war and demonise each other in all forms of despicable ways and continue to pull up walls and disinformation through propaganda, movies and fake news about one another. Still, can you stop me from loving Amir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, or Ranbir Kapoor? And Asha ji’s voice?

There is a generation or two who remember better times and continue to love our classical and Bollywood film phases. You can’t erase our experiences. Pakistanis have grown up loving Indian movies and their singers and actors.

Looking at the comments under the Geo TV notice by PEMRA is a testament of the sanity that foundationally prevails in Pakistani society.

We might rally around our government when it is under attack from outside forces, but we will not deny our shared love and admiration of iconic artists of the subcontinent. That would be denying our own culture.

 

 

 

 

Founder Sites and Institutional Sites: A Note on Sikh Sacred Geography

X.T.M · April 20, 2026 · 50 comments

This post is to be treated as Precedent on two matters.

First, on moderation

We have been alerted by Hamza that a number of Pakistani commentators on this site have been using anti-Dravidian racialised language against South Indian communities. This will not be tolerated on Brown Pundits.

Any comment that uses racialised language against Dravidian, Tamil, or South Indian communities will be removed, and the offending commenter will have twenty comments removed instantly as an automatic fine. There is no warning phase.

This is personal as well as editorial. DLV’s family was driven out of Sindh by Muhajirs at Partition. It was the Dravidians and the Tamils of Chennai who welcomed them, gave them a second home, and treated them as their own. Any racialised language against those communities on this site will be met with the full weight of the moderation tools available.

To Kabir’s credit, as far as we are aware, he is the only regular Pakistani voice on this blog who has never used racialised language of any kind, even in sharp disagreement. He remains institutional and high-minded even when the argument turns to nuclear rattling. He does not share in the wider Desi pathology with regards to skin colour and race, and that exception is worth naming. It may be the American side of him. Whatever the source, it is the standard this site expects of every commenter, Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, or otherwise.

Second, on substance

The post below establishes a framework for how this site will discuss the sacred geographies of Partition going forward. The recent Kabir-Kishore exchange on Sikh holy places, is the occasion, but the framework is intended to apply across all such disputes: Hindu sites in Pakistan, Muslim sites in India, Sikh sites on both sides of the Wagah, Buddhist sites across the subcontinent. Future BP posts on sacred geography should refer back to the founder-institutional distinction laid out here.

Founder Sites and Institutional Sites: A Note on Sikh Sacred Geography

A recent exchange on this site sets out two claims about Sikh holy places. The first says Sikhs lost most of their sacred sites to Pakistan in 1947. The second calls that claim nonsense. Both are right, and the disagreement turns on a distinction neither has named: founder sites versus institutional sites.

The Pakistan-side Holy Sites

Continue reading Founder Sites and Institutional Sites: A Note on Sikh Sacred Geography

Nankana Sahab and Gurdwara Janam Asthan

Kabir · April 20, 2026 · 5 comments

On the occasion of Vaisakhi, I want to share this travelogue of my trip to Nankana Sahab a few years ago.  This is completely an apolitical post and should be treated as such. Going forward, I have decided to restrict my contributions to BP to non-political subjects such as Hindustani Music.  I would appreciate if the Indian nationalists also do not write about the internal affairs of Pakistan (This is only a request).

According to Wikipedia, Vaisakhi was historically North India’s most important annual market.  Wiki notes: “Although Vaisakhi began as a grain harvest festival for Hindus and its observance precedes the creation of Sikhism , it gained historical association with  the Sikhs following the inauguration of the Khalsa”.

Recently, efforts have been made to revive Vaisakhi in Pakistan. An event was held in Lahore this past weekend hosted by THAAP (The Trust for History, Art and Architecture in Pakistan) in which I was invited to perform bhajans and shabads.

The event was reported on in DAWN:

World Heritage Day marked with Vaisakhi celebrations 

The travelogue is below

Continue reading Nankana Sahab and Gurdwara Janam Asthan

Op Sindoor Was Not a Pakistani Defeat: Precedents Two Days From Pahalgam

X.T.M · April 20, 2026 · 109 comments

Two days from the tragic anniversary of Pahalgam (may those brave Martyrs rest in Peace for their sacrifice for Dharma). A useful moment to set down precedents, because a year out the narrative has hardened in places it should not have, and we would like the comments to stress-test these before they calcify further.

Precedent one. Operation Sindoor was not a Pakistani defeat.

Pakistan entered 2025 as a failed state. It exits the Pahalgam year as a diplomatic champion. Whatever happened in the skies over those days in May, the outcome in global perception is unambiguous. A military operation is never only a military operation. It is also how the world reads it, and on that ledger the result is not the one Delhi wanted. No Pakistani commentator across the spectrum treats Sindoor as a setback. Our Pakistani readers can confirm this in the thread, and we invite them to. The Indian premise that Pakistan might now re-engage to recover from some imagined humiliation makes zero sense. The humiliation is not where Indian commentary locates it.

Precedent two. The Crescent commentariat cannot have it both ways.

There is a pernicious Pakistani trait, most visible in the diaspora and the Anglophone class at home. They live distinctly Western lifestyles. They then want Islam for all. Live your beliefs. It is a genuinely offensive thing to cheer on the Iranian revolution, a revolution deeply devastating to the Iranian people, from an American suburb or a DHA drawing room. Only a Pakistani commentator could manage the trick of celebrating the Islamic Republic while exempting themselves from its consequences.

In the Iranian diaspora, religious Shias are quietly ostracised. Persian pride, across pre-Islamic, Islamic and post-Islamic registers, is astonishing in its depth. Some of us, the Baha’is for instance, integrate all three.

The TNT move, which imports Islamist preferences onto others while the class that holds them escapes the reality (QeA typifies this), is the opposite.

Precedent three. The rediscovery of Hinduism is coming, and it will come from South Punjab and Sindh. Continue reading Op Sindoor Was Not a Pakistani Defeat: Precedents Two Days From Pahalgam

The Iran That 1979 Erased: What If Khomeini Had Lost?

X.T.M · April 19, 2026 · 6 comments

A Counterfactual Iran, 1979–2026

This is a thought experiment, not a manifesto. The Shah was finished by 1978. SAVAK, the Rastakhiz one-party state, the inflationary shock of the 1973–74 oil windfall, the rural migration dumped into an unready Tehran. The question is not whether Mohammad Reza Pahlavi survived. The question is what replaced him, and what that Iran looked like in 2026.

Start with the baseline the Islamic Republic inherited and dismantled.

Between 1960 and 1979, the Iranian economy grew at 9.1% per year. That is the Central Bank of Iran’s own figure. By 1977, Iran was the world’s 18th largest economy, ahead of Turkey at 20th and South Korea at 28th. Real per capita income had tripled in three decades. The White Revolution, launched in 1963, had already delivered universal suffrage for women, mass university expansion, the Literacy Corps, the Health Corps, land reform that turned roughly 90% of Iranian sharecroppers into landowners, and a domestic industrial base that was exporting motor vehicles to Egypt and Yugoslavia by the early 1970s. The regime was brutal. The development was real. Both things are true.

Then compound the counterfactual. Central Bank data shows Iranian GDP growth collapsed to 1.9% per year between 1979 and 2020, a near-fivefold reduction sustained over four decades. In 1980, Iran’s nominal GDP per capita was $2,374, higher than Turkey’s $2,169, Korea’s $1,711 and Vietnam’s $514. By 2024, Iran sits around $5,000 per capita, Turkey around $15,000, Korea above $33,000, Vietnam around $4,500 and rising fast. Every comparator with a functioning state has overtaken Iran. Iran has been lapped by a country (Vietnam) that fought a twenty-year war with the United States, lost it, and rebuilt from rubble.

Now run the counterfactual forward.

The Transition

Continue reading The Iran That 1979 Erased: What If Khomeini Had Lost?

The Chess Masters Who Weren’t

X.T.M · April 19, 2026 · 23 comments

The presumption behind the grand-strategist mythos is always the same. Trump, Milei, Netanyahu, Modi and Orbán are playing three moves ahead, and the other side is stupid. Strip the second half of that sentence and the first collapses.

Look at the scoreboard.

Op Sindoor. India’s post-operation strategic environment does not favour India. Whatever the tactical ledger reads, the diplomatic map around South Asia has tightened against Delhi, not loosened. Delhi has learned. The region has taken notes.

Pakistan. The surprise winner of Op Sindoor is not India. Rawalpindi has played the post-operation hand better than anyone expected and is now cashing cheques in Washington, the Persian Gulf and Beijing in the same quarter. On the current scoreboard, Pakistan is the diplomatic champion of the world.

Iran.* Tehran has pushed back harder than the MAGA-Likud axis priced in. Hormuz did not close on Washington’s schedule. The Islamic Republic has not folded on Washington’s terms. The deterrence calculus is running the wrong way.

Lebanon. Netanyahu was ordered to stop. Not persuaded, not incentivised. Ordered. That is a tell about who holds the leash, and it is not Jerusalem.

Hungary. Orbán conceded on 12 April 2026. Sixteen years, gone in a single parliamentary cycle, to Péter Magyar’s Tisza on a two-thirds supermajority. Some say it was thanks to JD’s Kiss of Death. The flagship of illiberal democracy in Europe was voted out by the electorate it was supposed to have captured.

Continue reading The Chess Masters Who Weren’t

Review: The Scattered Court: Hindustani Music in Colonial Bengal by Richard David Williams

Kabir · April 19, 2026 · 4 comments

In an attempt to shift the focus from geopolitics, I am sharing this review of a book by Richard David Williams (my professor at SOAS). 

This piece was originally published in South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ) in January 2025. 

Richard David Williams’s The Scattered Court: Hindustani Music in Colonial Bengal examines the Calcutta-based court-in-exile of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah (1822-1887), the last ruler of Awadh who was deposed by the British in 1856. The book is based on Williams’s doctoral thesis “Hindustani music between Awadh and Bengal, c. 1758-1905.” It develops a social history of how Hindustani classical music and dance responded to the transition from the Mughal Empire to British colonialism. Using previously unexplored sources in Urdu, Bengali, and Hindi, Williams aims to demonstrate the importance of Wajid Ali Shah’s exile in Calcutta in enabling the rise of that city as a celebrated center of Hindustani music. As he writes in the introduction:

Establishing the connections between Lucknow in Hindustan and Calcutta in Bengal challenges the notion of distant, regional performance cultures, and underlines the importance of aesthetics and the performing arts to mobile elite societies. Since Lucknow is associated with late Mughal or nawabi society, and Calcutta with colonial modernity, examining the relationship between the two cities sheds light on forms of continuity and transition over the nineteenth century, as artists and their patrons navigated political ruptures and social transformations (p. 3).

Most previous studies of Wajid Ali Shah treat his thirty years of exile as a footnote to the culture of Lucknow.1 In contrast, Williams focuses on the court-in-exile at Matiyaburj (located in southwestern Calcutta) in order to examine the impact of the nawab’s presence in Calcutta on the development of Hindustani music in Bengal. He examines the circulation of musicians between the transposed court and musical soirees in North Calcutta. Through his reconstruction of musical life at Matiyaburj, Williams demonstrates that the nawab’s musical innovations continued in Bengal and that he was engaged with his surrounding environment—for example, by composing lyrics in a mixed Bengali-Hindustani register. Continue reading Review: The Scattered Court: Hindustani Music in Colonial Bengal by Richard David Williams

Moderation Notice

X.T.M · April 18, 2026 · 11 comments

A brief note to all commentators on standards going forward.

We prefer ten comments from ten commentators rather than a hundred comments from three commentators.

Capacity for unmoderated commenting has run out. Known authors will be held to a materially higher bar than anonymous readers, because name recognition carries responsibility.

Kabir has set the template. He has moved his argumentation out of comment threads and into original posts (India is Not a “Muslim Power” & Overzealous Pemra), which is exactly the trajectory we want to see from regular contributors.

Direct warning to BB: stop fanning thread fires. The metric this year is not comment density, it is commenter diversity. Low-quality threads drive high-quality voices off the platform, and we have watched it happen in real time. One dominant voice churning out heat costs us three or four signal contributors who quietly stop showing up.

If you have a substantive argument, write a post. If you have a reaction, keep it tight and keep it clean. Threads are not a venue for serial combat.

This applies to everyone, but authors especially. You set the tone whether you mean to or not.

– Moderation, Brown Pundits

India is Not a “Muslim Power”

Kabir · April 18, 2026 · 28 comments

In the comments on “Pakistanis=Indian Muslims With Sovereignty”, BB argued that India is a “Muslim Power”.   This is a patently ridiculous argument but it merits a full rebuttal.

The simple fact is that India is NOT a Muslim country.  India is 80% Hindu. Muslims are a minority (approximately 15%).   India is a constitutionally secular state. So under no reasonable definition is India a “Muslim Power”.

Pakistan is the world’s second-largest Muslim-majority country. It is projected that within five years it will overtake Indonesia to become the world’s most populous Muslim country.  Additionally, Pakistan is the only Muslim-majority nuclear power.  Finally, Pakistan is an “Islamic Republic”.

This argument is so blatantly ridiculous and disingenuous that I can’t believe this clarification is even necessary. But here we are.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to clarify my exchange with El Khawaja.  He argued that “Pakistanis are Pakistani and that’s it”.  I disagree with this position.  I am as patriotic as the next Pakistani but this quote expresses the belief of the State — a belief I argue is fundamentally wrong.

Post the loss of East Pakistan in 1971, the Pakistani State has doubled down on the belief that we are all “Pakistanis first”.  The argument goes that if people are allowed to identify as “Punjabi”, “Sindhi” etc this may lead to secession. This is obviously a red line for the State.  Thus, the introduction of “Pak Studies”, a course that all students must take from primary school through their undergraduate studies.

However, this indoctrination has not served to lessen people’s feelings of being “Punjabi”, “Sindhi” etc.

It would be much healthier if the Pakistani State accepted that Pakistan is a multi-ethnic–NOT multinational– country.

Seccession is not a realistic possibility since Pakistan is a nuclear power. So I think the State’s worries on this ground are overblown.

The efforts of BB (and to some extent RNJ) to undermine the Pakistani identity and classify us as “Indian” are patently obvious and not intellectually tenable.

However, I do believe that my compatriots also go too far and try to downplay the links that Pakistan has with the “Indian subcontinent”.

 

 

Overzealous Pemra

Kabir · April 18, 2026 · 6 comments

A few days ago RNJ had referred to Pakistani TV channels being issued show-cause notices for airing Indian content in connection with the passing of Asha Bhosle.

This is one of the rare occasions when RNJ and I actually agree on something.  Though there is a judgement of Pakistan’s Supreme Court that bans the airing of Indian content on TV–and this is what PEMRA relied upon in their arguments–I personally think that this law is counterproductive. Art should transcend borders.

Mirza Moeez Baig explains in DAWN:

The decision in Human Rights Case No 22753-S: In 2016, Pemra issued a circular banning all private TV channels from airing Indian content. The circular was assailed before the Lahore High Court, where Justice Mansoor Ali Shah declared that Pemra’s ban was unconstitutional. In 2018, however, the apex court suspended the LHC judgement. In keeping with the jurisprudence that characterised his tenure, then chief justice Saqib Nisar, while suspending Justice Shah’s well-reasoned judgement, thundered, “They are trying to obstruct the construction of our dam and we cannot even ban their channels.”

And:

The right to free speech includes the right to receive ideas, facts, knowledge, theories, creative and emotive impulses through theatre, da­­-nce, music and film. Critical to the foundation of an independent and free media is creating an environment co­­n­ducive to the widest possible dissemination of informa-tion from diverse and antagonistic sources.

Unsurprisingly, Pemra’s show-cause notice would only pass muster if the content celebrating Bhosle’s musical journey (i) offended Pakistan’s ideology, (ii) was immoral, (iii) or jeopardised Pakistan’s security and integrity. Needless to say, Bhosle’s music posed no such existential threat.

I will end this post with a clip of Asha ji and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan’s piece “Khayal in Gaud Sarang”

 

 

 

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