Southasia Is One Word

Reflections on Pervez Hoodbhoy at MIT

Zachary L. Zavidé | Brown Pundits | May 2025

Pervez Hoodbhoy needs no introduction. As one of Pakistan’s leading physicists and public intellectuals, he has long stood at the uneasy crossroads of science, nationalism, and conscience. He spoke this week at MIT’s Graduate Tower — the final stop on a grueling five-city U.S. tour, a new city every two days — in support of The Black Hole Initiative, a cultural and intellectual space he’s building in Pakistan. Despite its ominous name, the initiative is a wormhole, not a void: a cross-disciplinary bridge connecting physics, literature, art, and civic life.

What followed was less a lecture, more an exposition — sober, lucid, and grounded in decades of hard-won clarity.

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The Logic of Annihilation

Dr. Hoodbhoy walked us through Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine: under long-standing military assumptions, if the north–south arterial route is severed, a tactical nuclear strike becomes viable. But the calculus is disturbingly abstract. Hiroshima’s 20-kiloton bomb killed 200,000. India and Pakistan each possess an estimated 200 warheads. One general once told him that, by crude arithmetic — obscene as it sounds — “only” 80 million would die in the event of a full exchange.

That figure excludes the poisoned rivers, the fire-prone vertical sprawl of megacities like Karachi and Lahore, the radioactive winds, and the unborn dead. The Indo-Gangetic plain would become a lifeless corridor — uninhabitable for millennia.

Perhaps only South India would be spared.

And while Delhi and Islamabad stare each other down, China watches patiently — proximate, unscathed, and ascendant.

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Crosscurrents and Unspoken Truths

Dr. Hoodbhoy offered a particularly compelling thread during the discussion: the recent appointment of Field Marshal Asim Munir — a Hafiz and staunch believer in the two-nation theory — signals just how ideologically consolidated Pakistan’s military has become. Paradoxically, no one has done more to cement the military’s dominance over Pakistan’s fragile democratic order than Pradhan Mantri Modi himself, whose engagement strategy, while superficially hawkish, may have inadvertently legitimized the army’s grip on power.

This is a theme I’ve explored before: nothing has animated the Pakistani national psyche quite like Modi’s India. The military thrives on external threat, and Modi provides it in spades.

The event drew a wide range of attendees from both Indian and Pakistani backgrounds — but what struck me was the age skew. It was the older generations who showed up, who still remembered mixing across the border. My sense is that the younger IndoPak generations aren’t interacting — intellectually, culturally, even digitally — with the same openness as South Asians did 50 or 60 years ago.

One participant made a provocative but important point about the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. He noted that while global coverage focused on the Taj Hotel siege, the highest number of casualties occurred at Victoria Terminus (VT), the train station. The shooter, Ajmal Kasab, gunned down 70–80% of the victims there. According to the speaker, who identified as Indian Muslim or rather had a Muslim name, many of the dead at VT were themselves Muslim — likely based on travel routes and regional demographics. I can’t independently verify that claim, but it underscores how class and media optics shaped public focus. The Taj, a luxury hotel with live media coverage, became the symbol — while the mass killing at VT faded into the background, covered only in domestic, not international, news.

Another thread traced the roots of contemporary militancy. Around the year 2000, support for jihadist groups was nearly mainstream in Pakistan, a residual effect of the Afghan jihad and the subsequent fallout. The “rigged” Kashmir elections in 1987 served as a turning point — delegitimizing Indian rule in the Valley and laying the foundation for decades of insurgency (which coupled with the directional flow of militants from the Afghanistan war zone). Kashmir has effectively been in turmoil ever since.

Hoodbhoy himself commented that while 26/11 was almost certainly ISI-linked, perhaps even used to destabilize Musharraf, the recent Pahalgam attack lacked the usual fingerprints. He suggested that a joint international investigation would have served all sides better, but India rushed to pin it squarely on Pakistan — foreclosing nuance in favor of narrative.

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Additional Reflections from the Talk

A few meta-points from the discussion stood out:

• Blocked by Musharraf: Dr. Hoodbhoy shared that his own academic promotion was blocked under General Musharraf’s regime. The reason? He had openly criticized the state for continuing to harbor militant groups, despite Musharraf’s public claims — made in the wake of Bush’s post-9/11 ultimatum — that such groups had been disbanded. The contradiction cost Hoodbhoy professionally, underscoring the risks he has taken in speaking truth to power.

• Pakistan’s Nuclear Adviser: Despite these tensions, Hoodbhoy has often been called upon by the Pakistani establishment to advise on nuclear policy — a recognition of his deep expertise. Yet, he has remained resolutely committed to de-escalation, peace & de-nuclearisation even at profound personal risk.

• The “Hard State”: Echoing recent commentary by S Qureishi, Dr. Hoodbhoy alluded to Pakistan’s evolution into a “hard state” — a term that resonates deeply post-Pahalgam, as Pakistan continues to operate as a managed democracy. The questions around Pakistan’s failure to sustain democratic pluralism came up frequently during the session.

• Partition’s Pathologies: Hoodbhoy offered a compelling diagnosis of this failure, tracing it to the political compromises made during Partition. He argued that Quaid-e-Azam’s dependence on the landed aristocracy (zamindars) undermined Pakistan’s intellectual foundations from the start. These elites were not ideologically committed to democracy, let alone modern statecraft.

• The Allahabad Anecdote: One telling anecdote stood out. When asked by a student at Allahabad University what kind of country Pakistan would be — a secular Muslim state or something else — Quaid-e-Azam reportedly responded:

  “Shh. Don’t sow disunity. We’ll figure it out once we have it.”

  That improvisational posture, Hoodbhoy suggests, continues to define Pakistan’s political ethos to this day.

• Personal & National Timelines: The event closed with a sense that Hoodbhoy’s life and Pakistan’s trajectory are deeply intertwined. His reflections weren’t just political — they were lived, often painfully. His half-hour talk spilled into an extended Q&A that poignantly blurred biography with national history.

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Peace on a War Footing

Also in attendance was acclaimed journalist Beena Sarwar, distributing materials from the Southasia Peace Action Network (Sapan). I signed both her Social Media Peace Pledge and regional peace petition — and donated. Her message was clear:

“We must wage peace on a war footing.”

Sapan now hosts daily peace-room office hours (11am ET) and a weekly Citizens’ Dialogue. The next session — “What Does Peace Mean to Young Southasians?” — is on May 25.

📍 Register: Zoom Link

📰 More info: Sapan Substack

🖊️ Join: Sapan Charter

Beena also shared her documentary Democracy in Debt: Sri Lanka Beyond the Headlines — a haunting portrait of governance and collapse.

🎞️ Trailer: Watch here

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Southasia, One Word

The subtlest, most powerful moment came from a veteran and very venerable former Indian diplomat who spoke at the end. “The easiest people to work with,” he said, “were always the Pakistanis.” Why? Because the shared civilizational fabric is undeniable — linguistic, emotional, spiritual.

Partition, he added, severed geography but left behind culture. Most significant Muslim shrines? In India. Most Jewish holy sites? In the West Bank. The flawed logic of post-colonial partitions repeats itself.

He also recalled the Musharraf–Manmohan era — when discussions around normalizing Kashmir, easing visa regimes, and developing “Common Action Protocols” nearly broke the deadlock. That spirit must be revived. Pakistan had retreated from its insistence on a plebiscite, which by the way the Indian government in 1947 believed it would actually win.

But what struck me most, and what inspired this post, was how many highly educated diasporic South Asians responded to the recent Pahalgam hostilities with bloodlust (including the Commentariat of this Blog). These are the very people who proclaim liberalism abroad — yet indulge in digital jingoism the moment Southasia erupts.

In contrast, the aam aadmi — the average Southasian — instinctively knows what our elites have forgotten:

“Southasia” is one word. One region. One civilizational breath.

To love Pakistan is love India. It is to acknowledge what came before 1947 — and to honor the civilizational truth that our current nation-states try so desperately to deny.

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What Comes Next

Back in Ye Old Cambridge, I co-founded CAMbFiRE (Cambridge Bridging Forums for Interdisciplinary Exchange), a pluralist space for cross-ideological conversation. We need the same across Southasia: hard platforms, not soft nostalgia.

I’ve proposed a follow-up dialogue at Harvard or MIT — ideally the beginning of a Southasia Series on peace, politics, and pluralism. The room for Hoodbhoy filled up fast; the appetite is there.

Brown Pundits, in my view, is fast becoming one of the few remaining platforms willing to tackle the Indo–Pak divide with both rigor and honesty. If you’re reading this, consider it a call:

Interrogate your media. Refuse manufactured rage.

Advocate for peace — even when the world around you is baying for blood.

*Why Southasia as one word? Because history, geography and shared struggles say so.

Write Southasia as one word. And mean it.