The Long Defeat: How Hinduphobia Hollowed Out Pakistan

I lost an entire post earlier, but perhaps it’s for the best. I’ve had the time now to clarify my thoughts and this is better to make clear the new policy of just junking comments that don’t “smell right.”

What prompted me to write again was a small but telling excerpt from a recent Dawn article. It wasn’t just that they misspelled “Brahman”; they wrote “Barhaman,” a word that doesn’t exist in any linguistic tradition. It was also the order in which they listed religions. They wrote:

“…revered for not only the followers of the world’s three major religions — Buddhism, Sikhism and Hinduism…”

Hinduism, the oldest and most foundational of the three, was placed last. This is not trivial. Both Buddhism and Sikhism evolved from Hinduism. Yet in Pakistani discourse, so marked by dislocation and disavowal, Hinduism is routinely treated as a junior or fringe faith. This is what endemic Hinduphobia looks like: not explicit violence, but civilizational misordering, semantic erasure, and the subtle, continuous downgrading of Hindu memory.

It’s barely recognized. And that’s the point.

Which brings me to Brown Pundits. As far as I know, only two individuals have ever been fully blocked from the platform: Honey and Qureshi. But even that isn’t permanent. Everyone has the ability to email in, to discuss, to reengage if they wish (though Honey’s bullying of Kabir was beyond the pale). Brown Pundits has always believed in open conversation.

But I’ve come to realize that openness does not require eternal tolerance for disruption. So myself, along with the Administrators, we’re moving to a new moderation model. Voiding will now be replaced by deletion. We will no longer hold space for voices that consistently derail, troll, or re-traumatize others; especially voices like Kabir, who seem determined to drag every thread back into a tired rhetorical war zone.

This is not a censorship regime. It’s an effort to restore purpose. Brown Pundits was never meant to be a battlefield for the same few fixations. It is not our job to continuously hold the center between incompatible extremes. Especially not when one side seeks only to provoke.

And to be clear: I love Pakistan. I’m a patriot. I believe, deeply, that one can love both one’s mother and one’s father (Bharat, Pakistan, India, Iran). That is part of my religious tradition. It allows me to hold both roots in tension, not denial. But love is not the same as enabling. Love requires clarity. And sometimes boundaries.

So let this be a small moment of clarification. Of housekeeping. But also of commitment: to platform serious voices, to protect civil discourse, and to finally say: we don’t need to justify the space. The space just is. And it’s time to use it wisely.

Addendum: On Hinduphobia, 1971, and the Failure of Pakistan

What has destroyed Pakistan, what has hollowed it out from within, is not merely economic mismanagement or geopolitical bad luck. It is Hinduphobia. A foundational Hinduphobia that has only intensified over time.

Where India became more pluralistic (even if imperfectly- not a single Indian Muslim seems intent on moving to Pakistan), and even Dubai embraced economic pragmatism over theological obsession, Pakistan doubled down on its hatred of what it once was. It turned Hinduphobia into national doctrine.

And in doing so, it opened the door to religious and ethnic cleansing; culminating in 1971, when East Pakistan was not just ethnically purged but religiously punished. Were there genocidal elements? I believe so. And I intend to write a post focused specifically on 1971, because the record needs to be clarified and restated with moral precision.

But for now, I say this: any space that cannot pass the SNP test; serious, nuanced, principled, is to be discarded. The role of Supernumerary Administrators is not to indulge rhetorical warfare disguised as civility. We are not here to be gaslit into silence.

To say I love Pakistan is not to say I will excuse its sins. Love requires the clarity to say: this is the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Take, for example, the comment by Kabir: “In response to 1971, we’ll never forget 1947.” That is not only illogical; it is morally bankrupt. The Partition of 1947, however violent, was a spontaneous collapse of order, not a state-led genocidal campaign. There is consensus on this point among serious historians across the spectrum.

Yes, both sides committed atrocities. But to conflate the communal frenzy of Partition with the premeditated targeting of Bengalis (and especially Bengali Hindus) in 1971 is a category error. It is a bad-faith equivalence, and no amount of Western academese camouflage can save it.

More broadly, Pakistan is a country at war with itself because it cannot bear to remember what it once was. It reveres Aurangzeb, a man who not only oppressed non-Muslims but also favoured foreign Muslims over native Muslims; a pattern of internalized subjugation that still defines much of Pakistani elite identity today.

Pakistan continues to look westward, even as it forgets its own soil. This worship of the foreign, Arab, Persian, anything but Indic, is a pathology, not a policy. Some may argue it’s no worse than traditional caste-bound Brahmanism. Perhaps. But it is certainly no better. It is no future.