The Pakistani establishment elites have zero understanding of modern India. They don’t make any serious effort to understand it.
girmit‘s response is probably the most nuanced I have seen in a long while. Quality comments like this keep Interdiction holding up. Girmit has been making such type of qualified and interrogated comments for more than a decade now at BP (after the jump):
This has been my experience. They extrapolate from the India they understand, the northwest part, which leads them to overfit their mental model. This is assisted by a lack of curiosity, and a mild racial disdain, for the eastern and southern parts. India makes a similar error in seeing Pakistan as purely ideological and overlooking its unique ethnic character. If you want to understand the Pakistani mind, you’d do better to understand the Punjabi mentality than to study Islam.
Wrt to whether southerners care about Pakistan, i lean towards thinking only trivially, insofar as that conflict is a liability and risk that’s been acquired, about which one must not be naive or in denial. It’s proportional to whether they know Hindi and ingest that media, along with the brahmin variable. I have several relatives in defense who spent huge chunks of their lives stationed near the border or in northern cantonment towns, and I don’t reckon their antipathy to Pakistan to be all that deep. As for common southerners, they range from opportunistic and highly performative in the hawkishness to a contrarian openness, but you’d find far more authentic antipathy to northerners tbh, and not unusual to hear a joke or two about how delhi should have ended up on the other side of the partition line.
‘It’s proportional to whether they know Hindi and ingest that media, along with the brahmin variable…but you’d find far more authentic antipathy to northerners tbh’
Shameful tbh.
Yeah…absolutely shameful…but then the blog needs the hits so…..
That is a cheap comment to make..
Don’t do that again..
ouch..ok…but may I respond in the form of a post? It will provide more context?
You are welcome to
@Naresh @Archer
Please feel free to unpack the part you consider shameful. You’ve listed the names of the victims of the Pahalgam attack i see, I’m trying to make a connection to whats being discussed. For the record, I default to thinking that there was a link of some sort to the Pakistani state and also felt that Op Sindhoor was largely necessarily. One can have an adversary and not be emotionally invested to the point of perpetual rage. If your point is “see how many south indians they killed, you are a fool to think they are not also your mortal enemy”, then I think there is more nuance to that, evaluating which is the purpose of a discussion forum like this.
+1
‘shameful’ is …way too strong. But I can understand why some folks will get their hackles raised.
In an effort to ‘balance’ out things, and given that our discussions on BP are quite off the cuff, some of the thoughts and ‘tropes’ trotted out can be quite …inaccurately inflammatory. Especially if one isn’t too familiar with the folks making the comment. For example, its only because of a few months of being part of the discussion here, that I ‘know’ that XTM’s comments on caste etc aren’t really meant to be provocative. He’s attempting to ‘understand’, and sometimes we all can get things wrong in that process. But for someone unfamiliar with him, it can read quite differently.
You are making a strawman by trying to start me on perpetual rage and emotional investment.
Nuance from P Chidambram, A K Antony, Jaswant Singh, Atal Behari and Manmohan Singh got us into trouble. Anyone who thinks that these are not your mortal enemies is a fool.
Not consuming Pakistani media is dangerously ignorant. This is due to not sharing language and border. Having an air of contrarian openness on Pakistan’s nuclear and militancy threats is naive and attention seeking.
Hawks are pushing the window further out so that the future Congress, DMK or TMC government will not be totally servile. Improved security situation in Kashmir is proof that this works.
@Naresh Patel
a) So for clarity, you are saying that Pakistanis should be my mortal enemy?
b)You missed my point about consuming media. I mean to say, a south Indian who is not highly proficient in Hindi, is not likely to consume Hindi language news media or cinema, and as such less likely to undergo acculturation to the hindustani worldview, including its very specific traumas related to muslim separatism.
c) I dont consume Pakistani media much for the above reason, other than the occasional song, i don’t know enough hindi to comprehend it with ease.
d) I’m not a supporter of any of the politicians you’ve cited.
Do you think non-hindi speaking southerners did not suffer from “muslim separatism”? How utterly uninformed a view of history this is.
All of us run the same danger when we try to come up with blanket statements or interpretations of history and culture. And that’s ok. But its requisite that we are aware to this possibility and open to being corrected, without being defensive.
@RecoveringNewsJunkie
How do you take my statement:
> and as such less likely to undergo acculturation to the hindustani worldview, including its very specific traumas related to muslim separatism.
and infer such a strong assertion as:
> Do you think non-hindi speaking southerners did not suffer from “muslim separatism”?
You are engaging in bad-faith sophistry. did you not consider that another distant culture, deep in the tropics, could have had a different experience with muslim separatism? that it wasn’t the “very specific” trauma that hindustanis had experienced? In your world is it an oddity that a place thousands of kilometers away might have its own peculiarities? My assertion is inherently a caution against blanket generalities when speaking about subcontinent scale history.
In your world is it an oddity that a place thousands of kilometers away might have its own peculiarities? My assertion is inherently a caution against blanket generalities when speaking about subcontinent scale history
Exactly.
Another specific example
Supposed to have antipathy to Catholics because of the Goan Inquisition. To Sri Lankans the Goan Inquisition was as distant as the Spanish Inquision
Also the Portuguese only held a thin sliver of the coastal belt. Most of the West Coast Catholics are immigrants from Kerala within the last 200-300 years. About 2-3 generations ago they spoke Tamil (Malayalam ?) at home. Now they are considered Sinhalese (eg my BIL)
I am not saying Pakistanis should be your enemy. I am telling you they are your enemy, and they repeatedly announce it too. To make up your mind about whether you should consider them your enemy, you can either listen to their media and leadership or listen to what we are telling you.
Our men were executed in front of their wives. Headshots, like cattle. Pick a side, SIs, possibly Tamils, like the ones you mentioned, if they do exist, can’t act all cute on this without being checked.
This is not hindustani worldview. Putting in the ‘brahmin’ variable, and the usual Bengali/Tamil trope is inappropriate in this context.
nothing is inappropriate.
shutting down the caste discourse.
@YBNormal
so roll of deceased with their regional identifiers in bold type was an accidentally posted grocery list?
whats shameful about one’s ethnic identity informing their feelings of group belonging?
just because a comment is nuanced doesn’t mean I agree with it.