A far-right senator, Pauline Hansen, recently walked into the Australian Senate wearing a burqa. Muslim MPs (one of whom wearing a hijab) angrily called it racist, bigoted, Islamophobic. They were right. But they also dodged the underlying question: What does citizenship mean when communities fracture along religious lines?

The same evasion dominates debates about Indian Muslims after 1947. One camp says: “They stayed, they’re citizens, case closed.” The other mutters about loyalty tests and fifth columns. Both positions are intellectually lazy. Neither grapples with what Partition actually did to the social contract.

This isn’t about defending bigotry. It’s about refusing to let bigots monopolize legitimate questions.

I. The Contract That Never Closed

Partition created a logical problem that India never resolved.

In 1946, the Muslim League won the Muslim vote overwhelmingly. The electoral mandate was clear: a substantial portion of Muslim political leadership rejected a Hindu-majority state. Pakistan was created. Millions migrated. Tens of millions stayed.

What happened next was not a new social contract. It was an assertion:

“Those who stayed are citizens. End of discussion.”

But citizenship after rupture cannot be declared into existence. It must be constituted.

Consider what did not happen:

• No plebiscite asking Muslims who remained: Do you now accept this republic as your final political home?
• No formal power-sharing settlement between Hindu and Muslim elites
• No public acknowledgment that staying was a choice worthy of political recognition
• No mechanism for the majority to say: We accept you unconditionally, despite 1947 except via soft cultural mechanisms (Bollywood & Cricket)

Instead, “secularism” became a euphemism for: We will not talk about the original wound. This is not how legitimacy works. Declaring a question closed does not make it disappear. It metastasizes.

The unresolved contract produces:

• Persistent anxiety about “dual loyalty”
• Communal voting blocs that treat identity as destiny
• Periodic violence that erupts when the repressed returns
• A majoritarian backlash that says: If you won’t name the problem, we will—brutally

You cannot build stable multiethnic democracy on unspoken resentments. You cannot expect a minority to feel secure when the majority never formally accepted them after rejection. You cannot expect the majority to feel confident when the minority never formally chose them after Partition.

This is the inheritance of 1947: a state built on a conversation that never happened.

II. “We Stayed” Is Not the Same as “We Chose”

The instinctive liberal response is: staying was the choice. Perhaps. But political legitimacy requires more than passive presence. It requires active consent; especially after a rupture as profound as Partition.

Every democratic theory from Locke to Rawls understands this. The social contract is not a one-time event. It must be renewed, particularly after it’s been broken. Think about what actually happened:

• Muslim elites who led the Pakistan movement largely departed
• Muslims who stayed were disproportionately poor, rural, less politically organized
• The remaining Muslim middle class had to navigate a state whose founding trauma included religious rejection
• No institutional mechanism existed to say: This is a new beginning

The Congress line, “Those who stayed are automatically loyal“, was generous in intent but hollow in execution. Loyalty is not assumed. It is built through:

• Reciprocal trust
• Shared sacrifice
• Institutional inclusion
• Public acknowledgment of the choice to stay

India did some of this. Reserved constituencies. Symbolic representation. Legal protections. But it never addressed the political question: How do you reconstitute legitimacy after your founding generation rejected each other on religious grounds? The absence of this conversation is not kindness. It’s a gap and gaps fill with poison.

III. Why Liberals Lose This Argument

Liberals make a category error. They treat every inquiry about Muslim loyalty as inherently bigoted. This is false. There are two separate issues:

1. Method – Collective suspicion, loyalty oaths, humiliation rituals, dog-whistles
2. Substance – What obligations does citizenship impose when your community’s historical leadership chose another state?

The first is morally wrong. The second is a legitimate question in political philosophy. By refusing to distinguish between them, liberals:

• Cede the entire topic to majoritarians
• Confirm the suspicion that they have no answer
• Make it impossible to defend Muslims on principled grounds

If your only response to questions about allegiance is “Islamophobia,” you have already lost. You’ve admitted you cannot justify the arrangement on first principles. Contrast this with how Israel handled Arab citizens after 1948. There was explicit tension, discriminatory policies, and ongoing conflict. But there was also a political argument: Arab citizens exist within the state, with rights and obligations defined by citizenship, not collective guilt. India never made that argument clearly. It simply declared the question out of bounds, which is why the question never went away.

IV. The Brahmin Question That No One Asks

This refusal to interrogate first principles extends beyond Partition. Consider caste. India had half a century of Brahmin Prime Ministers from one family. Now it has perhaps the most successful non-Brahmin Hindu leader in a thousand years. The symbolic shift is real. The structural shift is minor. The institutional culture remains recognizably Brahminical:

• The bureaucracy: dominated by generational exposure to formal education
• The judiciary: overwhelmingly upper-caste
• The media: staffed by those with English-medium schooling and social capital
• The diaspora: shaped by the IIT-IIM-H1B pipeline available only to a narrow slice

When people say “We will abolish caste,” they mean:

• Remove the words from legal documents
• Keep intact the structures that reproduce advantage

This is not conspiracy. It is how institutions work. Advantage compounds. The child of an IIT professor has a different starting point than the child of a landless farmer not because of IQ, but because of:

• Access to books before school
• Parents who understand the examination system
• Social networks that open doors
• Economic security that allows risk-taking

To pretend that success in this system is purely “merit” is fantasy. Meritocracy does not eliminate privilege. It launders it. The NRI/OCI middle class is the perfect case study:

• Enough privilege to navigate the tournament from JEE to Silicon Valley
• Not so much privilege that they coast on family wealth
• Convinced their success is entirely self-made

This class genuinely worked hard. But they worked hard on a track built by generations of accumulated advantage. Recognizing this is not guilt. It is clarity. If we cannot name how institutions preserve caste advantage under the language of meritocracy, we are not serious about caste abolition. We are engaged in performance.

V. What Brown Pundits Is For

Most online spaces exist to confirm priors. You go there to hear that your side is right, the other side is evil, and the world would be better if everyone thought like you. Brown Pundits cannot be that space or it is worthless. The point of this platform is to force contradictions into the open:

• For Hindu nationalists: to admit that “Hindutva” is often a cover for upper-caste consolidation
• For liberals: to admit that “secularism” has been a way to avoid hard questions about allegiance
• For Islamists: to admit that “minority rights” cannot mean exemption from critique
• For Ambedkarites: to admit that caste abolition requires more than constitutional text
• For NRIs: to admit that your position is produced by privilege, not universal opportunity

If you come here expecting validation, you will be disappointed. If you come here to have your logic tested, you are in the right place. I am returning to active moderation with one principle: No safe spaces for any ideology. Every camp has blind spots. Every camp has contradictions. If we cannot expose them in good faith, we will simply rehearse culture-war scripts until nothing means anything.

VI. First Principles or Noise

We will not resolve Partition, caste, citizenship, or legitimacy in one essay. But we can set a standard:

No slogans without definitions.

• What does “secularism” mean when the founding moment was religious rupture?
• What does “Hindu Rashtra” mean when Hindu society is fractured by caste?
• What does “minority rights” mean without minority obligations?
• What does “abolishing caste” mean when the institutional machinery remains unchanged?

No pretending history does not constrain the present.

• 1946–47 happened. It created a legitimacy gap.
• Caste happened. It structured who could access education, capital, networks.
• Elite continuity happened. Changing the name at the top does not change the machine.

No expecting Brown Pundits to protect your bubble.

• If your worldview cannot survive contact with counterargument, it is not a worldview. It is a cope.

The purpose of this space is simple:

To force South Asians, at home and abroad, to interrogate their own first principles in public. Everything else is secondary.