Two comments overnight exposed different sides of the the same problem.
You Can’t Weaponise Islamophobia and Then Kneecap Hinduism
Kabir tried to circulate a link around Manu Pillai’s Gods, Guns and Missionaries, a serious book, framed around whether Hinduism was, in some sense, constructed. The question is legitimate. All traditions are constructed. All identities consolidate under pressure.
But Hinduism and Islam are pari passu in this respect. The nineteenth century shaped both. Colonial enumeration shaped both. Reform movements reshaped both. Romila Thapar, Wendy Doniger, Sheldon Pollock; the literature on Hindu consolidation is vast. So is the literature on Islamic reform: Wahhabism emerging from Najd in the 1740s, Deoband crystallising in 1867 directly in response to 1857, Barelvism as counter-movement to both. All traditions have formation moments. All traditions modernise under pressure.
To apply the deconstructive lens to Hinduism while leaving Islamic historiography untouched is not intellectual rigour. It is asymmetry. Kabir, who deploys “Islamophobia” as a first-strike weapon with the hair-trigger of a seasoned litigator, has never shown the slightest inclination to subject his own tradition to equivalent scrutiny. If the lens is universal, use it universally. If it is selective, say so.
Anything else is prosecution dressed up as scholarship.
Pakistan’s Literacy Problem Is Real. The Comparison to India Is Useless.
Pakistan’s literacy rate sits at approximately 58%. India’s is 77%. The gap is real and it matters.
But literacy and digital literacy are different things. Mobile penetration in Pakistan exceeds 80%. Jazz and Telenor Pakistan have driven mobile-first access across rural Punjab and Sindh such that hundreds of millions of people who cannot read a newspaper navigate WhatsApp voice notes, YouTube, and TikTok without difficulty. This is the pattern across the entire Global South, from Indonesia to Nigeria. Bombay Badshah cited Jio as evidence of Indian exceptionalism. The irony is that Jio proves the opposite of his point; that device access decouples from literacy across developing economies.
The only serious comparison for Pakistan is longitudinal. In 1990 literacy was approximately 35%. Today it is 58%; twenty-three percentage points in thirty-five years. Slow, uneven, insufficient. But real. The harder questions are structural: why public education absorbs only 2.4% of GDP against the military’s 4%; why the parallel madrassah system educates an estimated 2.5 million children outside state frameworks; why telecom dynamism never translated into educational reform.
The reflex comparison to India, always framed to India’s advantage, always carrying a faint note of triumph, answers none of these. The only metric that actually matters for Pakistan is whether Pakistan is better than Pakistan was.
Everything else is theatre.
India Had the Perfect Middle East Strategy. Modi Is Torching It.
For decades India managed a triangulation that most countries could not have sustained: Israel, the Arab world, and Iran, simultaneously.
There is a reason the great goddess Durga is depicted with eight arms, each bearing a different weapon, each gifted by a different god, each serving a different purpose and yet she moves as one. She does not drop the lotus to raise the sword. She does not choose between the conch and the trident. The power is precisely in the multiplicity, held in perfect balance, each hand an expression of a different divine necessity operating simultaneously. That is not contradiction. That is sovereignty.
India at its best has governed its foreign policy the same way.
One hand holds Israel, defence co-production, cybersecurity, intelligence cooperation that long predates formal relations. Another holds Palestine, UN votes, the Jawaharlal Nehru Award to Arafat in 1975, Modi’s own Grand Collar of the State received in 2018, one of the few leaders honoured by both sides of that divide. A third holds Iran; Chabahar, energy, a civilisational continuum stretching back millennia, the Persian-Indic exchange that predates Islam in both countries. A fourth holds the Arab world; trade, diaspora, the six million Indians in the Gulf whose remittances underpin entire Indian state economies. A fifth holds the Global South; the voice of multipolarity, the inheritor of Nehru’s non-aligned vision, the country that speaks for the world that neither Washington nor Beijing fully owns.
Each hand has its own logic. Each hand serves Bharat. The deity functions because all hands move independently, without contradiction, without collision.
This was not hypocrisy. It was realism. Non-alignment was never passivity it was the disciplined management of contradiction in India’s favour.
Yesterday in Jerusalem something shifted. Modi became the first Indian leader ever to address the Knesset, told parliament that India stands with Israel “with full conviction,” and received a standing ovation. Netanyahu, who has lost significant credibility across the Global South, called him “more than a friend, a brother.” One week earlier, India had signed a UN statement condemning Israel’s de facto West Bank expansion, a day later than most signatories, suggesting considerable internal hesitation. The Israeli opposition boycotted the speech entirely. Netanyahu separately floated a “hexagon” alliance; Israel, India, Greece, Cyprus, and unnamed others, framed explicitly against “radical” Sunni and Shia nations. India has neither endorsed nor rejected it. That silence is its own statement.
The Palestinian cause commands deep and broad support across the Global South; from Jakarta to Johannesburg to Brasília. India has 200 million Muslim citizens. The geometry of sympathy is not complicated.
None of this means India should not engage Israel. The technology and security partnership is substantive; defence co-production, AI, quantum computing all on the table this visit. That relationship has its own logic and value independent of Gaza.
But when all the hands move in the same direction, Durga is no longer Durga.
The question is not whether India can stand with Israel; Bharat is well on its way to becoming the great balancing power between the US-China rivalry, the civilisational superpower that the twenty-first century has been waiting for. That destiny is not served by full legibility to any single bloc. It is served by exactly the sovereign multiplicity that made India indispensable in the first place.
Strategic ambiguity is a shield. Predictability is a liability. When a state becomes fully legible, it becomes tradable.
That asset, once spent, does not regenerate easily.
Muslims Turn Fasting Into a Party. Why Don’t We?
The Bahá’í Fast begins this Monday, falling inside Ramadan. The proximity, while coincidental (we fast to Naw-Rúz), is also genealogical.
The Bahá’í Faith emerged from a Shi’a Persian milieu in Shiraz in 1844. The Báb was a merchant steeped in Quranic literacy and Shi’a devotional tradition. Bahá’u’lláh declared his mission in Baghdad in 1863, having spent years in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala before his exile westward. The Fast, nineteen days of abstinence from sunrise to sunset, ending at Naw-Rúz on March 20th, carries the direct imprint of that inheritance, shaped further by the Zoroastrian solar calendar that gives Naw-Rúz its ancient date. Persian, Arab, Shi’a, pre-Islamic: all compressed into nineteen days.
What is striking about Ramadan is not the abstinence. It is the architecture. Iftar is communal; a nightly anchor, the day’s discipline releasing into shared tables every evening. From Marrakech to Dhaka to Boston, Ramadan is social infrastructure. The fast is structure; Iftar is renewal. 1.8 billion people inhabit this framework fully and joyfully every year.
The Bahá’í calendar contains its own extraordinary architecture. Nineteen months, nineteen days, names layered upon names; Bahá, Splendour; Jalál, Glory; Jamál, Beauty; ‘Adl, Justice; ‘Ilm, Knowledge. The nineteenth day of the Fast lands on the name Bahá again, completing the cycle. The number nineteen carries the numerological value of wáhid, unity, in the abjad system running through classical Arabic and Persian sacred thought. The Báb chose it deliberately. The structure is not incidental. It is cosmological.
Nineteen evenings. Nineteen households. Nineteen gatherings, each carrying a name from the calendar. The framework already exists.
The difference between abstraction and civilisation is use.
The Rules Apply to Me Too. Full Stop.
Brown Pundits works when standards are consistent; when Hinduism and Islam are held to the same lens, when Pakistan is assessed structurally rather than comparatively, when India’s strategy is examined without reflexive alignment.
The standards apply to everyone.
Including me.
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Am Yisrael Chai 🙂
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