Op Sindoor Was Not a Pakistani Defeat: Precedents Two Days From Pahalgam

Two days from the tragic anniversary of Pahalgam (may those brave Martyrs rest in Peace for their sacrifice for Dharma). A useful moment to set down precedents, because a year out the narrative has hardened in places it should not have, and we would like the comments to stress-test these before they calcify further.

Precedent one. Operation Sindoor was not a Pakistani defeat.

Pakistan entered 2025 as a failed state. It exits the Pahalgam year as a diplomatic champion. Whatever happened in the skies over those days in May, the outcome in global perception is unambiguous. A military operation is never only a military operation. It is also how the world reads it, and on that ledger the result is not the one Delhi wanted. No Pakistani commentator across the spectrum treats Sindoor as a setback. Our Pakistani readers can confirm this in the thread, and we invite them to. The Indian premise that Pakistan might now re-engage to recover from some imagined humiliation makes zero sense. The humiliation is not where Indian commentary locates it.

Precedent two. The Crescent commentariat cannot have it both ways.

There is a pernicious Pakistani trait, most visible in the diaspora and the Anglophone class at home. They live distinctly Western lifestyles. They then want Islam for all. Live your beliefs. It is a genuinely offensive thing to cheer on the Iranian revolution, a revolution deeply devastating to the Iranian people, from an American suburb or a DHA drawing room. Only a Pakistani commentator could manage the trick of celebrating the Islamic Republic while exempting themselves from its consequences.

In the Iranian diaspora, religious Shias are quietly ostracised. Persian pride, across pre-Islamic, Islamic and post-Islamic registers, is astonishing in its depth. Some of us, the Baha’is for instance, integrate all three.

The TNT move, which imports Islamist preferences onto others while the class that holds them escapes the reality (QeA typifies this), is the opposite.

Precedent three. The rediscovery of Hinduism is coming, and it will come from South Punjab and Sindh.

In Urdu class just now, our teacher proudly spoke about Panjnad, the point where the five rivers of the Indus meet (the equivalent of Varanasi alas without Brahmins to sacralise it). He told me proudly that it was named in the Mahabharata. He told us the Sufi master of Panjnad married a woman of the Cholistani tribe, and the local people remember it 150 years later. The pattern recurs across the shrines dotted through South Punjab and Sindh. Sufi masters married into the local tribes. This is the oldest Muslim culture in the subcontinent, running back to the earliest invasions and Muhammad bin Qasim. It is the most syncretic.

Pakistani nationalism as constructed in Lahore and through Urdu is a denial of the Hindu inheritance in favour of a Persian one. Lahore dominates the cultural production, and Lahore is heavily invested in an Urdu-speaking identity for reasons of its own. That construction does not map onto the actual history of Multan, Bahawalpur, Sukkur, Sehwan. As secularisation proceeds, and it is proceeding piecemeal, regional ethnicities will do what Bengal has already done and reach for a pre-Islamic layer. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are dense, spectacular, geographically specific texts. Most of the land they describe is in Pakistan. The internet is a very large place and Pakistanis, especially those who are truly autochthonous, will hunt for their heritage.

Within a generation, thirty to forty percent of Pakistanis will want to express some form of Hindu heritage. Not the majority. Not even the plurality. But a substantial and culturally consequential minority. It will not happen suddenly. It will be a process, uneven across regions and classes, and the Sindhi and South Punjabi will get there before the Lahori.

The Hindu right does not help itself. It does not know how to speak to this constituency. The parallel is Christian Zionism and its mirror: most Palestinian Christians, who are by descent far more plausibly linked to the ancient Israelites than most contemporary Zionists, are simply switched off by Zionism as currently configured. The communication failure is total, and the movement loses its most natural audience. The Hindu right is making the same mistake with the same demographic logic.

TNT nationalism is already fraying. It will have to adapt to a radically different landscape, the way Zionism will.