On Balochistan and Pashtunistan and Kashmir

June 23, 2026 Bombay Badshah No Comments filed under Bombay Badshah, Uncategorized

I had been meaning to make a post regarding this for sometime but since X.T.M made his post touching on some of the points, now is as good a time as any.

Now while X.T.M does make good points from time to time (his post on the fate of Indian Muslims was very good in my opinion without any hyperbole stating the actual future paths available), his views on Balochistan and Pashtunistan (not referring to an individual polity here but Afghanistan and KPK combined as the insurgency infrastructure exists across the Durand Line. Will be using this term for the rest of the article) are completely divorced from reality and at times sounds like it came from a DGISPR presser.

The same misreading feeds the Saffroniate’s favourite fantasy, that Balochistan or Afghanistan can be turned into Pakistan’s Kashmir, a running wound that bleeds the state. It will not happen, and the reason is structural.

This statement makes absolutely no sense. You can debate about subjective topics like who “won” Sindoor or diplomatic “relevance”, not the fact that Balochistan and Pashtunistan is already “a running wound bleeding the state”, not something that is going to “happen” in the future.

In fact, there was a post regarding this bleeding last month.

And the comparison to Kashmir makes that “bleeding” even more apparent because the bleeding in Kashmir has stemmed a lot (much to the chagrin of Pakistanis).

X.T.M is right in one sense – that I love my numbers. So I will be presenting some numbers and charts and inferences. All the data is sourced from SATP. They have their sources for the individual events which can be checked on their site.

NOTE: I am not “glorifying” or “celebrating” anything but just presenting cold hard data. I will even be referring to the parties as “insurgents” instead of “terrorists” or “freedom fighters” in the interest of fairness.

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Soundscapes of Muharram (Kabir’s Open Thread)

June 23, 2026 Kabir No Comments filed under Kabir

As promised, this is going to be my only post this week.

1) Soundscapes of Muharram

By Mansoor Raza

This is particularly timely since it is currently Muharram and Ashura is this week.

From the dust of Pakistan’s independence in 1947 emerged a sonic revolution that would permanently rewrite Karachi’s spiritual DNA.

Rooted in classical Urdu, Arabic and Persian literary traditions, the noha — a profound elegiac lament commemorating the tragedy of Karbala and the martyrdom of Imam Husain (AS) — travelled across a fractured Subcontinent in the hearts of millions of families that migrated to Karachi. Over the last three-quarters of a century, this localised ritual of displacement morphed into a defining cultural powerhouse.

Driven by global shifts and technological eras, 12 trailblazing master orators of the noha [elegiac lament] arose, not merely as reciters, but as architectural anchors and boundary-breakers who fundamentally re-engineered the soundscape of devotion.

2) DAWN reviewed Anjum Altaf’s book A Modern Introduction to Indian Music and Other Essays Including a Primer on the Physics of Sound

Part primer, part Socratic conversation and part cultural history, this engaging volume explores the theoretical foundations of Indian classical music

The book is unique and quite different from other Pakistani authors’ books on music, as it is interactive. It is the outcome of shared learning, in which a group learns from each other by pooling knowledge, and is more exciting and effective than passively being exposed to an expert’s views. In fact, the essays started off as blog posts that were then commented upon by readers. Those discussions are included in the book, almost like a Socratic dialogue.

The book has also been published in India by Primus Books

Pakistan, the Successor State to Islamistan

June 23, 2026 X.T.M 8 Comments filed under Precedent, X.T.M

The settled view of Pakistan, is that it is the most ideologically Islamic state the world has ever produced, and that each decade carries it further into theocracy. We think the settled view is wrong.

The Pakistani elite has quietly secularised. And far from hollowing the state out, this is precisely how Pakistan became what it was always designed to be: the successor state to British India’s Muslims. Islam was the vehicle. Pakistan is the destination.

Islam remains the public language of legitimacy.

Privately, among the stakeholders who actually run the place, the operating priorities are entirely secular. The society on the ground is conservative and devout. The class at the top, the one that keeps the state alive, believes in Pakistan far more than it believes in Islam.

It helps to separate three things that we mean by Islam. There is Islam as faith, the private conviction of the believer. There is Islam as identity, the badge of who one is and whom one stands with. And there is Islam as state language, in which Pakistan explains itself to itself and to the world.

The elite has not surrendered the third, and it has not wholly shed the second. What it has let go of is the first as a terminal value: the notion that the purpose of the state is to realise Islam, rather than to deploy it.

Faith has gone from ultimate to instrumental.

This migration is what we mean by secularisation. This is not the familiar story of liberalisation. We are not saying Pakistan grew tolerant, or irreligious, or fond of gin. We are saying something narrower and stranger. Pakistan’s elite secularised the priorities of the state without secularising its language. Strip away the Islamic vocabulary and look at what the stakeholder class optimises for, and the list is unmistakable: state survival, strategic depth, military capability, sovereignty, national prestige, and the reproduction of the elite itself.

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