July 9, 2026 – Brown Pundits

Two flags fly over the subcontinent’s women. One says cover them. The other says protect them.

We do not think the two are equivalent in cruelty. We think they are equivalent in structure.

No Hindu Equivalent to Zia.

There is no Hindu-nationalist equivalent of Zia ul-Haq’s Hudood Ordinances of 1979, which for decades made a raped woman’s complaint the raw material of a charge against her. There is no Hindu-nationalist equivalent of the Qanun-e-Shahadat of 1984, under which, in certain documentary and financial matters, two women’s testimony is required to equal one man’s. Pakistan partially repaired the first in 2006. The second stands.

That is statutory. It is one-sided. Anyone who tells you the two flags are the same is lying to you, and we are not going to.

What follows is about something else.

I. Two Patriarchies.

Continue reading The Crescent and the Trident clash over their women

The useful conversations at a conference are never in the room. They happen in the corridor, over bad coffee, among the people who did not get a panel.

What we heard there over the weekend was a single proposition, stated with varying degrees of anger. The subcontinent is held down by two post-imperial states, each of which inherited the Raj’s administrative logic and neither of which has any intention of loosening it. The languages, the peoples, the small nations inside the big ones are being quietly extinguished. The activists who said this were Baloch, Sindhi, Kashmiri and Punjabi (as well as Pushtun, Hazara, and Urdu-speaking).

We should also say at the outset that this essay is about Pakistan. The two-hegemon frame is the activists’ frame, and we have not necessarily adopted it.

I. Ethnicity versus the Pakistani state.

Continue reading Pakistan & India as Imperial Nation States