India Is No Longer Legible to Pakistani Liberals

There is a persistent habit among Pakistani liberals, especially those from elite backgrounds or with deep emotional ties to pre-1947 North India, of speaking about India as if it were still legible to them. It is not. India has moved on. So has Pakistan. But only one side seems unable to accept that.

The Mirage of Patrimony

Many Pakistanis of Muhajir or North Indian lineage carry an inherited sense of ownership over India. They speak as if India is a shared cultural estate, temporarily misplaced. This is a fantasy. The India of 2025 is not the India of 1947. It is not even the India of 1991. It has changed demographically, economically, politically, and, most importantly, civilizationally. Pakistanis who have not travelled to India in decades, who rely on English-language media and nostalgic family memory, do not “understand” India. They are projecting onto it. Projection is not insight. It is displacement.

Code-Switching as Evasion

This displacement often appears as cultural code-switching. A familiar type emerges: Pakistani by passport, Indian by convenience. At various moments, he is South Asian, Indo-Persian, Urdu-speaking, postcolonial; anything but fully Pakistani when the conversation turns difficult. This is not sophistication. It is refusal. By oscillating identities, such figures avoid reckoning with Pakistan as it actually exists: its theology, its civil–military imbalance, its treatment of minorities, its unresolved purpose as a state. When pressed, they grow defensive; not because the critique is unfair, but because it demands that they declare priors they would rather keep ambiguous.

Liberalism as an Exile Fantasy

For many Pakistani elites, India becomes the stage on which they perform their liberalism. Pakistan is too compromised, too dangerous, too morally demanding. So they outsource their ethical imagination. They critique Hindu nationalism. They warn of Indian authoritarianism. They speak eloquently about pluralism; always elsewhere. This posture allows them to avoid the central question: what is Pakistan for? If you cannot conceptually confront Pakistani society on its own terms, its use of Islam as state ideology, the military’s primacy, the limits of liberal reform, you have no standing to lecture India.

Dharma and the Civilizational Gap

At the core of this misunderstanding lies a deeper failure. Many Pakistanis cannot accept the primacy of Dharma in the Indian context. India is not merely a secular republic with Hindu aesthetics. Hinduism is not an identity comparable to Islam or Christianity. It is a civilizational grammar. Law, ethics, caste, ritual, time, metaphysics; all flow through it. You cannot understand modern India without accepting this. And you cannot accept this if your frame remains trapped in Islamic universalism or postcolonial liberalism, both of which treat religion as detachable from civilization. In India, it is not.

On Corruption and the Modi Question

India is not corruption-free. That claim is childish. But something has changed. Narendra Modi is not dynastic. He does not loot the state to secure his family’s future. This matters. It removes one central axis of extraction and shifts political incentives toward longer-term capacity rather than short-term plunder. The Indian state remains vast and imperfect. Corruption has not vanished; it has changed form. The difference is not moral purity. It is state confidence.

The Real Divide

Pakistan’s problem is not India. India argues endlessly, loudly, chaotically, but within a civilizational frame it broadly accepts as its own. Pakistan argues because it has never settled what it is for. Until Pakistanis stop using India as a mirror for their frustrations, they will remain trapped in a conversation that leads nowhere.

India does not need Pakistani validation. Pakistan needs Pakistani clarity.