So it starts ..
Author: X.T.M
Why Pakistani Liberals Remain a Colonised Intellectual Class
The exchange (which has now been removed after mutual agreement) that just unfolded was not about architecture. It was about authority.
SD made factual errors, quietly corrected them, and apologised in private. That should have ended the matter. Instead, the loudest resistance came from Kabir: a reflex insistence that disagreement was illegitimate because the author was âcredentialed,â âOxford,â and therefore beyond challenge.
This is the residue of colonisation. Pakistanis were not only carved out of British India; they were produced by the collapse of a Muslim ruling class already broken by the British after the destruction of Mughal power. What followed was not confidence but deference. The habit of looking upward, to Western institutions, American accents, British titles, for permission to speak. That habit persists. Continue reading Why Pakistani Liberals Remain a Colonised Intellectual Class
Why Balochistan Is Not Kashmir
This growing tendency to treat every internal conflict in South Asia as if it were interchangeable with Kashmir (the “Sunni Valley“). This is a mistake, and in the case of Balochistan, a very serious one.
The distinction was once put very clearly to me by Benazir Bhutto herself. In the 1990s, while seeking international advocacy on Kashmir, she was asked by Saddam Hussein a blunt question: If we support Kashmir, why should the world not support Kurdistan? Her reply was immediate and precise. Kashmir, she said, is an international dispute. Kurdistan is not.
That distinction matters, and it still holds.
Kashmir is internationalized by design. It is anchored in UN resolutions, formal bilateral agreements, wars between recognized states, and sustained global diplomatic engagement. It belongs to the same narrow category as Palestine or Cyprus; flashpoints where sovereignty itself is contested between states and therefore cannot be reduced to a domestic matter. Continue reading Why Balochistan Is Not Kashmir
Pakistan Is Not About to Break Apart
There is a persistent habit, especially among our soi-disant commentators, of predicting Pakistanâs imminent disintegration. The arguments are familiar: Baloch insurgency, Pashtun irredentism, low Kashmiri fertility, economic weakness, and analogies to 1971. They are also, taken together, wrong.
To begin with, most people discussing Pakistan do not understand its internal sociology. They begin with a conclusion, âPakistan is artificial and unstableâ, and then select facts to confirm it. This is confirmation bias dressed up as analysis.
Consider the Pashtuns. The claim that they are natural irredentists misunderstands who they are and how they live. Pashtuns in Pakistan are not a marginal population looking across the border for salvation. They are deeply integrated into the Pakistani state, economy, and military. They dominate transport, logistics, security, and large parts of urban informal commerce. Large numbers have moved permanently into Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad. Assimilation is not failing; it is proceeding at scale. Continue reading Pakistan Is Not About to Break Apart
A Republic Cannot Deport, Humiliate or âOutbreedâ Its Own People
âWe are not from Bangladesh. We are Indian. Why did they do this to us?â
That question should shame the Indian state. On the facts as currently established, Sunali Khatun, a pregnant Indian woman, her husband, and their child were detained in Delhi, deported across an international border without due process, imprisoned in a foreign country, separated, and left to survive on charity and court orders. Their crime was not illegal entry. It was speaking Bengali, being Muslim, and being poor. This was not a mistake or overreach. It was state violence carried out through paperwork and silence.
India has procedures for suspected illegal migrants
They exist to prevent this outcome. They were ignored. There was no verification with the home state, no due process, no public record, and no accountability. A family was pushed across a border, reportedly beaten when they tried to return, and abandoned. That is not law enforcement. It is expulsion by force. When a state confuses language with nationality and religion with foreignness, it stops governing and starts hunting.
Citizenship is not a favour
It is a legal fact. India is not meant to be a blood, language, or religious state. Citizenship is defined by law, not accent or poverty. When the weakest are forced to prove citizenship under duress while the powerful are never asked, law collapses into power. This is how republics rot: not through coups, but through habits.
This is not an isolated lapse of manners towards the Muslim minority
It is the same logic in a smaller, more public form. When a Chief Minister can pull down a Muslim womanâs veil at a government appointment ceremony, and senior ministers can defend it as âshow your faceâ patriotism, the message is clear: Muslim dignity is conditional, and visibility is enforced, not consented to. The argument is always the same. It is dressed up as procedure, security, or ârule of law,â but it operates as dominance.
Muslim Identity is seen as a National Threat
Today it is a veil tugged down in a room of officials. Yesterday it was a Bengali-speaking family pushed across a border. In both cases, the state treats Muslim identity as an offence to be corrected in public, and citizenship as something that can be suspended by suspicion. This is how discrimination becomes policy: first through humiliation, then through paperwork, then through expulsion.
Bengal, like Kashmir, is not a border zone to be cleansed Continue reading A Republic Cannot Deport, Humiliate or âOutbreedâ Its Own People
Pakistan and the Act of Union
A Cold Comparison, Not a Romantic One
There is only one historical analogy worth using when discussing Pakistan ârejoiningâ India: the Act of Union of 1707 between Scotland and England. Not Rome and Greece. Not Yugoslavia. Not German reunification. And certainly not civilizational nostalgia. The reason is simple. The 1707 Union was not about love, memory, or reconciliation. It was about bankruptcy, security, elite survival, and managed loss of sovereignty without humiliation. That is the only way such a union could ever happen.
Union Is an Elite Exit, Not a Popular Dream
Scotland did not join England because it felt British. It joined because it was broke. The Darien Scheme collapsed. The Scottish state was insolvent. The elite faced personal ruin. England controlled capital, markets, and trade. The Act of Union absorbed Scottish debt, protected elite property, preserved law and church, dissolved sovereignty while preserving status. The public opposed it. It passed anyway. Unions are not plebiscites. They are elite exits under pressure.
Pakistanâs Position Is Structurally Similar
Pakistan today is not Scotland in 1707. But the resemblance is close enough to matter. Pakistan is chronically indebted, permanently IMF-dependent, over-militarised by design, economically capped by scale and FX limits. It is run by elites whose lives are already offshore, Like Scotland, the state is failing faster than rents can be extracted, sovereignty has become expensive, security dominates fiscal policy and there is no credible independent growth path. This is not ideology. It is arithmetic.
Why India Is England in This Analogy Continue reading Pakistan and the Act of Union
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 âunderstandâ India. They are projecting onto it. Projection is not insight. It is displacement.
Code-Switching as Evasion Continue reading India Is No Longer Legible to Pakistani Liberals
Macaulay, English, and the Myth of Colonial Liberation
Rebuttal to When RSS-Modi Attack Macaulay and English, They Attack Upward Mobility of Dalits, Shudras, Adivasis
Follow-Up to Macaulay, Macaulayputras, and their discontents
A new orthodoxy has taken hold. It claims that criticising Macaulay or colonial education is an attack on Dalit, Shudra, and Adivasi mobility. English, we are told, was not a colonial instrument but a liberatory gift. Macaulay is recast as an unintended ally of social justice. This view is wrong. More than that, it is historically careless and civilisationally corrosive.
The Core Error
The mistake is simple: confusing survival within a system with vindication of that system. No serious person denies that English became a tool of mobility in modern India. No serious person denies Ambedkarâs mastery of English or its role in courts and constitutional politics. But to leap from this fact to the claim that Macaulay was therefore justified is a category error. People adapt to power structures to survive them. That does not sanctify those structures. To argue otherwise is like saying famine roads liberated peasants because some learned masonry while starving. Adaptation is not endorsement.
Macaulay Was Explicit
There is no need to guess Macaulayâs intentions. He stated them plainly. He dismissed Indian knowledge as inferior. He wanted to create a small class: Continue reading Macaulay, English, and the Myth of Colonial Liberation
Open Thread (Birthday)
Imran Khanâs sons speak out: âOur fatherâs prison conditions arenât bad, theyâre awful.â Whatever one thinks of Pakistani politics, the treatment of a former prime minister is a measure of a stateâs institutional health.
Is the Paknationalism or Indophilia; the strange twist of Pakistan is that both can be true at the same time.
It was my birthday two days ago on the 15th. The official celebration will be later this month in Sri Lanka, but the last few weeks have been unusually hectic with travel and work. Continue reading Open Thread (Birthday)
Should Babri Masjid have been moved to Pakistan?
This deliberately provocative piece draws on Kabirâs recent comments, Arkacandaâs excellent essay, Musings on & Answers, and Nikhilâs profound piece in âUrdu: An Indian Language.”
If India wants to avoid future Babri Masjids, it needs a clearer, more orderly doctrine for handling irreconcilable sacred disputes. Excavation, relocation, and compensation should be formalised as the default tools, rather than allowing conflicts to metastasise into civilisational crises. Geography matters. Some sites carry layered sanctity for multiple traditions; others do not. Al-Aqsa, for instance, is both the site of the Jewish Temple and central to Islamic sacred history through the Isra and MiÊżraj. Babri Masjid was not comparable. It had no unique pan-Islamic significance, while the site was widely regarded within Hindu tradition as the birthplace of Lord Ram. The same logic applies to Mathura, associated with Lord Krishna. Recognising asymmetry of sacred weight is not prejudice; it is common sense. A rules-based systemâfull archaeological excavation, dignified relocation of structures where necessary, and generous compensationâwould allow India to preserve heritage without endlessly reopening civilisational wounds.
Urdu is not an Indian language but Hindu nationalists made it one
It is a Muslim-inspired language that emerged in India. That distinction matters. Blurring it creates confusion, not harmony. There was an early misstep in North Indian language politics. Modern Hindi was deliberately standardised on Khari Boli rather than on Braj Bhasha or Awadhi, both of which possessed far richer literary lineages. This decision, shaped by colonial administrative needs and North Indian elite nationalism, flattened a complex linguistic ecology and hardened later divides. One unintended consequence was the permanent preservation of Urdu within the Indian subcontinent. Because Khari Boli Hindi remained structurally interchangeable with Urdu, Urdu survived as a parallel high language. Had Braj or Awadhi become the standard instead, that mutual intelligibility would have collapsed, and Urdu would likely have been pushed entirely outside the Indian linguistic sphere.
Persian Linguistic Pride
Today, a similar impulse is at work. There is a growing tendency, often well intentioned, to Indianise the Mughals and Urdu, to fold them into a seamless civilisational story. This misunderstands both history and the settlement that Partition produced. Partition did not merely redraw borders. It separated elites, languages, and political destinies. Urdu crossed that line with Muslim nationalism. It cannot now be reclaimed without ignoring that choice. I say this as someone with both an Urdu-speaking and Persian-speaking inheritance. When I chose which tradition to consciously relearn and deepen, I chose Persian. Not out of sentiment, but judgment. Persian language nationalism remains rigorous, self-confident, and civilisationally anchored. Persian survived empire, exile, and modernity without losing coherence. It carries philosophy, poetry, statecraft, and metaphysics as a single, continuous tradition. Shiâism, Persianate culture, and Persian literature remain intertwined. They preserve depth rather than dilute it. As a BahĂĄâĂ, that continuity has personal resonance. But the argument does not depend on belief. It stands on history.
Urdu as the “Muslim tongue” Continue reading Should Babri Masjid have been moved to Pakistan?