What India must do to Kashmir-

Very sad news emerging out of Kashmir.

Vidhi was saying that India should retaliate whereas I think it should be a more subtle response along the Israeli lines in the West Bank.

(1.) Everytime there are protests in the Valley, India should randomly select a sample of the protestors (maybe a third or so), strip them of their citizenship and bus them to the border so they can join Pakistan. Continue ad nauseam which will help demographics and instil enough fear to dampen potential rioters.

(2.) Abolish Section 377 and bring only the Valley under Central Rule (keep Jammu & Ladakh as it is). India should actively encourage Hindu (not just KP) immigration into Srinagir. Encourage KPs (who are India’s most endangered minority not the Parsis) to breed like rabbits (or like Muslims) and make them agents of the Indian state. Both the tepid tweets by Mehbooba Mufti & Omar Abdullah show the huge disconnect Muslim Kashmiris have with the rest of the Indian State.

(3.) India should begin to demilitarise in Kashmir and retreat to defensible borders on the LOC. With an effective and ongoing occupying force it can keep the Valley sedated with only a fifth of its standing army instead of the current million strong component. The geographic trade of Pakistan conquering Srinagir is losing half of Sindh so Pak won’t engage in conventional warfare.

(4.) BJP’s shameful backtracking on the Citizenship amendment shows the bankruptcy of democracy. The BJP should simply not allow the “new citizens” to settle in NE states, which understandably want to opt out. The “new citizens” should be redirected towards Kashmir & other sensitive regions of India, one million Bangladeshi Hindus in Srinagir will help sort things out.

No one will cry for the Muslim Kashmiris; their cause isn’t as emotive as the Palestinian one. I personally can’t understand the Kashmiri Muslim problem; they are one of the few people in India lucky enough to have Urdu as the official language of their state. They have the unique position of being cultural Pakistanis who have access to the Indian economy so they should buckle down and stop making a fuss.

It is obvious that it’s the Cult of the Holy Pedophile, also known as Muslim menace, behind it all and why it’s so important that Bharat use sickle & all to castrate Islam & its sick ideology once & for all.

The immense success Israel has had in the past two decades demonstrates that tough actions bear fruit and it’s time for the Muslim Kashmiris to step up. The Palestinian cause is far more secular (much less Muslim) than the Kashmiri one and therefore much more worthy.

Blame Bengal Famine on anyone but the British

I was flirting with a lot of topics on what to write but I’m just going to leave these tweets out here. We continued the exchange but my blood is now boiling; Vidhi always like to say “calm is a super-power” but I dislike the presumptuousness and arrogance when dispensing on the evil doings of colonialism in South Asia.

I notice many Indian commentators decry UP/Bihar backwardness but it has to do with British policy of bleeding India through her port cities.

British Development in the Subcontinent wasn’t centred in the most populous areas but rather the most productive. Say what you will about the Mughals (and John makes an uncharitable dig at them in a following tweet) but their development focus remained the UP-Bihar.

They may have been a rentier state par excellence but at the very least at least their wealth flowed back into the geographical territories that comprises modern day India

Babri Masjid & our shared Macaulay Caste

I was trying to reach out to RajMohan Gandhi for a podcast on his new book on South India. As an aside I’m trying to find people to interview for the podcasts since I want to plan out my schedule where I can.

Also Mr. Gandhi has a blog up called Himmat and I linked to his thoughts on Babri Masjid:

The bare bones of a settlement are not hard to identify. One, the Hindu side admits the error in demolishing the mosque. Two, the Indian state admits its failure to prevent the demolition. Three, the Muslim side acknowledges the Hindu community’s wish to see a Ram temple rise on the site as also the Hindu community’s belief that a temple had once stood where the Babri Masjid was built. Four, not far from the site, and yet not too close to it, space for a new mosque is made available by the Hindu side and the Indian state. If necessary, the four steps can be simultaneous. In this dream-like scenario, acknowledgment of wrongdoing and restitution leads to justice as well as reconciliation.

I googled to see the state of the “ruins” of Babri Masjid at the moment and this is what I found:

Below is the original, which if I say so myself is a rather majestic piece of architecture. Simple and striking.

Image result for what has happened to the ruins of babri masjid Continue reading Babri Masjid & our shared Macaulay Caste

Why I write on India’s lack of Asabiyyah

SC writes:

I have a suggestion for the bloggers. if you really want this blog to become popular and attract more insightful, witty and intelligent commenters, then you need to outgrow this India-Pakistan never-ending soap opera. This, and the other done-to-death Aryan-Dravidian debate occupies 90% of reading space on this blog.

There are many other interesting topics to talk about. If you are running out of ideas here are some from the top of my head. Continue reading Why I write on India’s lack of Asabiyyah

Wagner and India-

I went through Kim’s Twitter and website.His style and approach reminds me of China Mieville.

I guess there’s always a niche for a Westerner to take on “Eastern topics.” I wonder if he would have gotten so much traction or controversy with his work if he was a plain old Sikh?

The Daily Telegraph would have probably not noticed him or been very careful in what it wrote. It is a bit perverse to see what is a hugely important in Indian history now being “milked”.

As an aside name me coloured Shakespearan academics (in Western institutions) or in Western history? It’s rare to see a coloured individuals teach Western history topics to white students; if Coloured are in humanities and academia, it will be in coloured topics. It’s a bit like casting white actors to play Middle Eastern and other ethnic roles.

I was ruminating the other day what was most interesting about that video of the little girl interrupting her dad on the BBC; is that the BBC had taken so much effort to find the one white American academic they could speak to in Korea about Korea.

Now it may seem I’m just having a usual gripe about Colonisers but it’s simply a reflection that the highest echelons of academa still remain steeped in white privilege.

I’ve seen this time and time again in Britain; as Britain begins to “brown”, the white spaces just grow and fossilise. There might be much gripe about diversity but Britain at the top looks and feels extremely different to urban Britain.

Minorities have a few choices at their disposal:

(1.) Struggle to the top but they will have to invisibly “whiten” as they do so. It is essentially adopting

(2.) Just focus on making money and being hyper-bourgeois; leave exciting Bohemian areas to white people.

(3.) Become angry and disaffected to be noticed but so much anger is corrosive to the soul. I get tired of every other tweet being “I cried with rage” about relatively abstract and trivial topics. I wish I could send every SJW to the third world for a 6 month to understand what “real problems are”.

(4.) Do what I do and create another base “back home.” I don’t have much privilege in the West but I sort have privilege in the East as a Westerner (yes it’s a perverse logic). Privilege is really important to get ahead in life and the absurd arguments of SJWs that they need to “atone” for their privilege is essentially that they are so far ahead that they need to give others a lift up.

Pakistani Perfidy & The Nehruvian Deep State

As a minority, it is the everyday discrimination that hurts me most

In a campaign led by a few other residents, the Hindu family was refused their basic right of acquiring the property. It was claimed that instructions to prevent Hindus from acquiring apartments had come from an army office located near the building, based on the so-called belief that all Hindus are Indian spies. That claim was later found out to be false.

Personal conversations revealed that the bigoted residents were actually really concerned about the family setting up idols in their home as part of their religious rites. There were some other, more rational residents, who suggested that what the Hindu family did in their home was their private business, but the voices of sanity were silenced.

The article is written by a Pakistani Christian and is couched in the language of engrained fear. No Pakistani minority will dare lash out in the same manner that Indian Muslims do.

I eagerly await Kabir Bhai and his fellow Pakistani liberals to lecture us:

(1.) Pakistan is a Muslim state so that there is absolutely nothing we can do about this.

(2.) India does the same thing with vegetarian colonies.

The Roots of Hindu Rage are very simple. They are seeing their Hindu kin being turned into second-class citizens all over the Muslim world, while the Indian Muslim minority flaunt (and exploit) their privileges in India. Compared to the Muslim minority in Myanmar, China or even Israel; Indian Muslims have it exceptionally easy.

AR Rahman and Adnan Sami were holding court like demi-gods in the Voice yesterday; I cannot think of a single society where Muslims & Islamicate culture hold so much prestige.

If the same thing had happened to India to a Muslim family; the Nehruvians, post-modernists and NGOs would make sure it’s front page news.

Nehru India as the “Deep State”

The Deep State of India is Nehruvian India, which is driven to ensure that the post-Independence constitutional settlement endures. The inane constitutional settlement ensures that India will always be a fractured nation and therefore will need a “Dynasty” to wield power.

Would HinduRashtra split India?

Hindu India would not lead to a fractured India because most of the Hindu states and population are anyway strongly Hindu. The only non-Hindu states (Punjab, some of the seven sisters) would be able to safeguard their own local traditions in the same manner Tamils have done with regards to Hindi; they are not pan-Indian ethnicities. There is only one minority that will screech and battle every step to Hindu Rashtra and that is the Muslim minority. They will never sing Vande Mataram or appease the Hindu majority. Babri Masjid need not have been destroyed; Hindus are not a vengeful people and Ram idols in the building would have turned it into another Balaji site.

What is happening is that Hindu Rage at Muslim behaviour is instead being deflected towards Islamicate culture (and the odd riot) and therefore Allahabad pays the prices for Allah refusing to share the limelight with Hindu deities.

Rahul Gandhi in context with the rest of the global Left

There is nothing miraculous about Rahul Gandhi’s resurgence; it is the same syndrome you see in progressive parties all over the world.

Rahul Gandhi is Jeremy Corbyn, Beto O’Rourke, Justin Trudeau and even Macron. The diverse left needs a straight white male figurehead/kingmaker to hold its coalition together whereas the right can experiment with different leaders (May, Merkel, Modi, Marine Le Pen).

Nehru India as the Brahmin bulwark against a Shudra HinduRashtra

The upper caste urban vote bank of the BJP feel their guilt expiated when they are able to vote for a OBC like Modi; it may be a reason why Advani (a Sindhi Brahmin) never made it as PM. Maybe the Brahmins of the BJP aren’t able to maybe fight tooth and claw or as hard their Shudra counterparts?

It also raises an interesting question that if Hindu India’s best dynasties were actually Shudra (Gupta, Mauryas), then is the Mughal-British-Nehruvian Deep State of India committed to Brahmin rule by the Nehru-Gandhi clan as opposed to Shudra Rule by the BJP?

The Vijaynagar Empire and the saving of the Hindu Majority

It is interesting how Indian history is taught in a very misleading way. Akbar and the Mughals are presented as Indian (which is questionable since their eye-watering opulence, the Peacock Throne apparently cost twice as much as the Taj) but the Vijaynagar Empire is seen as a footnote (there is an important twitter thread on it, which I can’t find).

The Vijaynagar Empire probably did save Hinduism from Islam by keeping South India structurally and absolutely Hindu. It is interesting that Northwest and north east India are majority Muslim (when one includes Pak & Bangladesh into it) but that South India, the other great wing of India, is 90%+ Hindu. There is no reason why South India & the Deccan, relatively far from the Brahmanical and Sanskrit core of UP, should not have had a substantially Muslim contiguous belt like the Punjab and Bengal.

There are different reasons as to why the Punjab and Bengal became Muslim but by the time the Muslim dynasties had infiltrated the South, there was an intellectually and ideologically resilient Hindu population.

I would also hazard that though the Deep State is optically secular-Hindu but structurally Mughal & British.

Part-Partition – the worst of all worlds

It explains why Nehru and Gandhi agreed to a “worst of all worlds” with a part-partition when they should have either gone for No-Partition or a Full Partition.

They could have made false promises to Jinnah, keep India united, wait for Jinnah to die and then set about their true scheme- that was the modus operandi of Jinnah and Iqbal to lie compulsively, promise everything and never settle except for what they wanted. Pakistan is only following the blueprint set by Jinnah and Iqbal.

Otherwise in a “Full Partition” Gandhi and Nehru should have insisted on a full and final exchange of populations in the mode of Greece & Turkey. Even though Greece and Turkey have a bloody history; it is not as tortuous as India and Pakistan. This is because India & Pakistan had an incomplete partition by Nehruvian-Gandhian design. Gandhi was assassinated on his way to advocated for the rights of Pakistan.

South India as the only “structurally” Hindu society

It is only South India and Bali that are structurally Hindu societies (is it any wonder that the great architectural monuments in the South are Temples and in the North are Mosques) but these thoughts are either for another post, my journal or my locked blog (sometimes my writings can be eye-watering controversial and I prefer them somewhere safe but private).

Our most popular podcasts & a personal dilemma

Our Genetics & India post just crossed a very major milestone (Omar’s China episode is closely racing it) and 13 episodes on I thought it would be good to share our most downloaded podcasts. Our podcast listening figures are many multiples of the readership of this blog so kudos to Razib for suggesting it and to Omar & myself for hitching along for the ride.

Omar’s most recent podcast on India Military History has only just been released this morning and is already very well-downloaded. It’s interesting to see just how interested our listeners are in China, Islam and the military; not so much in Indian specific topics, art or culture. I guess people are most interested in the near exotic rather than the familiar.

I believe we have a podcast on the Patron page and another one is expected to be done tomorrow (I can only join in because the time zones align being back in Chennai again- for work this time).

I’m finalising a few of my own podcasts; I’m reworking the Dravidian one into a Deccan languages one. I’m also looking for a very well versed economist to speak with on the Indian economy both in a global and South Asian context.

I’m still very much a technophobe; my after dinner electronic ban has led to an efflorescence of intellectual thought (if I say so myself). I’m handwriting my novel & then interspersing my journal entries as a break between writing blocks.

I tried handwriting BP posts but they end up so familiar & intime that I have to post them to my locked private blog; it’s astonishing just how difficult it is to be trollish/opinionated about topics by hand, it just seems absurd on the written word as opposed to a computer.

I’ve discovered the medium of technology profoundly influences the writing style (twitter and its propensity for flame wars is a good example). Knowing that I have a ready audience with only the click of the button I will write for the reader than for myself. However the handwritten style, where the reader is a distant stranger, lends to a profound intimacy.

I’m very proud of my prolific output even though my handwritten notes rapidly degenerate into hieroglyphics if not typed out and it will require constant editing (not surprisingly I tend to be of the James Joyce style, a stream of consciousness).

In many ways I remind myself of a D-lister who have made their career playing Marvel characters is now trying to be taken seriously as an actor.

By masalafying BP and spicing up the comment threads, I’ve trolled my way to the top in the niche world of Brown Pundity. Now in my own search for authenticity I find myself compelled to play a role all of my own making. An existential crisis worthy of a good novel..

The Art of Ta’arof

Some years ago in Tehran a 90 something gentleman got up to greet someone half his age since he said those are the manners he was taught as a young lad. I instagrammed it as “amazing ta’arof” and my Persian friends immediately corrected me that was not ta’arof but genuine.

So Ta’arof is not always a positive force since it’s mixed in with traces of deception. This article below was a very old post in my blog and thought I would share it since it’s so well-written.

by 

One of the most complicated aspects of Persian culture — and language — is the untranslatable ta’arof. Depending on the circumstance, it can mean any number of things: To offer, to compliment and/or exchange pleasantries. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. I doubt if any study can lead to a full understanding of Ta’arof. A born and raised Persian, even I find myself losing my grasp on it from time to time.

Continue reading The Art of Ta’arof

Two Dosas

I was looking for a Western pop music video I saw in the gym. It was a white girl (darker hue but recognisably “Western features) in a very “local” restaurant in small-town Indian.

The son of the owners, a nerdy boy, immediately falls in love with her. He tries every tired trope to win her attention but it’s only when he “Bollywoodises” (he forms a dance troupe) that he manages to catch her attention, at which point stairs descends from heaven and she climbs up (either an angel or alien).

Unfortunately I can’t find the link to that video but instead I looked at the above video, which is an interesting short film.

Related: The Big Sick & Brown Romance In Pop Culture Narratives

BrownCast Episode 11: Indian Numismatics with Mohit Kapoor

The latest BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, iTunes and Stitcher. Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe at one of the links above. You can also support the podcast as a patron (the primary benefit now is that you get the podcasts considerably earlier than everyone else). Show-notes after the jump!

Image result for gandhara coin
Gandharan Coin

Continue reading BrownCast Episode 11: Indian Numismatics with Mohit Kapoor

Brown Pundits