Regency, Not Rupture in Pakistan (Open Thread)

August 6, 2026 X.T.M 4 Comments filed under Open Thread, X.T.M

(h/t Archer, who called for this thread in the comments on “Erm”.

Also as fair warning to the Commentariat, Flame Threads will be put down and any violator will have fines ranging from mass comment deletion to revocation of Author Rights. Say what you like but tread carefully in how you say it since I did want to write on White Intellectuals hogging the “South Asian” space after Indosaurus’s excellent piece on the Great Gandhi but this just tumbled out)

Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Mohsin Naqvi, told an Islamabad seminar last week that the country’s 80-year-old governance system has “collapsed” and that Pakistan needs new provinces. A day later the DG ISPR called on the parties to consider an “administrative reset.” This week Naqvi assured the press that Shehbaz Sharif will serve his full five years; while standing by every word about the destroyed system, and reprising, for good measure, his claim to the biggest scam in Pakistan’s history: judges, bureaucrats, politicians and bankers, all implicated, an inventory that conspicuously omits one institution. The scam has an address, One Constitution Avenue, a two-decade property saga Naqvi has been prosecuting in public since May; the individuals remain nameless, naturally.

Naqvi is a Husayni Sayyid, the surname is the pedigree, claimed descent from the Tenth Imam, which makes us cousins by caste, and at present the unluckiest good Shia boy in the Islamic Republic: sent out to fly the Deep State’s kite and left to absorb the fire alone.

The PPP demands his resignation; Khawaja Asif suggests he reset his own ministry first; Raza Rabbani reminds everyone that the disease is constitutional violation, not cartography.

A Coup is surplus to requirements

Continue reading Regency, Not Rupture in Pakistan (Open Thread)

30 seconds please

August 1, 2026 k jayas 28 Comments filed under k jayas, Open Thread

1. Anand rangarajan, a biochemistry professor from jnu , has popularized this 30 second interjection on prime TV debates. He is fearless in questioning beliefs of abrahamanic religions.

2. Shahazad poonawalla a popular spokesperson for BJP has resigned and is hinting a sabbatical from politics. Seems bit fishy.

3. Modi comming on instagram is increasing looking like an all advising ‘ society uncle’. He should expose himself less and concentrate on legislation.

4. Sadly rahul Gandhi is not taking much advantage and is acting in ajit prop style street plays in front of parliament. Crazy.

Admin Note: I’m adding this to sort of demonstrate the direction of travel where BP is going. We are building Community now and if it means a decline of traffic so be it.

desi open thread

July 11, 2026 k jayas 130 Comments filed under k jayas, Open Thread, Popular

1. S. Janaki has passed away. I’m Shanti. She sang more than 48,000 songs. Great artist. She sang in 17 languages.
2. Australia is selling uranium to India, probably freeing Indian stock for other purposes.
3. Looks like modi is not over yet.
4.Rahul Gandhi in forever foreign tour.
5. Hindus are pushing back on ‘sutlej’ , asking not to ignore their loss.
6. Indian cities are flooded. High time the drainage is redesigned.
7. Just as Opinions/demand for freeing Govt. Control of Hindu temples rise, a set of thiefs create a scene in ram temple. Lucky it is getting resolved.

Pink boots

June 30, 2026 k jayas 15 Comments filed under k jayas, Open Thread

1.oh God!! Germany out.
2. Brazil scrapping through. Japan gave Good fight.
3. Morocco hanging on. Netherlands out. What a game!!
4. Can’t believe and understand why grown up men should wear pink boots.
5. Kick and run northern European football is out, south European irritating tiki-taka is the normal now.
6. People are commenting on the large number of African-descended individuals in the game.

Continue reading Pink boots

Open Thread – Brutal clampdown, protesters shot in Kashmir (Pak administered)

June 9, 2026 RecoveringNewsJunkie 3 Comments filed under Open Thread, RecoveringNewsJunkie

The ‘K’ word serves as a lightning rod in any discussions involving Indians and Pakistanis. And the BP space is no different. That there are diametrically opposing views, fiercely dug in, is an understatement.

Over the past few days, the portion of J&K that came under Pakistani suzerainty after the ‘tribal’ invasion of 1948, has seen massive political protests that have led to violence and deaths of civilians. This isn’t the first time for such incidents in what Pakistani refers to as “Azaad” (free) Kashmir. The old Pakistani playbook of deploying military force, banning political organizations, and media blackout has been deployed once again. This time however, ‘feels different’ somehow. It has become increasingly difficult for totalitarian states to execute media clampdowns in the social media age, and videos and information are steadily streaming out of Rawalkot, Muzaffarabad and elsewhere.

I would hope that this open thread stays away from the always contentious circular ‘debates’ on whether India/Pakistan are the ‘rightful owners’ of Kashmir, and focuses on the specifics of the ongoing protests instead.

Why is that over the last decade or so, such repeated outbreaks of protests show up repeatedly, often swiftly followed with brutal state clampdowns. I think its reasonably fair to say that a strong majority of the residents of Pak-administered Kashmir were and continue to be, willing subjects of Pakistan. What then, is triggering such unrest, repeatedly?

Open Thread: Bharat wins at Norway Chess, but something is off with Bollywood

June 6, 2026 X.T.M 44 Comments filed under Open Thread, X.T.M

Our 2026 reader survey is open until 7 June – anonymous, roughly five minutes. Please take a moment.

We are travelling, but South Indians, Tamilians?, are crushing it at chess. Praggnanandhaa took Norway Chess in Oslo this week with four straight classical wins to close, past Wesley So and over Gukesh on the way.

Which confirms the theory we have been quipping all trip: India, that is Bharat, owns the letter C. Chess, plainly. Cricket, obviously. Cuisine, beyond dispute. Culture, increasingly. Conversation, certainly (Desis are loud and loquacious). Caste, come to think of it..

However there is one C that has curdled: Cinema.

We caught the otherwise excellent Vadh 2 on the road. One scene was so gratuitously disturbing that we can’t shake it out of our minds.

Since Sacred Games, the sex and gore on Netflix India have not been there to serve a story. They are there to stimulate, and the audience being titillated are India’s masses. A young, idle, frustrated population is easiest to hold with sensation, so that is what is fed. This is not film-making. It is sedation at scale, and a restless country kept watching is silenced from increasing inequity (the largess of the Oligarchics) but perhaps deepening in rage (the constant ire at minorities)?

Ps: The Commentariat may also enjoy our newsletter piece on Mission Chandrayaan (Aug’23) witten prior to our re-engagement with BP, which we essentially inaugurated with Telugu being the Italian of the East (Sep’24).

The Newsletter and BP both started to kick off at roughly the same time; we decided to focus on BP since Substack is full of individual Auteurs but BP has a very venerable community, which we wanted to honour. The survey results are trickling through but what is astonishing is how sticky readers have been over this long decade and a half (BP will be 16 years in December; probably the oldest continuing Brown Blog on the internet).

Pps: Last call on the survey before it closes tomorrow.

Look closely and you may “see” what we have done throughout this post 🙂

Open thread -Tamilnadu

June 5, 2026 k jayas 20 Comments filed under k jayas, Open Thread

Our 2026 reader survey is open until 7 June – anonymous, roughly five minutes. Please take a moment.

Some random points:
1) annamalai has quit BJP. Three strands are coming through :
a) he was not accommodated properly, was not given more freedom, party did not listen to him on avoiding aidmk alliance and hence was sidelined.
B) was never a BJP man ideologically, was an opportunist, impatient and hence good riddance.
c) since BJP cannot play any shade of Dravidian game, it is better that annamalai be a silent b team of BJP.

2) Vijay has become a honorary family member and now mothers and aunties are worrying about his health, long working hours, and lack of good lunch!
They want him to eat better and go to office on alternate days.

Open Thread: BP Survey

June 1, 2026 X.T.M 80 Comments filed under Open Thread, Precedent, X.T.M

Our 2026 reader survey is open until 7 June – anonymous, roughly five minutes. Please take a moment.

Update – from the thread: More reading reccys. Furqan flagged Dr Naazir Mahmood’s The assassination that changed India, along with his own book review on Duniya Digital and a related op-ed, Stupidity or strategy, on the political economy of the subcontinent’s borrowed democratic forms. Kabir marked the passing of playback singer Suman Kalyanpur with two recordings: an unreleased Pakeeza song, introduced by Meena Kumari, and a Rafi duet. And from our own pages, the latest BRAHM newsletter: The Sky Above São Paulo.

Update, 1 June 2026 – links from the thread: The Peshawar Review has a new issue out, including Professor Harbans Mukhia’s reminiscences of Kirori Mal College (College Days) and Shan-e-Ahmed reading an Urdu transcreation of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Prufrock in Pakistan). On the Tata Sons listing question, Agni flagged a cluster of commentary: the Indian Express “to list or not to list” column, The New Indian Express on the boardroom fight, Soonawala on why an IPO may not appeal to investors, and Business Standard on the 12 June board meeting. Survey responses are at 18 and counting; please add yours if you haven’t.

Editor’s note, 1 June: This Survey thread will sit on the front page through the week, until Sunday the 7th June, while we are travelling Eastbound, so we have made it an Open Thread. What strikes us, watching the comment threads, is that for all the constant bickering, BP is a community, and a recognisably Desi one.

It has the hue of a Hindu joint family (to be of the Indian subcontinent is, almost by definition, to have Hindu ancestors; “Hindu” is simply what the Persians called the people beyond the Indus) that has built a wall down the middle of the house and still cannot get over each other. The wall is real. So is the fact that nobody moves out.

Original Post: Every few years BP runs a reader survey. Razib began the tradition in 2019, and the responses then told us things the comments alone never could.

Seven years on, with a substantially different commentariat, we are running the 2026 edition. The prompt to revive it came from Kabir, whose recent post on what BP is and is not raised exactly the kind of question a survey can help answer, and we are grateful for it.

Nineteen questions, anonymous, roughly five minutes. The core spine is demographic in Razib’s tradition: age, sex, country, mother tongue, ethnic background, religion, caste, education, political ideology, and views on Hindu and Pakistani nationalism. A few behavioural questions follow on how often you visit, how long you have been reading, how you first found BP, and which topics you would like to see more of, with optional fields at the end for handle, newsletter signup, and anything else you would like the editors to know.

Please take the time to fill in this survey. Thank you for your engagement.

Open thread

May 27, 2026 El Khawaja 179 Comments filed under Open Thread

On early Sunday morning, May 24, 2026 — Just a few days before the festival of Eid al-Adha — on a quiet morning in Quetta’s Chaman Pathak neighborhood. An explosive-laden vehicle ripped through a shuttle service carrying passengers, from the Quetta Cantt station – killing at least 24 and 70+ wounded, mostly military personnel, laborers and families, that were headed to the Peshawar-bound Jaffar Express. These were ordinary Pakistanis looking forward to getting back to their hometowns for the Eid holidays. The Balochistan Liberation Army has claimed responsibility for the attacks. This tragedy comes just around the first anniversary of the Khuzdar school bus bombing — killing 8 civilians, injuring dozens, most of the fatalities being school girls. This attack was also connected to separatist militants in the province. Celebrated by journalists, talking heads and govt officials across the eastern border along with their social media commentariat – blinded by nationalism.

Jaffar express sounds familiar as that train was also attacked a little over a year ago, March of 2025, early in the holy month of Ramadan. That attack orchestrated by the BLA, killed over 60. It seems like attacking Pakistan around the holidays is the M.O of these militant groups and their handlers.

There is grief across Pakistan as terrorism has gone up, patience is wearing thin among the general public with the states inaction against these adversaries of the nation. The Dhurandars are running up their kill streak, maiming innocent Pakistanis across the country, trying to instill fear, chaos and division. There is palpable frustration among the citizenry due to government incompetence and lenience towards ethno-fascism and a failure to protect its citizens from this regional proxy war. Will the Dhurandars be brought to justice for the mass murder of innocent civilians or will the Dhurandar-ing continue with more violence, terrorism and bloodshed across Arz-e-Pak to no avail.

Here’s to another somber Eid and world peace.

Open Thread: Mother Indus is on Fire

May 24, 2026 X.T.M 139 Comments filed under Open Thread, Popular, X.T.M

The Commentariat on the “Long Night” has been busy. The Saffroniate counts Hindu babies, the Crescentiate counts Muslim babies, both sides argue with conviction over a future neither seems to have read the Weather Report for.

A heatwave advisory graphic maps much of Pakistan’s plains into extreme-risk zones for the final week of May 2026. Jacobabad, Multan, Bahawalpur, Sukkur, D.G. Khan and Sargodha sit in an extreme zone marked 47 to 50°C. Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar and Islamabad sit in a high zone at 42 to 45°C. Karachi, sea-cooled, stays at a relatively merciful 35 to 38.

The Indus does not read Radcliffe. The Punjab that cooks at 45°C on the Lahore side is the same alluvial plain that sears the Amritsar side. The Thar runs through both Sindh and Rajasthan. The Gangetic plain inherits the same dome of heat a fortnight later. The cradle of Desidom that the Commentariat are fighting over, will soon turn into a Heat Dome. Conversations on who fills it faster, who outbreeds whom, ultimately elide that Radcliffe drew a paper line. The thermometer does not pause at Wagah.

Continue reading Open Thread: Mother Indus is on Fire