Category: Popular

Nehru Lost India, Not Jinnah

May 25, 2026 162 Comments filed under Popular, Precedent, X.T.M

We write this from the chair of those who have just declined, again, to partition their own blog. The exercise concentrates the mind. Brown Pundits has a Saffroniate. It has a Crescentiate. It has an awkward intermediate seat between Viceroy and Prime Minister. We have chosen, repeatedly, to hold the centre.

We have observed that Nehru did not.

1. The Men.

Jinnah was self-made. He was technically brilliant. He was legalistic to the point of pedantry, which is the only kind of legalism that ever wins a constitutional argument. Nehru rode on his father’s coattails, on Gandhi’s affection, on the Mountbattens’ hospitality.

The asymmetry was decisive. One man knew the document. The other man trusted the room.

2. The Cabinet Mission Plan.

The Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 already confederated India. Grouping A, Grouping B, Grouping C. The Centre held defence, foreign affairs, communications. Everything else devolved. This was workable. The League accepted it provisionally as the best available route to parity. Nehru wobbled, then in his July Bombay press conference reserved the Congress right to revise the groupings once seated in power. The League withdrew within weeks. The edifice collapsed.

The question the Saffroniate refuses to ask is the simple one. Why was it harder to confederate on linguistic lines than on religious lines? The States Reorganisation that the Republic executed in 1956 was already latent in 1946. Madras Presidency was a Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada tinderbox. Bengal was Bengal. The Indus was the Indus. The Hindi belt was the Hindi belt.

Four groupings could have been negotiated. Continue reading Nehru Lost India, Not Jinnah

Open Thread: Mother Indus is on Fire

May 24, 2026 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.

What It's Like Living in One of the Hottest Cities on Earth—Where It May Soon Be Uninhabitable

Continue reading Open Thread: Mother Indus is on Fire

The Long Dark Night for India’s Muslims

May 23, 2026 73 Comments filed under Comment as Canon, Popular, Precedent, X.T.M

Our own Hindufication

We write this not as outsiders pretending to diagnose India, but as people who have undergone a gentler version of the same process. Over fifteen years of family and work on the subcontinent, our own Islamicate inheritance has been quietly sifted. The Persianate was retained. The Arabic was allowed to fall away. The qawwali, the food, the manners, the ghazal, the Mughal grammar of taste. All survived. The devotional Islamicate self did not. We arrived as something close to a Anglo-Islamicate hybrid. We are leaving, slowly, as a Hindu-Persianate one. We did not plan this. We watched it happen to ourselves.

The Persian survives. The Arabic does not. The poetry survives. The prayer does not. This is the formula. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

We made this passage with privilege, with distance, with choice, and with somewhere else to be if we changed our minds. The Indian Muslim, the one with no other passport and no other country, is being asked to make the same passage on terms set by people who never had to make it themselves. That asymmetry is this post.

The morning song

The news this week was Memo No. 470-ME, dated 19 May 2026, signed by the Director of Madrasah Education, Government of West Bengal. The order makes the singing of Vande Mataram mandatory at morning assembly in every state-recognised madrasa: government, aided, unaided, all of them. Immediate effect. Approval of competent authority.

Note the date. Suvendu Adhikari was sworn in as the first BJP Chief Minister of West Bengal on 9 May, ten days earlier, on a 207-seat mandate that ended Mamata Banerjee’s fifteen-year run. The order is ten days into the new government. Of all the actions available to a freshly-installed state administration, this is the gesture chosen. The first major item on the agenda was the Muslim schoolchild’s morning. The signal is the signal.

The Pakistani faction of our commentariat is aghast, and not unreasonably. The song is a hymn to the Great goddess Durga, drawn from a novel that called for war on Muslims, and forcing a Muslim child to recite it is a small humiliation that announces a large arrangement. One of our Pakistani commenters compared it to forcing a vegetarian Hindu to eat beef. The comparison overstates and understates at the same time. It overstates because nobody is forcing food into anyone’s mouth. It understates because food is forgotten by the afternoon, and a song sung daily for ten years writes itself into the spine.

The row is the symptom. The disease is older. Bengal is the latest frontier, not the first.

The Persianate without the Muslim

Continue reading The Long Dark Night for India’s Muslims

The Bahá’í Position on Palestine: A Note for the Record

May 15, 2026 52 Comments filed under Popular, Precedent, X.T.M

Comments of late have drifted, as they sometimes do here, into territory where the Bahá’ís are invoked as a rhetorical chess piece by people who know very little about them. We believe in free speech, and on this blog more than most, in authorial autonomy; contributors and commenters speak for themselves, and we are not in the business of policing opinion. But because the question of Palestine sits adjacent to much of what has been said, we thought it worth setting down what the actual position is.

“Members of the National Spiritual Assembly who disappeared in August in 1980. All are presumed to have been killed” by Bahá’í Media Bank.

One caveat first. When we write or administer here, we do not speak for our Faith in any official capacity. We are members of it. That is the limit of our standing.

The clearest statement of the Bahá’í position comes from the pen of the Beloved Guardian of the Faith, Shoghi Effendi, who in July 1947 was asked directly by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine to clarify the relationship of the Bahá’í community to the country and its political future. His reply, written from Haifa and reproduced in The Bahá’í World, Volume 11, is as close to a foundational text on this question as exists. We quote it at length, because paraphrase would not do it justice.

Letter to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine

On July 9, 1947, Shoghi Effendi received a letter from the chairman of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine requesting a statement on the relationship, which the Baha’i­ Faith has to Palestine and the Baha’i­ attitude toward any future changes in the status of the country. From Shoghi Effendi’s reply, the following paragraphs are quoted in The Baha’i­ World, Volume 11 (1946-1950), pp.43-44.1

HAIFA, ISRAEL—15 July 1947

“The position of the Baha’i­s in this country is in a certain measure unique: Whereas Jerusalem is the spiritual center of Christendom it is not the administrative center of either the Church of Rome or any other Christian denomination. Likewise although it is regarded as the second most sacred shrine of Islam, the most Holy site of the Muhammadan Faith, and the center of its pilgrimages, are to be found in Arabia, not in Palestine. The Jews alone offer somewhat of a parallel to the attachment which the Baha’i­s have for this country, inasmuch as Jerusalem holds the remains of their Holy Temple and was the seat of both the religious and political institutions associated with their past history. But even their case differs in one respect from that of the Baha’i­s for it is in the soil of Palestine that the three central Figures of our Religion are buried and it is not only the center of Baha’i­’ pilgrimages from all over the world but also the permanent seat of our Administrative Order, of which I have the honor to be the Head.”

“The Baha’i­ Faith is entirely nonpolitical and we neither take sides in the present tragic dispute going on over the future of the Holy Land and its people nor have we any statement to make or advice to give as to what the nature of the political future of this country should be. Our aim is the establishment of universal peace in this world and our desire to see justice prevail in every domain of human society, including the domain of politics. As many of the adherents of our Faith are of both Jewish and Moslem extraction, we have no prejudice towards either of these groups and are most anxious to reconcile them for their mutual good and for the good of the country.”

“What does concern us, however, in any decisions made affecting the future of Palestine, is that the fact be recognized by whoever exercises sovereignty over Haifa and Acre, that within this area exists the spiritual and administrative world center of a world Faith, and that the independence of that Faith, its right to manage its affairs from this source, the right of Baha’i­s from any and every country of the globe to visit it as pilgrims (enjoying the same privilege in this respect as Jews, Moslems and Christians do in regard to visiting Jerusalem), be acknowledged and permanently safeguarded.”

Three things are worth drawing out.

Continue reading The Bahá’í Position on Palestine: A Note for the Record

The saffron and the crescent – why BP matters

May 13, 2026 224 Comments filed under Nachiketa, Popular, Precedent

I have often noticed something distinctive that Brown pundits—especially Pakistani Muslim commentators—bring to the table.

I will highlight two or three comments from previous posts that shed light on an important aspect often missing from Indian discourse.

One comment by Kabir from about 25 days ago stated:

“Muslims tend to be more intransigent vis-à-vis conversion of a spouse.” Sharia is very clear on this point. A Muslim man may marry a Christian or Jewish woman without her converting. A Muslim woman, however, cannot marry a non‑Muslim man; there are no exceptions for women. Of course, Kareena Kapoor married Saif Ali Khan without converting to Islam, but that was not a nikaah. Under Islamic law, they are not considered married—though I doubt either of them is concerned about that.

Another important comment by Kabir was:

Continue reading The saffron and the crescent – why BP matters

At Negombo, the Indian subcontinent meets where it still can

May 11, 2026 57 Comments filed under Popular, Precedent, X.T.M

The photograph above was taken on the 11th of May in Negombo, on the western coast of Sri Lanka. The caption records the occasion plainly: friends from Pakistan, from Tamil Nadu, and from Sri Lanka, gathered with members of the International Teaching Centre and the Counsellors serving in the Indian subcontinent, at an Institutional Gathering convened by the Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Lanka.

We want to say something about what this image makes possible, and where.

Indians & Pakistanis cannot meet any longer

The hard fact first. There is no longer any practical way for an ordinary Indian and an ordinary Pakistani to sit in the same room inside either of their own countries. Visa regimes have hardened to the point of farce. The land border is sealed in spirit if not in law. What remains are the smaller states of the subcontinent and the wider diaspora. Of the smaller states, Sri Lanka is the one that handles the meeting most gracefully: visa-on-arrival to both passports, no overland complication, no political theatre, and a civic culture that does not ask either side to perform a position.

Which brings us to the older question, whether Sri Lanka belongs to our civilisational space at all. Some friends north of the Palk Strait still treat the island as adjacent rather than constitutive. We think this is wrong, and the reasons are not sentimental.

Sri Lanka is Dharmic? Continue reading At Negombo, the Indian subcontinent meets where it still can

The Muslim Districts That Hold West Bengal Up

May 7, 2026 94 Comments filed under Popular, Precedent, X.T.M

West Bengal Hindus have a real grievance, and it should be stated plainly. East Bengal’s Hindu share fell from 28% in 1941 to under 8% in the 2022 Bangladesh census. West Bengal’s Muslim share rose from 19.85% in 1951 to 27% in the 2011 Census, and is estimated higher today.

The Nehru–Liaquat Pact of 1950 was meant to be reciprocal. It was not. One side kept its minorities; the other did not. Three refugee waves, 1950, 1964, 1971, landed on West Bengal alone. The frustration is not communal; it is actuarial.

But the conclusion drawn from it is often wrong. The three Muslim-majority border districts, Murshidabad, Malda, Uttar Dinajpur, are not a demographic problem to be solved. They are the reason the state functions.

Murshidabad holds the Bhagirathi offtake at Jangipur and the Farakka Barrage beyond it. Farakka diverts the Ganga’s dry-season flow into the Hooghly; without that diversion, Kolkata Port silts up, the Hooghly becomes seasonal, and the salinity line marches inland into the 24 Parganas. Malda anchors the Sealdah–New Jalpaiguri trunk line and the rail spine to Assam; lose it and North Bengal is an island.

Uttar Dinajpur sits directly below the Siliguri Corridor and carries NH 27. These were not given to India by accident in 1947. Radcliffe overrode demography for infrastructure, and the engineering logic has only deepened since.

The Muslims of these districts are weavers, beedi workers, masons, farmers on the most fertile alluvium in eastern India. Murshidabad silk, Malda mangoes, the Farakka catchment; the productive base of three districts rests on a workforce the state would struggle to replace at scale.

Frustration is fair. Cession is not. The districts that look like the problem are the ones holding the system together.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

May 7, 2026 54 Comments filed under Popular, Precedent, X.T.M

The 2020 Open thread spent a whole afternoon on whether vegetarian biryani, vegetarian haleem and vegetarian paya could exist. Saurav declared the abominations should be banned.

Qureishi extolled the centrality of beef in Pakistani cuisine. The 2026 thread relitigates the same question with Nihari as the exhibit and the Modi diplomatic menu as the provocation.

BB’s argument is that Mughlai cuisine remains Indian property because it is Indian restaurants that carry it globally; the Pakistani versions are cover songs, the originals are still in Awadh and Old Delhi. As BB speaks to the strength of Indian soft power, this comment by Ali Choudhury six years earlier perfectly illustrates it:

Our local Pakistani takeaway does not serve beef dishes partly because they have a fair amount of Indian Hindu customers who don’t want the cross-contamination.

We had guessed this independently. The complexion of Mughlai food in the diaspora, or rather traditional Indo-Islamicate food, is buckling under three constraints: no pork, no beef, halal.

So all restaurants peddling the food of the Indian Subcontinent will converge toward lamb, chicken and goat, the “speciality meat”, as the offerings of choice, with a vast array of vegetarian options alongside. It maximises the customer base, and it is fascinating to see how the syncretic culture survives, despite attempts to destroy it.

The thread and Homelands perform partition. The market and Diaspora quietly un-does it.

Open Thread: Pakistan’s Demons are The Daughters of God

May 7, 2026 326 Comments filed under Open Thread, Popular, Precedent, X.T.M

Q writes on Pakistani source confirms US, Iran closing in on one-page memo to end war:

  1. Total Pakistani victory. If Pakistan pulls off the mediation, this will its greatest diplomatic victory ever. Lifting of Iranian sanctions will allow cheaper Iranian oil to flow directly to Pakistan, and the oil pipeline can be finally completed. Complete eradication of Indian influence from Iran is now achieved, and this will also eliminate any support to BLA from across the border.

Pakistan post Sindoor is on a winning streak. The mediation is real, the memo is real, and if it holds, the diplomatic ledger for the year goes firmly into Rawalpindi’s column. Iranian oil at the door, IP pipeline thinkable for the first time in fifteen years, BLA lifelines into Sistan throttled, Chabahar quietly demoted. A Victorious month?

But the question is whether she can conquer her demons. And the demons are not in the foreign ministry. They are in the drama studios.

Q again, on Pakistani dramas:

Women low-key love abusive behaviour from attractive men. Pretty much all women fantasy porn is about this. (What they don’t love is abusive aggressive behaviour from ugly or poor men) Since females are the primary target audience of these dramas, they tend to show this because that’s what the market demands. I would not read too much into this. What’s more concering was that foreign funded NGOs were trying implement anti-family messaging in the last 15 years – and that messaging has suddenly dried up after their funding dried up.

Fantasy is not preference. A woman reading a brooding-billionaire romance is not auditioning for one. To collapse the two is to flatten the female imagination into a market signal, which is exactly what the Pakistani dramas do and exactly why they rot the culture that consumes them.

Daughters of God Continue reading Open Thread: Pakistan’s Demons are The Daughters of God

Brown Pundits