These excellent tweets exhibit a painful pattern that many of us see but few want to name.
Pakistanis, particularly its establishment and elite classes, exhibit a deep inferiority complex towards white (light) Muslims; Arabs, Turks, Persians, and Afghans. These groups are valorized, romanticized, and used as benchmarks for identity and belonging. Meanwhile, other Asian groups, especially within South Asia and Southeast Asia, are seen as lesser. This manifests not only in foreign policy but in pop culture, education, and internalized social hierarchies.
This is why, even if Partition had to happen (and it was undeniably disastrous), Pakistan still could have been something else. It couldāve been a GCC meets Pahlavi Iran constructāa sleek, semi-modernist, high-income Asian Muslim republic with cultural gravitas and economic depth.
Instead, as others have rightly pointed out, Pakistan today has one of the lowest HDIs in its region. Karachi didnāt become Dubai. Lahore didnāt become Paris. Islamabad remains a ghost town of beautiful boulevards and hollow institutions. The promise wasnāt just broken; it was never even understood.
In some ways, Pakistan inherited the worst of both its imagined lineages: neither the intellectual cosmopolitanism of Persianate high culture, nor the industrious civic ambition of Indian civilizational continuity.
This is why tweets like those from @MrFreeFighter land so hard. They expose the psychic dissonance at the heart of the Pakistani stateās anxieties; its hatred of Pashtuns, its paranoia about āAfghanism,ā and its inability to deal with its own peripheral ethnic groups as anything but threats.
Meanwhile, Indian Muslims like bombaybadshah, though deeply patriotic to India, often voice critiques of Pakistan with a clarity born of disappointment. They represent what Pakistan could have cultivated: a civic Islam, grounded in identity but untethered to ethnic obsession.
The final irony? South East Asia, Thailand, Cambodia, even Bali, retains more civilizational Dharma than most of Pakistan. Religion is irrespective of that elusive civilisational quality of Dharma, thus the true borders of Bharat lie eastward, not northwest.
Pakistan is not the enemy of India. It is the shattered mirror. And what it reflects, feudalism, insecurity, bigotry, and colonial hangover, is what the entire subcontinent must transcend. Again anyone who reads this can see I’m not saying this from a place of hate but love.
