Category: Precedent

Open Thread: The Courtesy Guidance & the Two Factions (Majority vs. Minority)

  • BP’s two Factions in light of its “Bharat” underpinning?
  • What defines the “Majority”?
  • What does Courtesy Mean in an online forum?

The majority, described

Now that we are Brown, that is Bharat, Pundits, all of us who are the majority share things in common. Five come to mind, and they should be front and centre:

  1. Hindu by birth or Hindu by marriage (broadly Upper Caste social milieu).
  2. India’s borders can never be reduced. Some, myself included, are very much in the Akhand Bharat camp; I see Iran to Indonesia as one vast Indic, Hindu Continental sphere.
  3. Hinduism was oppressed under the Anglo-Islamicate legacy, which has been a mixed blessing at best (that is a most charitable view). The LeLi Brahmin view that we should have been grateful to be chattel under Despots, who professed Islam, is odd.
  4. Dharma has space for all, and that more Hinduism does not mean less secularism; as well as an inclination for more Hindu-Indic symbology in the national discourse.
  5. Broadly supportive of the current government of India and sceptical towards RaGa.
  6. Partition was a mistake and the two-nation theory was not a good idea. Pakistan has not succeeded.

That defines the majority to a very strong extent, and the minority is defined by being against these positions, in whatever combination. We have such a strong majority that all of us agree with it, including the full admin team.

It just so happens that even if I’m not Hindu by birth, I’m definitely Hindu by marriage. My entire social reality, where I engage with Brown people, is Hindu, so I have become an acculturated Hindu. A fortnight ago I said the divide here was ideological, not sectarian; the last week taught me the map is older than the ideology. It’s not Saffron or Crescent, left liberals or right wing. It is the majority versus the minority, and in a weird way we are converging towards what is modern-day India, and really mapping that.

The minority Continue reading Open Thread: The Courtesy Guidance & the Two Factions (Majority vs. Minority)

Brown, that is Bharat, Pundits

The Constitution of Brown Pundits

see: Bharat Needs No Validation

Ever since Brown Pundits was resurrected over the last two years, one thing has been missing: a written constitution. We never had one (fifteen years as the British of the blogosphere, running on an unwritten constitution).

The landscape has changed since the founding. The diaspora is not so interesting anymore. Pakistan and the other regions are not so interesting anymore. Modi came to power, and the economic divergence between India and her neighbours is now just immense; she is one of the largest economies in the world. A blog that does not register that is not describing the “Hindu Continent”, it is describing 2011.

Alias

I am not officially changing the name from Brown Pundits. But BP also stands, very much, for Bharat Pundits. We are not trying to make claims of equality. The focus of this house is India, that is Bharat, and how she claims her destiny in the world, with a nod to our origins, which were diasporic and Indo-Islamicate. Bharat Pundits began as a reframe in a wry comment reply to Kabir earlier afternoon. It has evolved into a Precedent.

“Writing” Continue reading Brown, that is Bharat, Pundits

The Crescent and the Trident clash over their women

Two flags fly over the subcontinent’s women. One says cover them. The other says protect them.

We do not think the two are equivalent in cruelty. We think they are equivalent in structure.

No Hindu Equivalent to Zia.

There is no Hindu-nationalist equivalent of Zia ul-Haq’s Hudood Ordinances of 1979, which for decades made a raped woman’s complaint the raw material of a charge against her. There is no Hindu-nationalist equivalent of the Qanun-e-Shahadat of 1984, under which, in certain documentary and financial matters, two women’s testimony is required to equal one man’s. Pakistan partially repaired the first in 2006. The second stands.

That is statutory. It is one-sided. Anyone who tells you the two flags are the same is lying to you, and we are not going to.

What follows is about something else.

I. Two Patriarchies.

Continue reading The Crescent and the Trident clash over their women

Two House Precedents

We apologise for overriding 0M-3’s excellent post, on Geography is Power, but we are pushing it up and allowing it to breathe.

We also second Kabir’s proposal for a book club, with Midnight’s Children as our inaugural read ahead of India and Pakistan’s Independence anniversaries in mid-August.

One. Online-safety reports go by email. From now, any online-safety violation must reach us by email. That is the investigative channel. If it does not land in the inbox, it is not in front of us, and for our purposes a violation we never see did not happen. Send it to us directly.

Two. What Brown Pundits is about: biodiversity and bio-density. Two aims. Density: a 20 comments per post. Diversity: five voices per thread, not a closed loop of a handful names. A hundred comments from a small circle is a monologue. A hundred from ten is an ecosystem, and the ecosystem is what we are here to keep alive.

A post unlikely to reach either metric may be held in abeyance or returned for reworking.

We have felt the losses. BB stepping back, and Indosaurus before that, cost us more than volume. They were bridges. BB in particular always found the connective tissue to sports and the economy that the rest of us missed. So read this as an open invitation home. We will be reaching out, and if either of you is reading, the room is still yours.

Geography is Power

The goal of this post will be to act as a counter to XTM’s post about geography not being power. It will rely on realism as a doctrine of international relations to de-cypher the significance geography has had on the Indian Subcontinent and how it has affected the trajectories of the nations within it.

Geography initially reared its head in discussions of strategy during the times of Mackinder and Mahan in the early 1900s. Where Mackinder so boldly stated that “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.”. However, these words were written in colonial era Britain as a device to fear monger about the Russians as they were the perfect counter to their strategy of controlling the world with sea power through internal lines of transportation through Cold Siberia. With that cold logic Russia which had been the ally of British through the two world wars became a target. Continue reading Geography is Power

Pakistan, the Successor State to Islamistan

The settled view of Pakistan, is that it is the most ideologically Islamic state the world has ever produced, and that each decade carries it further into theocracy. We think the settled view is wrong.

The Pakistani elite has quietly secularised. And far from hollowing the state out, this is precisely how Pakistan became what it was always designed to be: the successor state to British India’s Muslims. Islam was the vehicle. Pakistan is the destination.

Islam remains the public language of legitimacy.

Privately, among the stakeholders who actually run the place, the operating priorities are entirely secular. The society on the ground is conservative and devout. The class at the top, the one that keeps the state alive, believes in Pakistan far more than it believes in Islam.

It helps to separate three things that we mean by Islam. There is Islam as faith, the private conviction of the believer. There is Islam as identity, the badge of who one is and whom one stands with. And there is Islam as state language, in which Pakistan explains itself to itself and to the world.

The elite has not surrendered the third, and it has not wholly shed the second. What it has let go of is the first as a terminal value: the notion that the purpose of the state is to realise Islam, rather than to deploy it.

Faith has gone from ultimate to instrumental.

This migration is what we mean by secularisation. This is not the familiar story of liberalisation. We are not saying Pakistan grew tolerant, or irreligious, or fond of gin. We are saying something narrower and stranger. Pakistan’s elite secularised the priorities of the state without secularising its language. Strip away the Islamic vocabulary and look at what the stakeholder class optimises for, and the list is unmistakable: state survival, strategic depth, military capability, sovereignty, national prestige, and the reproduction of the elite itself.

Continue reading Pakistan, the Successor State to Islamistan

The Philippines Birth Rate Crash

Precedent. Every Brown Pundits post, new ones included, must be at least 70 percent original to BP. Reposts from other sites are allowed, but the reposted portion must not exceed 30 percent of the post.

 

The Philippines has just recorded one of the fastest fertility declines in modern history, and almost nobody saw it coming.

In 1993 the average Filipino woman had 4.1 children. By 1998 it was 3.9, by 2013 around 3.0, and by 2017 it was 2.7. Then it fell off a cliff. The 2025 National Demographic and Health Survey put the figure at 1.7, well below the 2.1 a population needs to replace itself. That is a 37 percent drop in about eight years, the steepest the country has ever recorded. In the early 1950s, Filipino women were having more than seven children each.

At 1.7 the Philippines is not yet as low as East Asia. It still sits above Japan at 1.2 and well above South Korea at 0.8. What unsettles demographers is not the level but the speed, and the direction, which is the same one every developed Asian society has already taken.

Why nobody expected it

Continue reading The Philippines Birth Rate Crash

India’s Wealth will not turn Pakistan into East Germany

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

The Comment thread is afire with the usual (and senseless) India-Pakistan arguments (essentially which of the two is poorer). Q waves the whole question away by pointing at the figure, unimpressed by “an average Indian producing only $2,800 in GDP every year,” and asks what the point even is. There is a point, two in fact.

First: per capita and scale measure different things. Per capita describes the life of a citizen. Scale describes the weight of a state. A single integrated market of 1.4 billion people generates agglomeration, economies of scale, and a pull on capital and talent that no small rich economy can match (India’s ascent in the world of cricket is an extremely interesting meditation). That is why India passed Japan in 2025 to become the world’s fourth-largest economy, why it is the fastest-growing major one, and why it is on course to take third from Germany by around 2028. The market no exporter can ignore, the trade terms a four-trillion-dollar base can lean on, the air defence and roads it can fund: that is concrete power, and it is not nothing. Much of the gain is siphoned by a clutch of oligarchic houses, but the dynamism is real.

Second: however that same wealth does not buy what BB imagines it buys. India outweighs Pakistan in GDP by something close to eleven to one. It has still not turned Pakistan into its East Germany, a dependent satellite drawn quietly into its orbit and, in time, absorbed. Pakistan remains sovereign, armed, and unbought. Pakistanis are not running across the Punjabi wall to their ethnic kin.

In May 2025, after Pahalgam, the larger economy did not dictate terms: Operation Sindoor ended not in surrender but in a ceasefire announced, awkwardly, from Washington, with both capitals claiming the win.

Look West. Iran is a fraction of the wealth of the United States and Israel, yet it has absorbed the most advanced air forces on earth, kept its regime, and kept the knowledge to rebuild what was struck. The guns fell silent at a ceasefire, not a capitulation. Wealth buys reach. It does not buy outcomes.

BB treats the GDP gap as a deed of ownership over Kashmir, and assumes Kashmiris will swallow their pride for a higher income per head, that prosperity purchases consent. It misreads the Islamicate moral economy entirely. In that ledger ‘Izzat and Deen, dignity and faith, are not line items to be outbid. The Hyderabadi Harvard PhD still sings the song of his lost people.

Peoples who set independence above comfort have done so across the whole anti-colonial century, and no balance sheet has ever talked them out of it. Money may buy luxury but not loyalty.

What price will any Indian or Pakistani nationalist accept for their love and loyalty to their homeland?

Brown Pundits