Part I of this essay took Anuradha Bhasin’s blueprint, cross-border journalism, a shared archive, the arts as empathy machines, and held it against the graveyard of prior attempts: Aman ki Asha, decapitated after 2014; Himal Southasian, strangled in 2016 by withheld paperwork. The open question it ended on was survivability; who funds the structure, and where does it live, such that no single ministry can starve it?

The woman who followed Bhasin to the podium is, conveniently, the field test. Beena Sarwar, Boston-based journalist, documentary filmmaker, journalism teacher, helped run Aman ki Asha from the Jang side through its best years; the campaign’s achievements are credited in large part to her stewardship. She watched it stall. And in March 2021 she co-founded Sapan, the Southasia Peace Action Network, explicitly on the lessons learned, followed in August 2021 by Sapan News, a syndicated features service. The arc from mega-campaign backed by two media conglomerates to volunteer-driven network is not a decline; it is an adaptation to the kill mechanism. Her talk, “Think like a Journalist, Build Peace,” was the day’s answer to its own hardest question.

The minimum common agenda

She opened by walking the room through Sapan’s founding charter, pointedly not, she said, a mass signature campaign but an exercise in building a community, whose “minimum common agenda” runs: soft borders and economic cooperation; visas on arrival, or at least something like them; a commitment to human rights and dignity for all within one’s own borders before pointing fingers across them; and collaboration in every field where it is possible. That third plank is the quietly radical one; a structural ban on whataboutery, written into the founding document. Around 150 organisations across the region and diaspora have endorsed the charter, along with some 800 individuals; academics, journalists, students, artists. Among the endorsing organisations, she noted with a smile, is Mela Nordic itself: the host had signed the guest’s charter before inviting her.

Think like a journalist

The heart of the talk was a catechism, what it actually means to think like a journalist. Know your own position, where you are coming from. Be curious and open. Be observational, not judgmental. Provide facts, not opinion. Verify before sharing. Give the Ws and the H, who, what, when, why, how, with context, not as a laundry list of what happened and what was said. Hear all sides and represent them fairly. Go beyond binaries.

Look for the process behind the event; this conference, she pointed out, was itself months of process wearing the costume of a single day. Look for the nuance. And take the long view. She was candid that this describes the craft’s ideals, not its current practice: “that’s not what we are seeing journalists doing.”

She has carried one slogan with her for years, from the Video Journalism Movement; a Netherlands-based outfit, now defunct, for which she once made a film on Kashmir: there is more than one truth. And she immediately fenced it against relativism with a vernacular example: ek aadmi ka terrorist, doosre aadmi ka hero. Those, she said, are opinions. The fact is the act: this person killed that person; this action was or was not lawful. More than one truth does not mean no facts.

From there, her most useful coinage. In the age of social media, everyone who posts is functioning as a kind of para-journalist, para as in paralegal, paramedic: performing the function without the training, the editorial oversight, or the accountability. She told the story on herself of the Karachi journalist who bristled at the term, the hardworking stringer in a small town, he objected, is a journalist, full stop. She conceded the man and kept the category: it is precisely the absence of institutional scaffolding, not of effort or courage, that the prefix marks.

The ledger she then drew up was scrupulously double-entry. On the credit side, the para-journalist bears witness, surfaces what mainstream media ignores, gives voice to the underrepresented, and holds power to account; Palestine, she noted, being the defining case of a story the legacy press could not have buried in the social-media era. On the debit side: no verification, no context, personal attacks, and above all fuel for the ambient outrage culture in which everyone now lives.

That outrage economy got her sharpest political diagnosis. What do the followings of Imran Khan, Modi, Trump, and Bolsonaro have in common? Each strongman went direct; straight to his constituents, bypassing the filter of editorial oversight, the tiresome discipline of both-sides-and-all-sides. Publics hungry for overnight change meet men promising exactly that, and the tiresome truth, that the wheels of change move slowly, that there is process behind every event, gets no engagement metrics at all.

The brain, amended

Sarwar reached for neuroscience to explain the machinery, and here a friendly amendment is in order. Her framing ran through the “reptilian brain” and the left-right hemispheres; reactivity at the brainstem, reason in the cortex. The folk anatomy is shaky (the triune-brain model has been retired by the neuroscientists, and the hemispheres do not divide labour so tidily), but her behavioural point survives the correction entirely, and is better carried by Kahneman’s two speeds of thought: the fast, reactive system that social media is engineered to capture, and the slow, deliberative one that journalism’s disciplines exist to protect. Strip the anatomy, keep the truth: outrage is fast; verification is slow; the feed is optimised for the former.

And her strongest citation was the one she offered most tentatively. Research on political extremists, she noted, finds that the brains of people with extreme views, left or right, resemble each other more than either resembles the centrist’s. This is real and robust: Leor Zmigrod’s work at Cambridge found that intensity of partisan attachment, to either American party, predicted cognitive rigidity on objective neuropsychological tests, with self-described independents the most flexible of all; an inverted-U in which the far left and far right meet at the rigid end. (A phrase from the conference corridors earlier in the weekend, “leftist mullahs”, is, it turns out, peer-reviewed.) The shared traits Sarwar named, certainty in the righteousness of one’s cause, refusal to hear another point of view, are almost a lay translation of the findings.

The mirror against the wall

Her prescriptions came at two scales. For the individual: pause, breathe, reflect; refuse to be swept along by the tide; regulate, verify, and then post. For the region: Sapan News’s newest initiative, born of an ugly new fact. Since last May’s war, India and Pakistan have banned each other’s press outright; a dozen Pakistani news sites, Dawn among them, blocked in India; thirty-two Indian sites, the major mastheads among them, dark in Pakistan; reciprocal blocks the Editors Guild of India was still pleading against this January. Sapan’s response is Media Mirror: republishing, with permission, journalism from across the wall, so that readers on each side can still encounter the other’s reporting. It is not a manifesto. It is a workaround; which is exactly what makes it the operational answer to Bhasin’s blueprint. Where the states have built a wall in the information space, a volunteer network is quietly propping a mirror against it.

She closed with her most speculative idea, offered with disarming honesty. Sapan News and the Southasia Peace site both carry a code of ethics and responsibility; a Hippocratic oath, as she put it, for anyone engaging on social and digital media. She would like everyone who endorses it to carry a badge on their profiles, “I have signed the social media pledge, have you?”, to make others pause and think.

The open questions

Taken together, the two talks bracket the problem, Bhasin the institutional scale, Sarwar the individual conscience, and together they expose the three questions neither fully answers.

The first is the tension inside Sarwar’s own coinage, and it is the honest heart of the whole subject. The unmediated channel she credits with carrying Palestine past the gatekeepers is the same channel that carries the demagogue past the editors. Structurally, the citizen bearing witness and the troll manufacturing outrage are indistinguishable: both bypass the filter. What separates para-journalism’s credit column from its debit column is nothing architectural; it is precisely the list of disciplines her talk enumerates, adopted voluntarily, one poster at a time. An uncomfortable conclusion, because voluntary discipline is the one thing that does not scale on demand.

The second follows: can a pledge do any real work? On the enforcement reading, plainly not; adverse selection guts it, since those who would sign a civility oath are those who least need one, and a name on a website rewards signalling over conduct. The accountability with teeth is institutional, newsroom- and platform-level; which the para-journalist lacks by definition. But Sarwar had already supplied the better reading an hour earlier, describing her own charter: not a signature drive but the building of a community. Professional norms have never spread primarily by policing; they spread by modelling; by enough visible practitioners behaving a certain way that the behaviour reads as the mark of belonging to something. Eight hundred names on a founding charter is not an enforcement mechanism. It is a nucleus. On that reading her pledge is not naive at all; it is a slow instrument, consistent with everything else she said about the long view.

The third is the one Part I pressed: money and domicile. Bhasin’s proposals need funding at scale; the graveyard shows funding at scale is exactly where the strangler’s hands go. Sapan’s volunteer model is, in one sense, the perfect counter-design, you cannot freeze the grants of an outfit that runs on none, but volunteerism caps out well below the scale Bhasin rightly demanded. Somewhere between the conglomerate-backed campaign that was decapitated and the volunteer network that cannot be, there is a design waiting to be specified: endowed rather than grant-dependent, diaspora-anchored, multi-jurisdictional, digitally domiciled, with no single ministry holding a lever. That design document is the real homework this conference set its region.

Coda: the unbroken raag

The day did not end with journalism. It ended, as perhaps it had to, with Ali Sher’s The Unbroken Raag, two hours of music, memory, and the echoes of Partition, the arts doing, in the event’s final act, exactly what Bhasin said journalism cannot: creating the empathy on which everything else depends. A raag, unbroken across a border that broke everything else, is as good a closing argument as any speaker managed.

One last detail, typographic and therefore easy to miss. Himal always wrote Southasia as one word; a house style that was really a thesis, the copy desk’s quiet insistence that the region precedes its partitions. Sarwar’s network carries the convention in its very name: the Southasia Peace Action Network. It is a small thing, a missing space. But a region that has learned to write itself as one word may yet learn to read itself as one story; Pakistan’s floods, India’s heatwaves, Nepal’s vanishing glaciers, one Himalaya, one meltwater, one story. The alternative, as Bhasin said in closing, is to keep fracturing along lines that will eventually become impossible to hold.

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.

Summary of the Book

This book has argued that patterns of ethnic violence in India stem from legacies of colonial rule that were reinforced over time through institutions. India is well known as having been the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire; less well known is that the British never controlled the entire country. Most of the areas that were already British colonies prior to the conquest of India had been brought under direct rule, but the Rebellion of 1857 prevented the subcontinent from being entirely annexed. Afterward, roughly one-fourth of the Indian population lived in princely states ruled by largely autonomous native kings. This key historical divide forms the colonial origins of ethnic violence in contemporary India. Both the British administrators and the princely rulers governed heterogeneous populations, but they had very different conceptions of how to manage this ethnic diversity. In the provinces, British administrators emphasized the centrality of caste. Colonial officials chose this particular identity after the Rebellion of 1857, which they perceived as a religious(primarily Islamic) uprising, because they were intent on de-emphasizing religion. Caste (along with tribal identities) was promoted as the central organizing principle for a new, modern society. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the caste system was divorced from its Hindu origins and became largely a system of social categories. It was subsequently viewed as scientific in character, bearing resemblance (depending on the administrator) either to race or to the class structure of Victorian England.

Beginning with this assumption, British administrators then stratified ethnic groups by enforcing policies that benefited high castes but discriminated against low castes and tribals. High castes such as the jenmis in Malabar, for example, gained a new proprietary right over the land, while low castes and adivasis in the region suddenly became tenants-at-will. At the same time, in the interests of promoting secularism, the British embraced a policy of religious neutrality, or what Peter Hardy (1972) has called “balance and rule.” In effect, this policy meant that groups such as Muslims, a small minority in the country, were protected under colonialism. In provinces such as Ajmer, Muslims came to form almost half of the local administration, and a culture of religious cooperation between Hindus and Muslims was gradually fostered. The outcome of these policies in the provinces was intense caste and tribal violence, but over the long term, communal conflict was minimized.

In the princely states, ethnic politics was organized altogether differently. Native kings had always derived their legitimacy from religion—even in the precolonial period—and they had constructed theocratic states. Many territories were explicitly religious kingdoms; for example, Travancore, in the south, was officially dedicated to the Hindu god Padmanabha. In these areas, politics was organized around the centrality of religious legitimation, laws, shrines, customs, and rituals. Religion was inherently central to the princely states, but the British also reinforced this ethnic category: they believed that religious rule had been native to India, and some administrators relished the opportunity to highlight a divide between modern provinces and “backwards” princely states.

In their territories, native kings constructed policies of ethnic stratification that were the mirror image of British India; these policies benefited dominant religious groups but discriminated against minority religious groups. Even in states such as Kashmir, where most of the population was Muslim, the Hindu rulers of the kingdom brutally repressed them and enabled Hindus to dominate local politics. At the same time, many princes protected the lower castes and Adivasis. This was because, respectively, cultivators had a hereditary right to the land in many princely kingdoms, and certain tribes—like the Bhils in Rajasthan—were viewed as the earliest inhabitants of these states. These policies of ethnic stratification, in turn, created a pattern of intense religious violence, but minimal violence among castes and tribes. Thus, across India’s provinces and princely states, different conceptions of ethnicity led to different political cultures, then different policies of ethnic stratification led to different fault lines of ethnic violence.

This central theory—a new interpretation of British Indian history—is supported by extensive qualitative and quantitative evidence. The qualitative component is derived from fifteen months of fieldwork in India, in which primary source research was conducted in six archives and dozens of elites were interviewed in five carefully chosen case studies. The first two pairs of cases were controlled historical comparisons of two neighboring areas that were similar in most regards except that one was a British province and the other was a native state. Chapter 2 detailed a comparison of the districts of Jaipur and Ajmer in the north Indian state of Rajasthan. Jaipur was a Hindu kingdom, and Ajmer was selected by colonial officials to be their lone outpost in the area then known as Rajputana. Chapter 3 then detailed a state-level comparison between the northern portion of Kerala, known as Malabar, and the southern region of the state, known as Travancore. These two cases constitute a “historical accident,” because the British wanted to bring all of Kerala under their control, but a variety of contingent factors enabled them to conquer only the north. The South consequently remained under the control of a powerful Hindu dynasty.

In both Ajmer and Malabar, extensive primary source evidence showed that the British emphasized the centrality of caste and tribal identities. Colonial officials who descended on Ajmer in the early nineteenth century were among the first administrators to codify the designation“untouchable,” and the effect of census operations in the area was the heightened salience of caste identities. New landholding and forest policiesinstituted in both provinces enhanced the power of zamindars butdispossessed low-caste agriculturalists and tribal groups. For example, in pre-British Malabar, there was most likely no system of private property, but British administrators misinterpreted the existing agricultural system and granted proprietary rights to jenmis. This new policy resulted in skyrocketing eviction rates and, subsequently, the earliest political mobilization of low castes and adivasis in the region.

Colonial administrators in Ajmer and Malabar also sought to minimize the salience of religion, and minority Muslim communities were protected by the British policy of religious neutrality. In Ajmer, Muslims constituted a large share of the government administration, and equality between Hindus and Muslims led to the religious divide slowly receding over time. In Malabar, although Muslims were responsible for a series of uprisings against the government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the vast majority of rebels were actually recent low-caste converts, and the history of this region since the advent of colonialism included repeated episodes of intercaste tension and violence. By the end of the British period, however, Malabar, like Ajmer, experienced almost no communal conflict. The colonial histories of Jaipur and Travancore, by contrast, were quite different. Hindu rajas ruled these theocratic states, and they emphasized the centrality of religion. The rulers of Travancore governed a state that, unlike most areas of northern India, had never come under the control of Muslim armies; these rajas were therefore particularly staunch defenders of Hinduism. The leaders of both areas heavily favored the Hindu majority while restricting the rights of Muslims and, in Travancore, Christians. In Jaipur, for instance, newspapers from the early twentieth century described the kingdom as one of the worst areas for communal violence in the entire country.

In both Jaipur and Travancore, however, the same rajas instituted a number of protective policies toward low castes and adivasis, which in turn prevented the growth of caste and tribal violence in these areas. The rulers of Jaipur acknowledged, for instance, that the Meena tribe ruled most of the state in the medieval period and therefore guaranteed them a ceremonial position in the kingdom and a certain allotment of government jobs. Similarly, land policies toward Adivasis in Travancore were among the most progressive in India. The rajas of Travancore also pushed for low-caste uplift aggressively after the mid-nineteenth century, opening the doors of Hindu temples to untouchables before any other region in India.

Across these four cases, the patterns of history are clear: British administrators emphasized the centrality of caste and enforced policies that stratified ethnic groups along these lines, but they simultaneously protected religious minorities. In these areas, caste and tribal identities became hegemonic, and violence centered on these identities; the religious divide, however, receded over time. Princely rulers, for their part, emphasized the centrality of religion and enforced religious policies of ethnic stratification, but they protected the lower castes and adivasis. Religious violence increased, but caste and tribal violence were minimized. These four cases drawn from such different geographical regions of India—regions with sharply contrasting cultural and historical attributes—highlight that bifurcated colonial rule created clear fault lines of ethnic conflict.

Many aspects of the argument presented in this book challenge traditional historical work on the colonial era in India. For example, the dominant view on religious violence in colonial India can be summed up as “princes good, British bad.” The controlled comparisons in Rajasthan and Keralademonstrate the opposite. Similarly, the area that experiences the most immense tribal conflict in contemporary India is not a former British province but a former princely state. To consider some of the limitations of the theory presented in this book, Chapter 4 examined the theory’s key deviant case, focusing on Bastar, a small, remote former princely state that is the single deadliest battleground for Naxalite conflict in modern India. An analysis of this kingdom has shown that tribal revolt began in Bastar in the mid-nineteenth century precisely because of creeping British influence in the state. Bastar was unique among Indian princely kingdoms in terms of the sheer amount of British interference in its administration: for almost half a century, it was ruled directly by colonial officials. Therefore, Bastar is the exception that proves the rule: where the British were in power, tribal rebellion soon followed.

Disparate sets of ethnic policies across provinces and princely areas created very different patterns of ethnic violence in India. In the post-independence period, these patterns have not dissipated. Dozens of elite interviews spanning Rajasthan, Kerala, and Chhattisgarh were conducted to study the modern period. Respondents drawn from district- and state-level government departments, NGOs, ethnic organizations, political parties, police administrations, newspapers, and universities all showcased that patterns of ethnic violence have not changed in postcolonial India. In Ajmer and Malabar, respondents detailed that conflict still revolves around caste and tribal identities. In Jaipur and Travancore, however, respondents highlighted the central role of religion in fomenting political violence. For example, after the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, mentioned at the beginning of this book, there were riots in both Jaipur and Travancore—but no corresponding riots occurred in neighboring Ajmer or Malabar. Patterns of violence established during the colonial period persisted into postcolonial India for two overarching reasons. First, they became embedded in both formal and informal institutions. Political parties in
Jaipur and Travancore, for instance, did not create new ethnic cleavage structures; instead, they built on the religious divide inherited from princely rule. Likewise, the Communist Party that has been so central to Malabar’s politics emphasized caste (then class) because of a long history of low-caste agitation in the region. Institutions as informal as the collective memories of different ethnic groups continued to structure ethnic conflict in one form or another. Patterns of violence became self-reinforcing; every riot hardened ethnic divides, built histories of animosity, and kept communities apart. Even major events did not alter these conflict patterns. For example, the partition caused much of the Muslim population in Ajmer to leave for Pakistan, but many of Jaipur’s Muslims also left. Partition affected both districts in similar ways, but in post-independence India, Jaipur continues to experience much more communal violence than Ajmer.

Second, the new postcolonial governments failed to implement the effective reforms of the past. For example, at the dawn of independence, agricultural reforms in Ajmer and Bastar began from a weakened position due to the power of British-backed zamindars, and new policies largely failed to improve the lives of landless, low-caste, and tribal laborers. One of the few exceptions was the state of Kerala, where the communists in Malabar used low-caste mobilization to come to power, implement a number of impressive reforms, and decrease the amount of ethnic violence in the state compared to most other regions.

Evidence from the case studies showcases a clear pattern of ethnic violence across contemporary India, but even five in-depth cases can potentially provide a misleading portrait of the entire country. Chapter 5, therefore, provided statistical evidence from almost six hundred Indian districts that similar ethnic conflict patterns exist across the country, even when controlling for a variety of alternative explanations such as poverty, geography, and levels of social development. British rule correlates strongly with contemporary caste and tribal violence, but negatively with religious conflict. The British experience in India after 1857 deeply influenced colonial administrators in London. They began to extol the virtues of what becameknown as the “Indian model” of colonialism. Colonial officials realized that combining direct and indirect rule was less expensive, less intrusive, and less likely to produce violent backlashes among native populations than outright direct rule. As the British Empire continued to expand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Indian model was exported (in one form or another) to a number of new colonies across Africa and Asia. Chapter 6 provided an overview of ethnic politics and conflict in three such colonies: Burma, Malaya, and Nigeria. In all of these states, the British ruled certain areas directly but left other regions to be controlled by kings, sultans, or emirs.

In the directly ruled parts of these colonies, the British tended to implement a policy of de-emphasizing religion, no doubt drawing on the Indian experience. In Burma, for instance, the Buddhist monarchy was dismantled, and in Nigeria, the religious divide in Yorubaland was replaced by a concerted effort to make ancestral city membership salient. In some indirectly ruled areas, however, native rulers—often with the encouragement of British officials—continued to emphasize religion. The sultans of Malaya, for instance, became the defenders of Islam in their states. Bifurcated rule in these colonies created different fault lines of ethnic conflict. Even in the contemporary states of Myanmar, Malaysia, and Nigeria, there appear to be patterns of ethnic violence that descend from the British period. In northern Nigeria, religious violence has been a major problem, but not in Yorubaland. Racial tensions plague directly ruled Malaysia, but religious identification is still much stronger where the sultans once reigned. Chapter 6 provides evidence of the analytical power of drawing on the Indian model for insights into explaining contemporary ethnic violence in states around the Indian Ocean.

The arguments presented in this book contribute to several current debates within social science research. This project has aimed to advance work on the causes of ethnic violence in contemporary India, on the determinants of ethnic salience, and on the broader impact of colonialism on ethnic conflict. It is worth revisiting these three literatures to consider how the Indian case may provide answers to several of these important puzzles.

Ethnic Violence in Contemporary India.

An impressive body of literature within political science has examined the causes of ethnic conflict in India, specifically the recent and widespread occurrence of Hindu-Muslim riots. Three central books (Brass 1997, 2003; Varshney 2002; Wilkinson 2004) emphasize several similar factors, including the rise of Hindu nationalist groups such as the Vishva Hindu Parishad and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and the incentive for political elites to promote violence in the run-up to elections. These books not only have vastly expanded our understanding of ethnic conflict in India, but also have done much to popularize Indian politics to a broader audience across the social sciences. However, two critical factors are missing across these works: a consideration of the deeper historical causes of contemporary violence, and a focus on forms of ethnic conflict other than communalism. Existing scholarship on Hindu-Muslim riots has focused on proximate causes, highlighting relatively recent factors such as the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 1980s. Variables such as these are no doubt important, but this book focuses instead on the underlying causes of violence. A major problem with research on Hindu-Muslim riots is the fact that extensive religious violence occurred throughout Indian history, dating as far back as the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, one of the earliest Islamic empires in South Asia. Therefore, a deeper explanation is needed to understand the root causes of modern violence. By looking at the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods, this book offers a more historically grounded theory of contemporary communal violence.

A second problem of the existing literature is the singular focus on religion. Communal conflict in India has received an enormous amount of scholarly attention, but comparatively little consideration has been given to violence occurring along caste or tribal lines. This is a serious oversight, considering that these forms of conflict are prevalent throughout modern India. Thousands of atrocities are committed against members of the untouchable castes every year, and the Naxalite rebellion in eastern India was described by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the largest security threat in the history of the country. To broaden the scope of existing scholarship on ethnic conflict in India, this book offers a more comprehensive account, examining religious, caste, and tribal conflict together. In doing so, it highlights that most caste and tribal violence in contemporary India descends from the policies of colonial officials who discriminated against low castes and tribal groups. Importantly, this book also shows that religious violence had different causes and was prevalent even before colonialism.

Excerpt from The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India: Verghese, Ajay

Indus Waters Treaty was signed in 19 Sept 1960 between India and Pakistan under mediation provided by the World Bank. As a political compromise between Pakistan and India seemed improbable the US and UK decided to pressure both into signing onto a technical treaty which could outline the claims and limits of both nations on the flow of the water. Over the years it was touted at the most successful and unequal water sharing agreement where the upper riparian nation only made claim to a minor portion of the river’s waters.

The Indus basin was categorized into two groups of rivers. With the Eastern Rivers (Beas, Ravi, and Sutlej) being controlled by India and the Western Rivers (Indus, Chenab and Jhelum) being controlled by Pakistan.

Many still blame Nehru for this treaty in India for only allowing India to control less than 20% of the Indus’ waters, while many in Pakistan still decry the unequal nature of the treaty in directly awarding a set of rivers to India as that may eventually cause droughts in the parts of Pakistan which are mainly fed by the Eastern rivers. However, the main calls for renegotiations of the treaty have originated in India which at this point has put it into ‘abeyance’. In this post we will go through the main areas of dispute in the treaty and what the possible solutions for the current impasse may be.

Points of Dispute

Hierarchy of Dispute Resolution

One of the major points of contention between India and Pakistan in the Indus Waters Treaty is which method of dispute resolution should be utilized. India opines that a neutral expert is best equipped to provide a judgement on any dispute as the treaty was created as a technical document divvying up the river system. As the technological leaps which have occurred since the signing of the treaty are such that only a technical expert could decipher which portions of a dam project are adhering to the spirit of the treaty and which are not. Pakistan opines that the court of arbitration remains the best method for the settlement of any dispute as it ensures both parties adhere to the limitations set on dam construction and that water use in the upper riparian are limited to irrigation, power production and no excessive storage occurs at any dam project.

India claims that the entire treaty has been used by Pakistan as a tool to delay and alter any project on the Indus. To the point that even the Eastern Rivers which India has had complete claims over remains underutilized. This had gotten to a point in 2016 where over a dam project both the neutral expert and the court of arbitrations were consulted with both providing contradicting verdicts.

Distribution of Water

The Indus Waters Treaty remains the most unequal treaty in terms of water distribution. The main claim on the Indian side has been that due to a change in population on their side of the border their requirements for water have risen but the treaty remains largely in the past. The water flowing through the Indus River Systems has only declined as times goes on. Therefore, a new bargain needs to be struck to make the treaty viable for the future for either sides.

Pakistan affirms that population has risen more significantly across their side of the border, therefore their claims over the waters are more important now. Furthermore, they claim that giving over the entire claim over the Eastern Rivers to India was a massive failure of their predecessors. Pakistan therefore also asks claims over a portion of the Eastern Rivers to ensure that there isn’t any drought caused on their side due to a complete redirection of the Eastern Rivers as stated in certain claims by Indian politicians.

Colonial Nature of the Treaty

Perhaps the least commented on portion of this treaty is its inherently colonial nature. The treaty was negotiated in the good offices of the World Bank an American Institution, it was clearly an objective of the USA and UK’s governments to ensure the viability of their client states in Pakistan. Even today the governments of the US and UK are deeply involved in the selection Engineer Members, and Legal Members which are involved in the dispute resolution portion of the treaty. It would future proof the treaty further if these positions were devolved to the main participants of the treaty.

Through Indian eyes this treaty is almost written by a colonial master on unequal terms. Now, that India is no longer in a state of Ship-to-mouth existence it needs to shed these clearly colonial features of the treaty. Pakistan might find this portion of the treaty not as excusable due to the fact that the member states with these influence have often been close allies of theirs through formal treaties such as (SEATO, CENTO or the Baghdad Pact) and both the powers sent aircraft carriers (HMS Eagle and USS Enterprise) to intimidate India in 1971.

Possible Future Scenarios

At this point the chances of an Amended treaty are going to require deft negotiations from the Pakistani side as many projects on the Western Rivers in Indian territory have already begun to spring up. Therefore, the chances for a “Permanent Abeyance” or “Total Disregard” remain most likely.

Indus Waters Treaty Amended

This is an ideal scenario in which all that track-2 level diplomacy leads to fruitful results. Where the treaty is examined by both sides and amended to ensure that the points of conflicts that led to its abeyance are sufficiently allayed such that they won’t lead to any future suspension or abeyance.

In this scenario the water distribution either changes nominally (giving both sides minor claims to waters from both set of rivers while maintain a similar distribution of water) or remains the same. However, the main dispute is resolved which is the hierarchy of dispute resolution. In a scenario where Pakistan has the upper hand it would ensure the court of arbitration is the highest, in the case where India holds all the cards as the upper riparian it will be the neutral expert.

If the amendments are ambitious it could even tackle the colonial nature of the treaty excising any influence of former colonial powers from the treaty. Making it not just future proof but even more closely aligned to the Indian policy affirmed in the Shimla Agreement.

Permanent Abeyance

The Indian government finds this scenario particularly enticing. As it isn’t directly suspending the treaty while side stepping all its cumbersome dispute resolution mechanism. It can easily ignore any rulings from International Courts as they have little to no jurisdiction over the country. It allows the state to have a good level of ambiguity in decision-making which many bureaucrats appreciate. It leaves a card up their sleeve which they can use to entice Pakistan during a future crisis.

On the Pakistani side this is a dreaded option as it removes any influence they might’ve had over the construction on the Indian side. Projects which previously might’ve been delayed and altered for decades will be suddenly out of their influence. But the most devastating will be the lack of data sharing which would affect the planning of crop seasons. This uncertainty could’ve been reduced to a degree if a larger number of dams were to be constructed on the Indus however as a “hard” state Pakistan rarely has any resources to spare for non-military projects of this magnitude.

Total Disregard

The most extreme of all options would be a total disregard for the treaty. Instead of acting like the treaty is only in abeyance which means the claims over the Rivers remain static in principle. Meaning India has limited influence over the Western Rivers. In this scenario a large build up of projects begins on both the set of Rivers. A number of river connection, dams, and reservoir projects spring up to capture water from the Indus. Large tunnels of 30-40kms are built up to join river water of the Indus towards Uttarakhand and Rajasthan through canals ensuring that more than 20% of the waters from the Indus River System never reach across the border.

Any construction of dams or reservoirs on the Western Rivers would tilt the world towards this scenario. As once the construction is complete no incumbent government will ever have any incentive to adhere to the old treaty ever again. Meaning once a project is constructed it will become a permanent fixture, Once a river is redirected to a canal it cannot be turned off, because anyone who turns it off will commit political suicide.

Projects like the Chenab-Beas link tunnel are inching up towards this reality. Where Pakistan’s claims over the Western Rivers are diluted through rather small and insignificant projects over long periods of time. In its current state the link tunnel doesn’t even transport 1 MAF of water from the Chenab to the Beas, however, it demonstrates a principle that Pakistan holds no influence over Indian construction on its claimed river waters.

Conclusion

Every day that passes without any open negotiation between the governments of India and Pakistan on the issue of the Indus Waters Treaty is a day where we move closer towards the scenario of “Total Disregard”. Personally, I wouldn’t want this issue to get to a point where Indian leaders jockey to claim larger and larger portions of Pakistan’s waters for the sake of their local constituencies and jingoistic sentiments. The effect this treaty’s abeyance has over Pakistan isn’t as large as most would assume due to a short-to-medium term effects on the Indus’ waters however in the long term it might reduce millions into poverty due to the rising cost of water.

I’d love to know your thoughts on this! What real talking points do you think we can pull from this issue? Also, let me know if there’s a blind spot I completely missed that needs to be addressed.

There is a lot of debate taking place in the digital space regarding the safety of women in public spaces. Here, I am sharing an old opinion piece published in The News International on this issue.

Walk through any major city in Pakistan, and you’ll find that urban spaces speak a masculine language – the result of a parochial, patriarchal project sustained over centuries.

From dimly lit streets and poorly maintained sidewalks to male-dominated public transport and unwelcoming parks, our cities have long been built for and around men. This isn’t by accident; it’s the result of decades of planning that excluded the voices and needs of women, girls and gender-diverse individuals.

Unfortunately, Pakistan’s urban centres (Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Peshawar, and Quetta, etc) have ample room for improvement. Despite women making up nearly half the population, their visibility in public and economic life remains limited.

Female labour force participation peaked at 24.4 per cent in 2011 but declined to 21.3 per cent by 2021 (per the latest labour force data), reflecting stagnation. While 13.4 million new jobs were created between 2011 and 2021, only 2.5 million went to women. Harassment in public transport, unsafe parks, and infrastructure that neglects women’s needs, such as a lack of sanitation facilities contributing to school dropout post-puberty, further reinforce exclusion, ensuring that Pakistan’s cities remain far from truly inclusive urban spaces.

These challenges are compounded by Pakistan’s broader gender disparities. Ranked 148th out of 148 countries in the WEF’s 2025 Global Gender Gap Report (parity score 56.7 per cent), Pakistan lags behind even conflict-affected nations. Critics note that the WEF framework focuses on formal metrics while ignoring women’s contributions in informal labour, unpaid care, and grassroots roles. Yet, despite gains in education, unsafe cities, outdated infrastructure and gender-based violence, with over 60,000 abuse cases in Punjab in 2024 and a 3.0 per cent rape conviction rate, keep our deeply patriarchal society a citadel of gender injustice.

Without gender-sensitive urban planning and meaningful reform, these structural barriers will continue to marginalise half the population. This is concerning, as female literacy has risen – for instance, 88 per cent of 13-year-old girls in urban Punjab are now literate – signaling a coming wave of potential female workers who will need safe, accessible, and inclusive cities to thrive. Given fiscal constraints, it is inevitable that Pakistan must fully leverage this segment of the labour force.

Building safer, more inclusive cities demands moving beyond male-centric urban design and centring women’s lived realities. With 68 per cent of working women still in the shrinking agricultural sector and female literacy at 52.8 per cent, cities must enable women’s transition into services and manufacturing. This means investing in gender-disaggregated data, co-designing public spaces with women and removing entrenched barriers, such as adolescent school dropouts caused by inadequate sanitation and facilities.

What would gender-informed urban design look like in Pakistan? At the very outset, advancing gender equality in Pakistan demands comprehensive legal and institutional reforms. Uniform, enforceable laws against gender-based violence, early marriage, and workplace discrimination must be implemented across all provinces. Judicial reforms should prioritise survivor-centred justice by ensuring swift case resolution and holding law enforcement accountable through robust oversight.

Equally, a more thoughtful approach to transport planning must reflect women’s actual mobility patterns – often multiple short trips in a day, sometimes with children. Expanding reliable, affordable local transport and ensuring step-free access with adequate seating can transform both safety and accessibility for women in public spaces.

Public toilets, a glaring omission in most cities, should be designed to be safer and more inclusive, with consideration for needs such as childcare and menstrual hygiene. Similarly, keeping markets and public spaces active into the evening, with improved lighting and a supportive security presence trained in gender sensitivity, could help create environments where more women feel comfortable and welcome.

Representation matters too. Public spaces should reflect the diverse identities of those who live in them. This can be as symbolic as naming streets after women or installing statues that celebrate female leaders, or as practical as ensuring women sit on municipal boards that decide zoning and budgetary allocations.

Some international case studies offer guidance. Vienna, for example, has embedded gender mainstreaming into city planning, ensuring equitable access to parks, transport, and housing. Barcelona’s exploratory walks involve women in assessing the safety and usability of public spaces. These are not utopian ideals; they are models of what can happen when gender equity becomes a core principle, not an optional add-on.

In Pakistan, change must start with political will. Local governments can lead by introducing gender-responsive budgeting, allocating funds specifically to projects that improve safety and accessibility for women. City development authorities should mandate gender impact assessments for all major infrastructure projects. Planning teams must be diverse, and developers encouraged to hire gender champions who ensure inclusivity from design to implementation. Progress should also be tracked. Municipalities can adopt KPIs such as changes in crime rates, increased female participation in public spaces, or even simple perception surveys asking women how safe they feel walking home at night.

To build truly inclusive smart cities, we must replace the one-size-fits-men technology with AI systems grounded in gender-disaggregated data, ethical oversight and meaningful participation from women and girls. Artificial intelligence, if paired with gender-sensitive planning, could predict and prevent harassment, map unsafe zones, optimise street lighting to women’s mobility patterns, and redesign public transport using sex-disaggregated travel data.

It could also address healthcare blind spots by recognising gender-specific symptoms and removing bias from hiring algorithms. With diverse datasets and inclusive design from the outset, AI can dismantle structural barriers that have kept women’s needs invisible in urban policy; without such intentionality, it risks amplifying existing discrimination, as evidenced by a Berkeley Haas study showing gender bias in 44 per cent of AI systems.

A city that forgets its women forgets itself. In the maze of concrete and cold logic, where transit maps loop without meaning and lights flicker over empty benches, the absence echoes. When women cannot move freely, walk without calculation or appear without permission, the city grows brittle, its rhythm falters. The economy stutters. Public spaces decay. The promise of prosperity folds in on itself.

Pakistan stands between progress and paralysis. With fast-growing cities and an aware youth, we must choose: keep women in the footnotes or make them the starting point, from the very first line.

Historical context

During the late 1400’s to early 1500’s, a new figure appeared in the philosophical tradition under the name of Raghunatha Siromani. He was a brahmin of ordinary origin with a point of interest, except for the fact that his grandfather, Sulapani, wrote a minor commentary about a Sanskrit Smriti. He studied at a university in Mithila that was the centre for Brahmanical learning, and he even went on to be a chancellor at the institution; however, he found it to be too conservative and chose to return to his original home in what is modern-day Nadia in West Bengal. This hometown was part of the Bengal sultanate that was presently ruled by the liberal minded Hussain Shah, who multiplied institutions in Brahmanical ones. In this open environment, Raghunatha would go on to rewrite the entire field of logic and indirectly begin what can be considered the earliest forms of Modernity within South Asia. 

Before we go any further, we need to understand what Raghunatha’s works were and conduct a broader examination of their social implications for the time. Also, I will be abbreviating Raghunatha Shiromani with the initials RS for the rest of this discussion to make it easier to write.

Skepticism and Reason in the School of New Logic

Basically, RS was a part of the Navya Nyaya school of philosophy that was originally founded by Gangesa in the first half of the 14th century, when he unified the traditional school of Nyaya (logic) and Vaisheshika (metaphysics) together in his magnum opus, the “Tattvachinatmani” (Jewel of thought on the Nature of things). RS, during his lifetime, wrote multiple commentaries or Bhasya on multiple historical texts such as the Nyaya sutra, Nyayakusumanjali, and Gangesa works as well. Traditionally, the Bhasya is supposed to provide clarification about grey areas and expand on the pre-existing literature, but there was always a degree of deference to these ancient works, and one couldn’t understand the precepts that were presented.  

RS on the other hand extensively challenged a lot of these assumptions as he did a thing that the author Janardan Ganeri calls “being in a discussion with tradition”, where activity challenges some of the pre-existing states made in the work using logic and reason to ensure the arguments being presented isn’t simply considered as true due to traditional rather there is a logical basis for the points being made. What RS was doing here is shifting the onus of inquiry into the hands of the individuals and challenging the traditional norms that were previously set in place. He doesn’t reject tradition completely, but he emphasizes the need for skepticism and examination of ideas through a lens of neutrality. I am just doing a direct quote from his works, which can explain his point:

“The demonstration of these matters, which I have carefully explained, is contrary to the conclusions reached by all the other disciplines. These matters spoken of should not be cast aside without reflection just because they are contrary to accepted opinion; scholars should consider them carefully. Bowing to those who know the truth concerning matters of all the sciences, bowing to people like you [the reader], I pray you consider my sayings with sympathy. This method, though less honoured, has been employed by wise men of the past; namely that one asks other people of learning to consider one’s own words (Inquiry into the True Nature of Things 1915: 79,1-80,3; trans. Potter 1957: 89-90).”

Another notable quote of note is:

“How does it come about that, from (hearing) the word “Dasaratha,” people now, who never saw Dasaratha [the father of the legendary king Rama] come to know of him? Likewise, how, from the words [for fictional entities like] “hobgoblin”, do others come to know of them? I leave this for attentive scholars to meditate upon. I shall not expand further here. (1915: 60,4-61,4; trans. Potter 1957: 76).”

 Here he is talking about an idea that comes to mind, but instead of simply explicating this concept fully. There is an expectation that readers of the text actively engage with the idea being that they aim to inquire about these ideas themselves instead of merely taking the idea via rote memorization. The onus of inquiry is shifted into the hands of the reader, where you are actively expected to partake in a discussion with the text and the ideas being presented here. 

Furthermore, you see a similar trend in Europe, where they developed such ideas, and it led to the formation of the scientific revolution and broader advances in society. Think of how, before the enlightenment, people used to follow the Galen theory of Anatomy and Humoral theory in explaining disease, which often resulted in leeches and bloodletting. The ideas were taken as the norm for a long time, since any further investigation, such as the examination of dead corpses, but the enlightenment and the reformation shifted this dynamic. These theories gradually emerged with figures like Andreas Vesalius questioning these concepts and providing scientific proofs about how these ideas were false; most of which involved breaking deference to tradition and the norms of the time. All of this may seem mundane to us today, but it was unique in that time, and it paved the way for the scientific revolution.

 Another aspect of RS’s writing is his close connection to realist philosophy, as was common among the logicians, and his emphasis on individuality, best seen in the following quotes: 

“Among entities, space and time are nothing but God, since there is no proof [that they are distinct from God]. For wherever particular effects arise, these arise simply from God by his being combined with particular causes (1915: 1,3-3,1; trans. Potter 1957: 23).”

“The universal selfhood, insofar as it is the limitor of the inherence- causality of pleasure etc., is not in god (1915: 44,2-45,1; trans. Potter 1957: 55).”  

His argument is quite similar to the ideas presented by the European philosopher Spinoza, a type of religious deism. Basically, he argues that space and time itself is God itself and that the individual self is distinct from this god. In the traditional Vedantic view, the distinction between the atman (self) and the Ishavara-Brahaman (God/Absolute) is an illusion, indirectly saying that individuality is a product of ignorance (avidya), i.e., created by the environment you live in. RS, on the other hand, holds that not only is individuality not an illusion stemming from ignorance, but that the self and the other aspects of individuality, such as feelings, emotions, and experience, are real. Individuality is an important part of his philosophy about logic and inquiry. 

The Environment and other figures of pre-colonial Modernity 

You see the things that are commonly the basis of modernity today: individuality, questioning of tradition, openness to newer ideas, and skepticism about once-reality. What makes this form of pre-colonial modernity fascinating is the fact that it wasn’t just limited to one philosophical tradition, caste, or religion; in fact, it was quite common during the Early modern Mughal empire. Yashovijaya Gani, a logician and orthodox Jain monk, came to the same conclusions that Raghunatha came to, despite criticizing his work extensively. In fact, Yashovijaya even had a form of a prototypical science method as seen in the following quote:

“No body of ‘theory’ (śāstra), whether Jaina or non-Jaina, is to be accepted merely based on sectarian interest. Instead, the theory should be subject to testing, just as the purity of a sample of gold is determined by tests involving rubbing, cutting, and heating (1.17). There is testing a theory or idea through a continuous process, like purifying gold. 

This wasn’t even limited to the Dharmic religions, since you see a similar trend in the Islamic tradition, specifically in the figure of Dara. Even though today Dara Shikoh’s main work, the “Majhma-ul-Bahrain” (meeting of two oceans), is remembered as a text that was supposed to “unify” Islamic and Vedantic traditions, that was never a goal of the work. Dara was re-examining the traditional Islamic texts in the same way that Raghunatha Siromani was engaging with Navya Nyaya works; he was engaging in a discussion with the Islamic tradition and trying to use reason in a manner that refined pre-existing notions present in the doctrine. He himself stated that he was examining subjects not extensively discussed in traditional Islamic works and learning about how another religious tradition that confronted these ideas resolved them. Learning from them, looking at how the Islamic tradition may deal with those issues, like how RS looked at grey areas in the Metaphysics established by Gangesa, and trying to resolve them. There might be some overlap as well since Dara talked with Banaras Brahmin trained in Nyaya, Yashovijaya studied Nyaya in Ujjain and wrote commentaries on RS, as well as indirectly commented on Dara’s works sometime after his execution. 

These ideas further permeated into broader society in many ways. Like there was a style of rhetoric used by the Nyaya school called the Nyaya rhetoric, which, according to recent studies, suggests this style is used across all religious, caste, and ethnic groups in India. The emphasis on skepticism and inquiry was very common in the Mughal empire, as even European travellers noted how many administrators in the Mughal bureaucracy showed complex analytical tendencies. Even the emperors got in on this tendency, as they often default to a deeper emphasis on logic and reason as a pathway for the dispensation of legal judgments. I remember this story about how a few Rajput nobles argued with the ritualistic purity of deer meat and whether they could consume such objects, which was overheard by Shah Jahan. The emperor proceeded to give a complex explanation analytically by reconstructing a discussion using the concept of Halal. Outside of the imperial courts, you had multiple figures (religious and non-religious) actively questioning traditional norms and even the development of a sophisticated popular politics that actively challenged traditional power structures. 

The Decline of the pre-colonial alongside the rise of colonial 

Now, you might be wondering how any of this relates to modern political discussions. Well, see how pre-colonial, so it’s all going to go downhill from here. Many of RS’s writings had continued to develop after his time, as many philosophers, including European figures such as traveller Francis Bernier, translated these works into European languages. However, all of this came to a screeching halt once the Mughal empire fragments and many of these writers lost their patronage as the Sultans and Rajas lost control as political authority decayed, leading to a state of chaos and banditry. 

The British filled in the gap created by the fragmentation and went on to form a colonial state in South Asia, starting the British Raj. During the colonial period, many writers in Europe started to directly engage with the works of RS and the other philosophers; however, many of these new writers gradually started to dismiss these writings as inferior in contrast to the works of European scholars. RS and the Nyaya schools were largely dismissed as irrelevant, and the Brahmanical scholars were gradually absorbed into the colonial apparatus. The multiple famines caused by British oversight, specifically the ones in Bengal, the centre of Nyaya, naturally killed many people, including the Nyaya scholars, hence weakening their education centre and school of thought.

On the other hand, Dara’s works and his contribution didn’t do any better. For one, the works he wrote naturally got him killed by his brother for being a heretic as part of a succession dispute that was going on. Furthermore, it seems that discussing his work was somewhat limited during the period after his death, since Yashovijaya, who wrote his commentaries around the same time, didn’t mention Dara’s work explicitly but only discussed the main point of the discussion indirectly. At the same time, Yashovajaya himself is referred to as the last great philosopher of the Jain tradition.

A lot of colonial-era historiography emphasized the “fallen” nature of South Asian civilization, often beginning around the 12th century, and this shaped how many discussions about the region were conducted well into the modern era. If you open any modern book on Indian philosophy, they always stop around the 12th century and barely mention any writer that came afterwards, like Vallabha Acharya and his Suddhadvaita, or any South Asian Islamic writers. Another negative impact was how historiography greatly emphasized the “spiritual” nature of South Asia, presenting an orientalist interpretation of the land, usually through the lens of Mysticism and an overemphasis on the religious nature of society. Even today, many Western academics dispute whether South Asia had philosophy and often tie South Asian philosophy with the theology department. The last major influence was the concept of the White man’s burden of bringing (or rather “reviving” a stagnant) “civilization” to South Asia that centred Eurocentric philosophy, law, social norms, and broader practices.

The Post-Colonial Reality

The inevitable product of the colonial era is seen in the post-colonial period. Philosophy today is by default assumed to be associated with Western canonical works such as Plato or Socrates, not Raghunatha, Yashovijaya, or Dara, for that matter. This has an impact on political theory as a significant portion relies on philosophy as a base for understanding society, which resulted in a lot of the founding fathers using a lot of Eurocentric notions to create the political theory that served as the basis of most South Asian countries. What this created is a society whose ruling classes conceive of modern politics within a Western framework that centres Eurocentric cultural assumptions that don’t line up with the ground-level societal reality. Like a platinum statue with a head of bronze. The inevitable product is multiple blind spots in discussions that I vaguely discussed in another comment about paranoia and Indian left-wing politics that I will paste below:

“I understand the paranoia that you are talking about here, but I don’t think it’s exclusive to Hindus at all; rather, it seems to be an Indian thing. Like I have been in many online spaces with a wide variety of people ranging from Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Atheists, in addition to people from both the Left and Right. Almost a significant portion of people in these areas are oddly paranoid a lot of the time, to the extent that some of them have just started making conspiracy theories about the other groups. I wouldn’t say this is a phenomenon limited to South Asia, since the same things have happened in Western spaces as well. It’s not just a you thing, rather it is a lot more common than you can imagine. 

In terms of your college experiences, well, I can explain why you feel the same way by sharing a particular experience from my own college years. So, I studied at a Canadian university, and I happened to take a class on Afrofuturism in my 3rd year. It was an entire class that explicitly discussed racial politics in the context of science fiction with close references to Marxism, Feminism, Post Modernism, Intersectionality, and your generic progressive frameworks for analysis. Through that entire course, I got to experience how these theories were originally interpreted and used within the original Western cultural setting as their original author intended. A lot of these ideas, while useful in understanding society, are often discussed and written by authors who lived in European settings. There is always this underlying assumption of universality to a lot of concepts that are heavily Europe-centric in some sense. Like a lot of class discussions in Marxism centred quite heavily on how class works in the context of Early Modern Europe. 

India has completely different cultural structures that separate it from Europe, which means that a significant portion of those frameworks has to be changed in order to avoid making Eurocentric assumptions about a society that is non-European. For example, caste creates a situation where social, economic, and political capital aren’t shared by the same group, like how race in the West causes a singular group (Caucasian) to control all those capitals. In India, Vaishyas or Mercantile Jatis like Jains, Zoroastrians, Baniya, etc., control commerce, but that doesn’t translate to direct political power that agriculturalists like Yadav yield via electoral processes due to numerical superiority. 

Caste isn’t consistent either, since a Jaati dominant in one state might be marginalized in another state, hence there are a lot of contextual differences that you need to account for. However, most Indian left-leaning individuals fail at this since they take this framework whole without meaningful consideration of cultural differences. It’s kind of the basic reason why caste discussion purely centres around Brahmin vs Dalit, but doesn’t account as much about every other group in between, since these two varnas are the only consistent ones from one region to another. Like I have read Indian feminist blogs where the writer tries to transplant Western feminist ideas wholesale into an Indian context, and there is a visible mismatch since the West is a post-industrialized state, while India is still in the early stages of Industrialization. There is a very clear social and political reality that is different. 

Additionally, this creates another problem as well, since most of these authors do not use a cultural language that is comprehensible to ordinary Indians, as they wholesale transplanted these ideas without considering the audience’s background. Like India has a specific style of rhetoric called the Nyaya method that is quite commonly used here, but also extensively in a Western background. If you don’t consciously pay attention to rhetoric, it affects how audiences feel about the subject matter.

Another factor I should mention here would be the fact that Western academia is still somewhat haunted by the legacy of oriental historiography. Many of the early studies done about India were often done by British Orientalists who presented a notion of India being a static, unchanging society steeped in spiritualism. Even Karl Marx had a concept called “Asiatic mode of production”, which is a stupid concept that is steeped in orientalism. The only person who seemed to argue extensively against this tide was Max “one of the founders of sociology” Weber, who argued that things like caste were a product of material conditions rather than religion, which didn’t get popular until much later on. 

Even post-colonial historians who tried to decolonize Indian history ended up kind of being in the shadow of oriental scholarship since they rejected a lot of aspects (many that were bad) from orientalist scholars, but that involved rejecting the pre-colonial elements in these works. Think of how Hinduism is a name given by the colonial officials to the present-day religion. Many post-colonial scholars reject this identification since it was an orientalist category placed on a complex tradition. However, Hinduism was already crystallizing into a clear religion before the British, and by rejecting the label wholesale, you end up rejecting the pre-colonial aspect. None of this includes the underlying assumption that the non-Hindu groups were any different. There was a lot of fluidity between religious identities and grey areas that often got missed.

Now, Western academia has definitely improved a lot in more recent times, and academics have attempted to overcome these assumptions. However, most lay left or right leaning person has access to any of these works, and they mainly rely on older, trashier works that are deeply outdated. When I was at university, I was told that work that is more than 5-10 years old is outdated, and you have people referencing works from the 1800’s. God, this shit annoys me so much. The result is very obvious: you have a bunch of people referencing outdated material that isn’t relevant in academia today, and the legacy of colonial historiography has created a lot of questionable assumptions about Indian society.

This leads to an entirely missing perspective, which creates a social grey that makes an information desert. For example, Orientalist assumptions make it seem as if Hindus are the only ones who have caste in India, and other groups like Muslims lack or have a weakened form of caste. If you look at caste from a material rather than an orientalist perspective, this wouldn’t exist. This makes a blind spot for cross-religious caste tensions that implode in everyone’s face, and we don’t understand anything, leading to a lot of missing information and paranoia with things like “would so and so community cause this violence, what happens if they gain power, etc.” The paranoia comes from things not fully adding up or clear explanations.

Honestly, everything I said isn’t unique or new to me. I literally use intersectionality and other leftist ideas, but I accounted for orientalism, cultural differences, and used Indian philosophical ideas to explain it in a manner you can understand culturally. I explain things poorly, but I am presenting a new idea or giving nuance; rather, I am trying to bring a clearer picture hidden underneath the exterior appearance. Also, the new political polarization has only made so many of these problems worse, and even I am having a hard time keeping up with these discussions these days.”

Another impact that colonial era practice has on South Asia is the manner in which modernity as a concept is understood by people today. There is a strong association of modernity as being something that is representative of “Western” civilization in contrast to the traditional “Eastern” civilization, to the extent that people consider concepts such as queerness and gender equality as “Western” concepts that are being imported into and to an extent “ruining” the East. Even the notion of challenging traditional institutions is something that is an extension of westernization to such an extent that people use Western symbols and terminology to explain these ideas, like how people use the term LGBT instead of expanding and further developing pre-existing ideas or terms like Hijra to express those ideas in a culturally comprehensible manner to the lay population. Modernity is something that is imported from external land and forced onto the people, rather than being seen that has an organic historical basis in the land and was something that developed internally rather than externally. Like Yashovijay, RS, and Dara were working within their own orthodox, often conflicting, frameworks, yet organically came to similar ideas before European influence arrived. 

The result of all these practices is a political elite that tries to force a form of Eurocentric modernity that requires the ground-level population to change their entire outlook on life to obtain any form of advancement. This inevitability will lead to a backlash as people double down on their pre-existing hierarchical and discriminatory practices out of fear of losing their sense of identity and self. On the opposite end, people who can adopt an Eurocentric system of modernity find themselves losing their traditional ideas and being forced to navigate society using Western cultural assumptions that don’t line up with the social reality of the society they live within. They naturally feel isolated, suffering social loneliness, and attempt to return to a now weakening traditional identity, which puts them on a trajectory leading to ethnoreligious nationalism. 

A good example is the issue with open defecation in India. The main issue with defecation practices in India was often affected by two aspects: a material issue and a social issue. Materially, people didn’t have access to latrines to conduct their business, so the government compensated and decided to build latrines for people, which resulted in a reduction. However, this didn’t completely translate over since India still had a somewhat open defecation and even relapses into such practices, which was driven by social practices that had been embedded in the land over time, and one that didn’t account for. For the political class (both left and right), they mainly saw the latrine issue more from a material perspective and didn’t really understand the fact that there was an entire culture around this practice due to a normal cultural disconnect. People literally had actual toilets built into their homes, yet they still did open defecation because they weren’t provided a clear explanation that would work within their cultural framework.

The second example stems from this study (I have been trying to find for a long time on JSTOR, but I haven’t yet), which talked about the rise of Hindutva and urban practices. The author noted that a rise in urbanization led to a breakdown of traditional caste identities, which weakened over time, resulting in a loss of community, so everyone gradually turned to religious institutions. This strengthening of religious communities led to a gradual revivalism and the broader expansion of ethnoreligious nationalism that came alongside. The sense of identity loss and community that was foundational identity led them to other entities (I believe temples with connections to Hindutva groups like the RSS), closely affiliated with ethnoreligious nationalism, to fill in that void. 

The end of the organic form of pre-colonial modernity in South Asia and its replacement by a forced form of post-colonial modernity across the political spectrum has hindered the forward process, resulting in the region being very backwards. Compare this to East Asia, which was able to transition organically from the pre-modern to the post-modern since they weren’t as extensively ruled by colonial powers, and it mostly adapted aspects of the European Enlightenment alongside the aesthetic appearance without losing its sense of identity. Like Japan, “Westernized” during the Meiji reformation, but maintained a lot of their practices to the extent that modern scholars question the westernization narrative. Even though China had things like the cultural revolution still retains a lot of aspects from the pre-modern era, since communism was embedded within the pre-existing cultural landscape without fully displacing it to the extent that neo-Confucianism is seeing a revival there. Hence, the adage: Communism with Chinese characteristics. At the same time, it would be disingenuous to ignore a clear power dynamic between East Asia and the West that forced Eurocentric notions onto the region, but it didn’t elicit the same backlash as it had in South Asia, since a pre-existing form of modernity to guide it. Nonetheless, South Asia was never able to make that transition organically without the negative impact of colonialism and lost its own prototypical modernity on the way.

Bibliography:

Ganeri, Jonardon. “Raghunātha Śiromaṇi and the Origins of Modernity in India.” Nagoya Studies in Indian Culture and Buddhism: Sambhaea , 2013. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.18999/SAMBH.30.55. 

Ganeri, Jonardon. “The Cosmopolitan Vision of Yaśovijaya Gaṇi.” International Journal of Jaina Studies 4, no. 1 (2008): 1–11. 

Ganeri, Jonardon. The lost age of reason: Philosophy in early modern india 1450-1700. New York, New York : Oxford University Press, 2011. 

Takhelchangbam, Nilima D., Deepanshi Saxena, Divyata Sachan, Pankaj K. Jain, Sushil K. Shukla, Dhiraj K. Srivastava, and Prashant K. Bajpai. “Barriers of Household Toilet Utilization among Toilet Owners in a Rural Area of Northern India: An Analytical Cross-Sectional Study.” Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care 12, no. 9 (2023): 1984–90. https://doi.org/10.4103/jfmpc.jfmpc_515_23. 

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?

Hey folks, this will be my first article on Brown Pundits. Hope you guys enjoy it! Any recommendations regarding future topics, books, or just critique on the article itself will be greatly appreciated!

Tilak Devasher is a former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat Government of India. He is now known as a prolifically researcher on Pakistan in India. 10 years ago he began his scholarly journey with Pakistan: Courting the Abyss. As I was going through the book I wished there was a 10 year retrospective on his work which would help us determine how well his work has held with time. So, I’ve decided to undertake that task myself.

I will largely stray away from the sections involving historiography as that is not where my expertise lies. I will instead look to compare the numbers provided in the literature in order to determine the accuracy of the trajectories being prescribed in the book. Therefore, I will not be looking into the Ideology of Pakistan (Nazaria-i-Pakistan), The Muslim League or the Pakistan Movement. Due to this reason I will also not be commenting the origins of the Balochistan insurgency, or other provincial issues based on history.

The Army

The most stark feature of the army is the overrepresentation of Punjabis in the rank of its officers while its underrepresentation in the ranks of its troops. Along with the rising radicalism seen within not just the troops but among the officers as well. It would be unthinkable for the army chief of the nation to have prided himself on memorizing the quran just a few decades ago.

Shuja Nawaz notes a decline in the percentage of representation of soldiers from Punjab, between 1990 and 2005, from 63.86 per cent to 43.33 per cent, but that of the officers rising from 66.46 to 66.93 per cent. Within Punjab there was a shift to the more populous and emerging urban centres of central and even southern Punjab. These bigger cities and towns were also the traditional strongholds of the growing Islamist parties and conservatism, associated with the petit bourgeoisie. [1]

The Rise of Radicalism

An aspect of Pakistani radicalism on display is the differences between the Shia, and the Sunni (Deobandi). There has been spate of attacks on Shias by Sunnis in Pakistan most recent of which can be considered the bombing of a Mosque in Islamabad which killed at least 30 people an injured more than 169. These sentiments seem to be encouraged by a plurality of Muslims who believe that Shia are non-Muslims.

Ominously, a 2012 Pew Global Survey showed that 41 per cent of the respondents in Pakistan believed that Shias were non-Muslim. As sectarianism takes deeper roots, the question of what is true Islam has taken on greater salience. Since Shias are seen as diverging from mainstream (Sunni) Islam, their killing seems to attract less sympathy, adding to the impunity of the killers.

Madrasas

Madrasas pose several challenges. First, according to Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, ‘90 per cent of madrasas had no connection to terrorism, based on intelligence reports received’.[3] On another occasion he was at pains to point out that his government was not painting all seminaries with the same brush; he said that ‘around 10 per cent of madaris were involved in terror activities’.[4] This would imply that 10 per cent of the madrasas, where anywhere between 150,000 and 300,000 students study (estimates vary hugely about the total number of students studying in madrasas) could be potential terrorists. Even if 1 per cent of them were to become suicide bombers, there could well be around 3,000 potential suicide bombers waiting to blow themselves up. Even if they do not blow themselves up, the limited education they have received would make them dysfunctional members of society, prone to being incited to violence.

Madrasas are a direct consequence of a state lacking capacity to educate all its youth. Because of which many will flock to madrasas which are unqualified, often unregistered and incapable of handling a modern curriculum. The reality also is that due to radical madrasas going out of their way to avoid any kind of registration we have no idea how many madrasas are operating in Pakistan. According to estimates from a decade ago there are at least 35,000 Madrasas in total operating in Pakistan with around 26000 being registered serving around 2-3 million children.

In 2014, according to the interior ministry, there were at least 22,052 registered madrasas in Pakistan, but there was no record of the unregistered ones. According to a July 2015 report titled ‘The Madrassa Conundrum — The state of religious education in Pakistan’, the number of madrasas in Pakistan had crossed 35,000.[5]

However, the only contestation to the awfulness of the Madrasa system is that vast majority of violent terrorists come out of the public schooling system with little to no exposure to the Madrasa system. However, that would ignore the fact that less than 10% of Pakistan’s children are enrolled in Madrasas. Meaning there is a 4 times overrepresentation of Madrasa graduates in terrorism according to Christine Fair.

Christine Fair, for example, noted that while madrasas proved to be a hotbed for disseminating ideology, they were not a major source of militant recruitment. Of the 141 cases studied by her, less than a quarter, thirty-three of 141 ever attended theological schools. Of those thirty-three madrasa products, twenty-seven attended a madrasa for four or fewer years, and most also attended public schools. In contrast, the remaining eighty-two were well educated by Pakistani standards, at least a matriculate.6 Another survey of ten major jihadi groups revealed that of the over 15,000 people from Punjab who died in Afghanistan and Kashmir only 40 per cent had actually studied in madrasas.

Terrorism

Pakistan would do well to refer to the 2008 study of the Rand Corporation of 648 terrorist groups existing between 1968 and 2006. The study found that military operations resulted in the elimination of terrorist groups only in seven cases whereas 40 per cent of the groups were crushed through police and intelligence work and 43 per cent renounced militancy by joining political parties. Military force has rarely been the primary reason for the end of terrorist groups. While it acknowledged the importance of hard force, especially against large and well-organized groups, it also stressed a range of policy instruments including policing and intelligence networks.7 This element is largely absent in Pakistan.

The rise of Terrorism in Pakistan has been its most apparent feature in the recent past. The book correctly identifies the TTP as being a large issue in terrorism in the KPK. However, the book could’ve never expected the quantum of increases now visible across Pakistan because of the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Regardless the end to terrorism doesn’t seem to be in the cards in short-term as there has been no acknowledgement of the detriments of using non-state actors as state policy in Pakistan.

However, stopping the use of such elements as instruments of state policy will only be the start. It will have to be followed up by dismantling the infrastructure of jihad – the madrasa network, the training camps – and provision of jobs, after a period of re-educating the madrasa graduates and changing the mindset in government schools. This would mean massive investment in industry and agriculture to create jobs and in education to provide modern education. Pakistan would have to build a counter-narrative to join the battle against the Islamic hardliners and present a viable alternative. Unfortunately, Pakistan has yet to acknowledge, let alone deal with, the ideology of hatred and militancy that has been cultivated as state policy for over four decades. Given that for decades the Pakistan has viewed jihadis as an instrument of state policy against India, it will be extremely difficult to change that policy in the immediate future, or even medium term. With terrorism continuing to fester internally, Pakistan’s slide on the slippery road towards the abyss will hasten in the years to come.

WEEP Analysis

Water:

The availability of water is changing due to climate change, change in rainfall pattern, melting of glaciers, etc., as borne out by the trends of water availability. A statistical comparison of surface water availability between the last thirty and ten years points towards declining water flows. While average flows for the years 1978 to 2008 equal 140 MAF, the same for 1998–2008 is 128.52 MAF. In years without super floods (four out of five years), average flows have declined from 135.6 MAF during 1978–2008 to 123 MAF during 1998–2008. The highest river inflow in the last three decades was 172.10 MAF in 1977–78; the highest inflow since 1998 has been 152.69 MAF in 2006–07.8

The book doesn’t go into any details regarding the Indus Waters Treaty which has now been put into abeyance. I tend to agree with it on that fact, IWT remains only a minor issue for Pakistan. The real problem lies on the rapidly rising population which will inevitably mean water scarcity for most of its citizenry. My views on the IWT and the water situation in Pakistan is that it will be another drain on the foreign exchange reserves of the nation as imported grain, and produce will work to substitute the lack of water in the nation by importing it through goods which Pakistan will no longer be able to be self-sufficient on in the future. These ideas are better detailed in a substack article on virtual water.

However, this will inevitably mean a shift away from crops like sugarcane, rice, and a shift towards cash crops which demand a greater value in the international market which can be used to subsidize the inevitable grain imports. It would unironically mean Pakistan having to move away from a halal diet to a satvik diet for the sake of maintaining their foreign exchange reserves.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) measures the pressure on national water resources by calculating water withdrawal as a percentage of total renewable water resources (TRWR). Stresses are considered high if the TRWR value is above 25 per cent. Pakistan’s water pressure amounts to a staggering 74 per cent. This pressure is exorbitant even compared with neighbouring high-pressured countries, including India at 34 per cent and Afghanistan at 31 per cent.[9]

Education:

In absolute terms, half of the country’s out-of-school children – about 52 per cent – live in Punjab, 25 per cent in Sindh, 10 per cent in KPK, 7 per cent in Balochistan, and six per cent in other parts. In terms of proportion, Balochistan and Sindh are home to the highest proportion of out-of-school children. As many as 66 per cent of children in Balochistan and 51 per cent in Sindh are out of school, followed by Punjab and KPK with 47 per cent and 34 per cent out-of-school children respectively. Speaking in Quetta recently, the adviser to the Balochistan chief minister Sardar Raza Barrech said that 1.6 million children were out of school in the province, two-thirds of whom were girls.10

The Education situation in Pakistan is so grim that outside of Afghanistan and Sub-Saharan Africa it has no competition in youth literacy numbers. When the next generations of India, Bangladesh and Nepal will have almost 95% literacy rates, Pakistani Punjab doesn’t even reach 90%. Meaning even regional backwaters like Sylhet in Bangladesh are more literate than Pakistan’s most literate province.

Economy:

There are many grim statistics regarding Pakistan however, I want to remind everyone that even fundamentalist militaristic juntas in other parts of the world have better track records of economic management than Pakistan. The issues Pakistan faces are uniquely awful in that regard. In an already lengthy review if I could bring your attention to a specific set of paragraphs it would be the impact that being a security state has brought to Pakistan and the horrid future that holds for it if it remains determined on the trajectory towards becoming a ‘hard state’.

During its first three decades, Pakistan was a ‘development state’, wherein the state agenda pursued by all governments – civilian and military – was economic development. This period was marked by large-scale asset creation (dams, irrigation systems, highways, power plants, industrial complexes, factories, etc.). The ‘security state’ replaced the ‘development state’ in 1977 as a result of which economic development ceased to be the primary agenda of the state. The period was marked by a failure to invest in additional capital formation as well as lack of replacement investment in economic assets created earlier. Brief attempts to revive the ‘development state’ it in 1990s proved futile.11

This is proved statistically by the fact that during the 1970s, the real rate of growth of development expenditure was 21 per cent per annum and the rate of growth of defence expenditure was 2 per cent. During the 1980s, the rate of growth of development expenditure crashed sevenfold to 3 per cent and the rate of growth of defence expenditure escalated almost fivefold to 9 per cent. As a percentage of GDP, development expenditure has been falling from 9 per cent in the 1970s to 7.3 per cent in the 1980s to 4.7 per cent in the 1990s and to 3.5 per cent in the first decade of the millennium. Currently it is 3.2 per cent.

Population:

During the period, 1971–2015, around 8.77 million Pakistanis proceeded abroad for employment through the Bureau of Emigration. The main concentration of overseas Pakistanis was in the Middle East (49 per cent), Europe (28.2 per cent) and the United States of America (16 per cent). Manpower export continues to show an upward trend from 0.622 million in 2013 to 0.752 million in 2014 and 0.946 million in 2015. However, around half of the migrant workers are illiterate and unskilled workers and only 1.76 per cent workers are doing white-collar jobs. Among the skilled workers, drivers are in the highest number, followed by masons, carpenters and tailors.12

Many Pakistanis seem to talk about the ‘extinction-level birth rates’ of many Indian states in this forum. However, they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the demographic dividend. The demographic dividend only arises as a result of decline in birth rates which allows for the population to be able to afford higher impact consumption goods like a better car, air conditioning, etc which simulate the local economy. Pakistan hasn’t even gotten started with its demographic dividend as its birth rates remain sky high meaning most of its population will be unable to afford the rates of consumption necessary to stimulate the economy. It is likely that Pakistan won’t enter its demographic dividend until 2050 alongside most of Africa. India itself has only entered the demographic dividend after 2013.13

The other problem with an unrealized demographic dividend is that an unproductive population would pose huge pressures on resources like food, water and energy. A country that was near to being self-sufficient in food in the early 1980s has a food security issue today largely due to increased population. As noted earlier, agriculture accounts for about 20 per cent of Pakistan’s GDP and employs 60 per cent of its labour while 70 per cent of export revenue stems from agriculture. A decline in water availability would impact on food production at a time when the population is increasing, creating multiple crises. And the availability of water is declining and is below the 1,000 m³ /year per capita benchmark.

Conclusion:

Pakistan: Courting the Abyss remains a great read to gain some amount of background on the various elements of the multi-crisis Pakistan finds itself in. Most of the issues detailed in the book have either exacerbated or maintain their significance. The only issue with the book is that it is rather lengthy and goes into excessive detail regarding each topic which may be too much for many casual readers. Even I had to plumb through the depths of many articles to fairly evaluate this book according to present sources.

TL;DR If you wish to understand the basic history, ideology, economy, water management, education, foreign policy, and future of Pakistan in a single book then this is the book for you.

P.S. Thanks for reading the article. If you’ve had the chance to read all my commentary on this book please recommend me some other books on similar topics. I would welcome any opposing perspectives on the matter.

Sources:

[1] Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within, Karachi: OUP, 2008, pp. 570–71.

[2] Pervez Hoodbhoy, ‘Healing our sectarian divide’, Dawn, 21 February 2015.

[3] Nisar Ali, ‘Sympathisers, Supporters of Terrorists Live Among Us’, Dawn, 21 December 2014.

[4] ‘Madressah project: From reform to a registration drive’, Dawn, 29 December 2015.

[5] ‘Report says over 35,000 madrassas operating in Pakistan’, Pakistan Today, 31 July 2015.

[6] Cited in Hasan Mansoor, ‘Report on state of madressahs in Pakistan launched’, Dawn, 31 July 2015.

[7] Cited in Umar Cheema, ‘Not military but police-agencies cooperation needed to fix terrorists’, The News, 10 January 2015.

[8] Kaiser Bengali, ‘Water Management under Constraints: The Need for a Paradigm Shift’, in Michael Kugelman and Robert M. Hathaway (eds), op. cit., p. 48.

[9] FAO, AQUASTAT database, 2013, cited in Daanish Mustafa, Majed Akhter, and Natalie Nasrallah (eds), op. cit, p. 6.

[10] ‘Education crisis’, editorial, , 19 December 2015.

[11] Kaiser Bengali, ‘Proposed Agenda for Sustained Economic Revival’, Karachi: Social Policy and Development Centre, September 2013.

[12] Economic Survey 2015–16. Ministry of Finance, Government of Pakistan.

[13]Steven Brakman & Tristan Kohl & Charles van Marrewijk, 2024. “Demography and Income in the 21st Century: A Long-Run Perspective,” CESifo Working Paper Series 11108, CESifo.