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.

One of my guilty pleasures is that I read police procedurals to relax. Though they are certainly not high art, these novels are paradoxically comforting– despite the violence they contain– since the reader knows that the mystery will be solved in the end. This perhaps explains why detective stories–of which police procedurals are a subgenre– continue to be one of the most popular literary genres. Agatha Christie, for example, is one of the world’s bestselling authors.

Sometime during the pandemic, I discovered Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano mysteries. At a time when we were all stuck at home, these novels allowed me to travel vicariously to Sicily. The books are full of local color. In particular–since Inspector Montalbano is a gourmand– they are full of descriptions of local cuisine.

The series often covers the connections between crime and politics–the Mafia is often involved in the plots. In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, Camilleri spoke about how he combined the detective novel with social commentary. He said: “In many crime novels, the events seem completely detached from the economic, political and social context in which they occur… In my books, I deliberately decided to smuggle into a detective novel a critical commentary on my times. This also allowed me to show the progression and evolution in the character of Montalbano”.

The books do have some weaknesses. While recently re-reading them, I was struck by the relative lack of female characters. Montalbano doesn’t have any female colleagues who assist him with his investigations. This is a major difference between these books and Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti novels for example–though even in the Brunetti books the main female colleague is a secretary. Many of the female characters who do appear are depicted in a sexualized manner. The most prominent female character is Montalbano’s longtime girlfriend Livia who mostly fights with him and serves as a love interest. This lack of female characters perhaps reflects the male bias of the police procedural genre.

Another weakness of the books is that the endings sometimes seem abrupt. Unlike Agatha Christie’s novels where the clues are left in a meticulous manner and the reader can often go back after finishing the novel and see how the solution was obvious, the Montalbano novels often turn on things suddenly falling in place for Montalbano. At least I couldn’t often see how he came to the particular conclusion he did.

I must also credit Stephen Sartarelli who has translated all the novels into English. The novels are very readable in English. Sartarelli particularly does an excellent job at helping the reader distinguish between those characters speaking in standard Italian and those speaking in Sicilian dialect.

In conclusion, I would highly recommend the Inspector Montalbano mysteries to those seeking an entertaining read which will also help them to learn about the social and political background of Sicily. These novels do for Sicily what the Guido Brunetti novels do for Venice.

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

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

However there is one C that has curdled: Cinema.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Budget season is here. Everyone is presenting their two cents on the way out of the IMF’s vicious trap (with the latest iteration imposing 105 compliance requirements, including 75 ‘structural conditionalities’), solutions to kill all tax ills, a panacea for the power sector miscarriages, a lethal shovel for the trade deficit serpent, development-centric economic prescriptions to counter pro-cyclical meandering and whatnot.

And thanks to ChatGPT and Google NotebookLM, Facebook and LinkedIn are brimming with macroeconomic commentaries and infographics. Resplendent seminars are being organised, with the same slides but for the new fiscal year, to gauge the impending behemoth. Newspapers, especially oped sections, are the sweet spot for policymakers and even ex-ministers. One may wonder where the magical healing potion was when they were orchestrating the national financial (mis)management. Maybe it is only after defenestration that one gets hold of the knowledge that the job required in the first place.

The typical approach in the prevailing discourse is to perform horizontal and vertical analyses. The former is a trend analysis; for instance, since 2007-08, current and development expenditures of our governments have increased by 1007 per cent and 937 per cent, respectively. The latter works by dividing a certain expenditure, let’s say military expense, by the total budget; this works as a classifier, with an ideological baggage, either accepting or rejecting the line item. And then, the cliche sermon ends with ‘the way forward’, presenting obvious things: cut tax rates, grow the tax base, cut current expenditure, boost development expenditure, rationalise subsidies, produce more, import less, and so on.

At the moment, I am sick and tired of these mantras. And it’s not that I am a sadist who wants Pakistan to fail economically. Rather, what irks is simple: if we know the deliverance already, why are we not implementing it? Either those in power don’t read newspapers or the roadmaps, which are often presented by think tanks to incumbent ministers by hand, or don’t scroll through social media, which of course is almost impossible in this day and age – or they are well versed in all this, but they don’t want to follow it due to the absence of incentives for such tiring endeavours.

Then, what we should focus on, rather than debating constantly sans dialogue, is to, somehow, cure the infamous phenomena of elite capture, which, according to PIDE, works both as a situation in which the elites shape development processes according to their own priorities and as a process in which the powerful elites skim resources intended for the bottom and define policies in a way that protects their own interests. This translates into the financial morass reflected in our budgets and reports, and a development deficit that is borne with excruciating pain by paupers.

Our economy revolves around rents and rent-seekers; this is a colonial way of governance, institutionalised through bureaucratic controls, legal frameworks and economic policies designed to serve colonial interests. Unfortunately, even today, this remains the modus operandi of our governments. Some features of the prevailing economic edifice include: regulatory capture and political control: policy configured by powerful groups who sustain discretionary influence over institutions and economic rules; rent-seeking and distorted incentives: access-based gains dominate, making lobbying and connections more rewarding than productivity; selective taxation: offering exemptions, evasions, and ineffective rates; trade protection and favourable prices: subsidies that do not promote efficiency and instead sustain protected sectors through repeated support.

This involves, on the one hand, favourable pricing formulas, strong protective barriers and conditions that allow cartels and monopolies to operate easily, and, on the other hand, convenient access to cheaper inputs; and debt dependence and property-led accumulation: external financing smooths the BOP crises while domestic wealth concentrates in land and low-productivity assets rather than productive investment.

Now, one may assess exactly how the hackneyed roadmaps fix this, ad capite ad calcem. In the short run, because of lender-imposed fiscal austerity, numbers may improve, but the very economic structure – the incentive structure that promotes the capture of capital (economic, political, cultural) by those in positions of authority – remains the same. And so, this status quo will inevitably lead to social inequity, laggard governance, widespread corruption, the proliferation of patronage networks and the limitation of mobility of the marginalised, again and again.

Lastly, considering the foregoing, some reflections are indispensable: what exactly is the point of fudging the figures, visualising infographics, commencing dazzling seminars and writing all these commentaries, opeds and reports without questioning the very fundamental axis of the political economy? Is there any foundational rethinking of economics year on year, apart from the updated numbers? Does it make sense to exude analyses to those who have permanent employees, graduated from top economic schools, and who, unequivocally, don’t care?

Are we really that stupid to assume that a leopard will change its spots while we continue to feed it?

Since there has been some recent discussion of Hyderabad Deccan here, I am sharing this book review from DAWN of Arslan Athar’s debut novel Forty Days of Mourning. 

Note: Like everyone else these days, Arslan also has a Substack.   He is a Lahore-based writer. 

Hyderabad Deccan is not merely a setting in this novel. It is a living, breathing presence that shapes the people who inhabit it and the events that unfold. Once a princely state rich in terms of material wealth and cultural plurality, Hyderabad carried a distinct identity that rarely finds adequate representation in narratives of colonial India. Discussions around the British Raj and Partition often reduce history to binaries, and Hyderabad’s nuanced past is frequently overlooked. Athar’s novel resists this erasure with care and precision.

And:

As pressure from the newly formed Indian state increases, Hyderabad’s fragile independence begins to crack. The story follows this slow unravelling, moving from hope and denial to violence, loss and reckoning, ending with the state’s forced integration and the collective grief of a world that disappears almost overnight.

As the wife of a high-ranking army officer, Saleema moves through the city’s elite circles, aware of every whisper of political tension, every shifting alliance. But as the Nizam’s Hyderabad faces the inevitability of annexation, Saleema realises that neither status nor cunning can fully shield her, and the choices she makes ripple through both her personal life and the crumbling world around her.

In an interview with newinbooks.com, Athar notes:

My father’s family is originally from Hyderabad Deccan. However, at the time of the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent and the subsequent annexation of the Princely State of Hyderabad, the family moved. In their new home, Pakistan, they never really talked about that time of turmoil. I only found out about it because of an assignment, and learning about the annexation became the impetus for this novel. From all the research about the time, the character of Saleema was born, and the story blossomed from there!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to Agni for bringing this to our attention.  I remember reading Persepolis years ago and it definitely does provide a different perspective on the Iranian Revolution. 

From CNN:

French-Iranian artist and activist Marjane Satrapi, whose graphic novel “Persepolis” brought home the struggle of the Iranian people to millions around the world, has died. She was 56.

A statement from the Élysée Palace announcing her death Thursday lauded Satrapi’s work, saying her work “captivated a global audience.”

“Her passing marks the loss of a leading figure in French culture and an artist deeply committed to freedom, whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international acclaim,” the Élysée said.

And:

Satrapi’s work spanned numerous graphic novels – which she preferred to call “comic books” and films. In 2019, she directed “Radioactive,” a British biographical drama film starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie.

But she was also an outspoken critic of Iran’s ruling establishment and a prominent supporter of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement that emerged after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody in 2022.

Iranian women human rights group, the Narges Foundation described Satrapi as “a fearless advocate for feminism, women’s rights” and as someone who “champion(ed) the struggles and resilience of Iranian women.”

I’m sharing this review that was originally published in 2020. After the victorious Taliban takeover of Kabul on August 15, 2021 and President Ghani’s flight from the country, Dalrymple’s prediction that the American Occupation would end up handing power to the same regime they set out to destroy seems eerily prescient.  This type of book would make a good possibility for BP Book Club. 

Early in Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan (Bloomsbury 2013), William Dalrymple quotes Mehrab Khan’s (the Khan of Kalat) remark to the British diplomat and adventurer Alexander Burnes: “You have brought an army into [Afghanistan] but how do you propose to take it out again?” (Dalrymple 161). As the British and subsequent foreign powers would find out, it is extremely difficult to successfully withdraw from Afghanistan. It has now been nearly two decades since the current US-led invasion began in 2001 and President Trump is promising to extensively draw down the presence of US troops, after having signed a deal with the Taliban–the regime that the US went to war to remove. In such a context, Dalrymple’s account of the First Anglo-Afghan War remains extremely relevant.

Return of a King takes its title from the attempt of the British to put Shah Shuja—the grandson of Ahmad Shah Abdali, the founder of modern Afghanistan — back on the throne after an exile of over thirty years in British India. This attempt took place in the context of the Great Game–the British-Russian rivalry for control over Central Asia. The British feared that Dost Mohammad Khan, who had usurped power from Shah Shuja, was pro-Russian and hence decided that he needed to be replaced with Shuja, whom they would use as a puppet leader. While they succeeded in removing Dost Mohammad and giving the crown to Shuja, they could not have anticipated the resistance that they would face.

The bulk of the book describes the war in an extremely detailed fashion. Dalrymple’s style is novelistic and makes the reader feel that they are actually a witness to events as they occur. For example, here is the description of the only survivor of the disastrous retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad:

That night lamps were raised on the gates of Jalalabad and bugles blown to guide in any last stragglers, but none limped in. ‘ A strong wind was blowing from the south, which sent the sound of the bugles all over the town,’ remembered Captain Thomas Seaton, ‘The terrible wailing sound of those bugles I will never forget. It was a dirge for our slaughtered soldiers and, heard all through the night, it had an inexpressibly mournful and depressing effect. Dr Brydon’s tale struck horror into the hearts of all who heard it… The whole army had been destroyed, one man alone escaping to tell the fearful tale ( 387).

The retreat from Kabul was followed by an Army of Retribution which set out to punish the Afghans. After retaking Kabul, this army burned large parts of the city. Dalrymple writes:

… as well as destroying the empty shops and houses of their supposed enemies, the marauding British troops also committed what today would be classified as war crimes against their Qizilbash and Hindu allies. Indeed the peaceable Kabul Hindu trading community that had for centuries survived arbitrary arrests and torture by a whole variety of Afghan rulers bent on extorting their money was wiped out in just forty-eight hours by the depredations of the British, as an official inquiry later acknowledged (460)

As for Shah Shuja, he not only lost his throne but ended up assassinated, not for any fault of his own but due to his loyalty to the British. Dalrymple writes:

Shuja was always unusual for his honourable loyalty to his allies and his faithfulness to his agreements, in a region not known for either… He saw himself as the true heir to a highly cultured Persian-speaking Safavid and Timurid civilisation, and as well as writing fine verse and prose himself was a generous patron to poets and scholars… His vision of his kingdom was one which saw it not as an isolated and mountainous backwater but instead as tied by alliances to a wider world, and which through the common Persianate civilisation was diplomatically, culturally and economically integrated with the other countries of the region. It was sadly not a vision that shows much sign, even today, of being realised, though the idea has never completely died (422-23).

The First Anglo-Afghan War ended with Dost Mohammad — the very ruler that the British had gone to war to depose — back on the throne. His descendants would continue to rule Afghanistan until the end of the monarchy in the 1970s. The war thus serves as a striking example of colonial hubris. In his “Author’s Note”, Dalrymple explicitly compares this British Occupation to the current American one:

Nevertheless due to the continuities of the region’s topography, economy, religious aspirations and social fabric, the failures of 170 years ago do still hold important warnings for us today. It is still not too late to learn some lessons from the mistakes of the British in 1842. Otherwise, the west’s fourth war in the country looks certain to end with as few political gains as the first three, and like them to terminate in an embarrassing withdrawal after a humiliating defeat, with Afghanistan yet again left in tribal chaos and quite possibly ruled by the same government which the war was originally fought to overthrow (493).

In 2020, as the US withdraws after making a deal with the Taliban and intra-Afghan negotiations are occurring on a new power-sharing arrangement which may herald a significant role for the Taliban, Dalrymple’s account of the First Anglo-Afghan War continues to hold important lessons for those of us in the region as well as for the wider international community. It is a deeply engaging and important work of historical research.