see: Bharat Needs No Validation

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

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

Alias

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

“Writing”

0M-3 made a deliberately Islamophobic comment (now deleted) claiming the pages of the Holy Quran were copied (or something to that effect). That is just a trashy comment, and it is palpably untrue. The quality of Arabic verse set a standard that helped carry Arabic into the top five languages on earth. The Holy Quran needs deep study, and I dislike uninformed comments on any subject, particularly those that are sensitive or complex.

The point is that theology is complex. Under no circumstances are we going to have simplified, random flame threads on complex subjects. This is not a throttling of free speech. Free speech is also intelligent.

For instance girmit’s comment on the Wodeyars set the high watermark in the 200+ comments (more than half deleted) that happened over the last 24-36 hours.

Equity, not equality

Brown Pundits doesn’t need to be fair. It doesn’t need to be equal. It needs to have equity. That is the difference. Bharat is an equitable notion, since Dharma, as Agni points out, has space and capacity for all.

Here is what equity means in practice. Even if we tilt Saffron; it doesn’t mean we don’t respect interrogation. Q’s comment to 0M’s post was excellent and I agree with most of it; Pakistan, to her credit, is an extremely deft diplomatic and strategic player. The visit to Israel precisely prior to the failed Iran war isn’t a masterstroke per se.

Pakistan

Alas however Pakistan is a third-rate peripheral power. Maybe in some years it plays itself up to second-rate, because as a purely strategic, diplomatic and military actor Pakistan has always been formidable.

I do have much sympathy with 0M’s view that the British envisaged Pakistan for exactly what it became: not the shaheen Allama promised, but a cheel on India’s shoulder, circling, harrying, snatching what it can, never stooping like a falcon.

I hate to say this, because there is so much capacity in that valley. It is one of the richest in the world. Punjab is exceptionally rich. The northern areas are very beautiful. Karachi could have been the Singapore of the Arabian Sea. Balochistan has the minerals, the Frontier has the ruggedness of its terrain, and Peshawar to Kabul was once an axis of its own. The tragedy of the cheel is that it has falcon country and flies it like a scavenger.

En Fin

However the blog has shifted over fifteen years. Pakistan has dipped in significance while India has soared in the sun. Even with mistakes made by India; its fundamental rise and promise seems assured, notwithstanding any unforeseen disasters (even the CJP is careful not to stoke chaos).

I can understand that for Kabir, who has been with us for at least a decade, that shift is real, and it is hard. Blogs can do that since we are not bound to a written constitution like India is to her secularism.

After all the pointless flame wars on this website I wanted to tackle some less divisive topics, therefore I have decided to create a short post discussing the failure of alliance structures in the Middle East (including Pakistan going by the World Bank definition). The alliances we will actually look at being the METO/CENTO/Baghdad Pact, SEATO, and the two recent pacts between Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan with Turkey being the most recent entrant.

(P.S. XTM can you add an Active Author Category for me.)

Colonial Legacies

The borders of the Middle East have been drawn rather unnaturally like almost any decolonized part of the world. However, the region has been plagued with conflict since almost time immemorial. The reality of national border is that creating perfect borders according to the distribution of populations is a fraught task which is bound to lead to an almost unending series of wars. Therefore, regardless of colonialism the borders of a nation state will create frictions with other states and blaming Mortimer Durand, Mark Sykes, François Georges-Picot and myriad other colonial era diplomats will simply derail the discussion beyond its scope. I acknowledge their faults contributing to the unstable nature of many states in the region however do not think of them as the root cause for the instability.

Failure of CENTO/METO/Baghdad Pact

CENTO initially started in 1955 as the Baghdad Pact between Turkey and Iraq as a way of keeping the Soviet Union out of the Middle East. In time it admitted the UK which occupied several territories in the Middle East shortly after. Slowly the Alliance expanded to house Iran, and Pakistan as well.

The reason for its failure are almost multiple however the root cause seems to always end up being the infighting and instability endemic to the Middle East. The grouping became disillusioned when Pakistan tried to invoke some help during the 1965 and 1971 wars against India. Aid was provided by the organization’s members in individual capacities however it was all short of actually becoming a cobelligerent in the conflict against India. Another point of friction became the Turkish invasion of Cyprus which led to the UK withdrawing from the alliance.

The final nail in its coffin was the Iranian Revolution of 1979 which sealed its fate as in short order Iran, Pakistan, UK and Turkey all exited the alliance structure.

Military Failure of SEATO

SEATO was created for a similar objective to CENTO as anti-communist, anti-Soviet Pact headed by Western Powers to guard South East Asian colonies. However, in comparison to CENTO it involved a much larger colonial overhang. Its main members were Australia, US, UK, France, Pakistan, and Thailand. Unlike CENTO which vanished away in a blaze of glory no one single event could be identified which ended SEATO but instead a culmination of events led to its demise.

In 1971 Pakistan lost its Eastern Province which became Bangladesh. Therefore, it lost any weight it might’ve had in South East Asia making the Pact beyond its scope. It officially withdrew from the pact in 1973. Soon after which France withdrew from the Pact due to its loss in Vietnam. This led to the pact later being dissolved in 1977.

Military Failure of Saudi-Pakistan Pact (SMDA)

The Saudi-Pakistan Pact was signed on 7 September 2025. It began as a way for the two nations to come to each other’s defense using collective security. Any attack on one nation would be considered as an attack against both. The pact was initially a reaction to the Israeli bombing of Qatar which killed several Hamas leaders.

The pact was tested during the Pakistani-Afghan conflict in the same year. This conflict showed the unequal nature of this treaty where the Pakistani border hostility would be replied to by the Saudi govt with call of peace. While, any hostility against the Saudis by Iran or any of its proxies would end up requiring the deployment of Pakistani troops and equipment on Saudi soil as at least a show of force if not for actual war fighting.

The Inevitable Failure of the Mecca Defense Pact

The Saudi-Pakistan pact was recently extended into a Trilateral Pact on 7th August 2026 to include Turkey into the mix. The alliance seems to mimic the natural expansion of bilateral alliance into a multilateral alliance as seen in CENTO. However, the alliance has already been test in around 48 hours of its signing by the Houthis in Yemen who have decided to fire on Saudi infrastructure.

Although the Pact remains nominally anti-Israeli in nature, the real enemy it wishes to triangulate against is Iran. It has also been called a Sunni NATO or an Islamic NATO. Although other organizations have had similar monikers but they all have had the same failing.

The Faults in Collective Defense

To demonstrate the inherently uncertain and unreliable nature of collective defense I shall quote the Article 5 from NATO as none of the treaties signed between Saudi Arabia-Pakistan-Turkey are currently publicly available.

Article 5

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security .

Even Article 5 the gold standard for collective defense relies more upon the collective faith the nations place upon it rather than any firm guarantee that an attack on one nation shall be an attack on all. As nations are free to pursue actions they deem fit, this may include use of the armed forces however it doesn’t necessarily have to which means in a difficult situation such an alliance structure lacks the binding nature to be relied upon. Furthermore, it forces no actions of economic coercion on any of the signatories against the nations which triggers Article 5.

The death nail for any military expectations from this alliance has been that it is clearly created to counter Iran’s increasing influence on the Middle East. Although, none of the nations can even clearly state this in any of their statements. Out of the 3 signatories of the treaty only Pakistan directly borders Iran and it will take any and all actions necessary to stay out of a direct conflict with Iran. To the point where it will completely abandon its ally Saudi Arabia to act as an intermediary or mediator in the Saudi conflict against Iran. This is simply due to the strategic calculus of already being burdened by 2 hostile fronts and not being able to afford a 3rd hostile front for Pakistan.

Although the three nations may tout their varying advantages as bringing different strengths to the table the real weakness it displays is an inherent inability to operate along with each other. Turkey is a NATO member therefore has at least some degree of standardization in its equipment along with Saudi Arabia which procures most of its equipment from the US as well. However, a large portion of Pakistani equipment originates from China which is bound to not play well when forced to operate with almost entirely NATO compatible armies. Furthermore, the economic differences between the three nations will make further military integration difficult beyond some basic drone integration.

Regardless, I do not believe that Pakistan will be the reason for the failure of the Mecca Pact. Historically speaking the reasons for the destruction of such pacts is due to Revolution in a signatory, the liberation of a signatory’s territories, and inherently diverging strategic interests of all signatory nations. In a long enough timeline the strategic misalignments between Turkey and Saudi Arabia will be reason enough to tear this alliance of convenience apart.

Perhaps. But the term has travelled before. In 1860 Oliver Wendell Holmes borrowed it for “the Brahmin caste of New England,” christening what became known as the Boston Brahmin: an untitled Protestant aristocracy, not a sacred thread in sight.

I want to repatriate the word because it illuminates two arguments that at first seem unrelated: who enters India’s apex elite, and who is permitted to belong to India without proving it.

The old metropolitan order administered admission quietly: assimilation, presentation, marriage. The new Hindu order increasingly administers national belonging aloud: Jai Hind, Vande Mataram, the flag, Bharat Mata ki Jai. The first produced the Lutyens Brahmin. This harder question for the Indian Muslim: is the new loyalty test merely explicit where the old one was hidden, or has belonging itself been repriced?

As Agni pointed out, the Brahmin I mean is the Brahmin of Boston: an apex caste defined by class, not gotra. A Shudra can join it. An OBC can. A Muslim can. In India it has its L.A.B. chapters, Lutyens, Academic, Bollywood, each commanding a sector and recruiting on much the same terms: assimilation, presentation, marriage. The furore over nepotism in Bollywood was, in part, a quarrel over precisely this caste; further reading includes The Bollywood caste, Bollywood, Brahmins, Parsis & WASPs, The Rise of the Quarter-breeds in Bollywood.

The Persistence of Elites

Marriage is the pump of elite reproduction. Talent and beauty marry up, status marries status, and caste reproduces itself as class while insisting it no longer exists.

Gregory Clark measured the persistence. In The Son Also Rises he followed surnames as a geologist follows isotopes: Norman names such as Darcy, Percy and Mandeville remaining disproportionately represented at Oxford and Cambridge centuries after Hastings; samurai surnames persisting in Japan’s professions after the stipends disappeared; and, nearest to home, Kulin Brahmin surnames, Mukherjee, Banerjee, Chatterjee, remaining disproportionately represented among Calcutta’s physicians through Permanent Settlement, Partition and the Left Front.

Clark’s persistence coefficient is around 0.75 per generation, and the scandal is how little institutions seem to move it. Sweden, with free universities and the Folkhemmet, produces surprisingly similar persistence. Regimes redistribute income. They barely dent descent.

Democracy, it turns out, demands hierarchy much as a republic demands an aristocracy; the constitutional question is only ever whether the aristocracy is named. I made the case last week for restoring it.

The Rivalry of Cousins

The suave metropolitan and the provincial forward caste are therefore related, but they do not occupy the same position.

Reservations are not a conspiracy; they are part of the settlement by which a dominant order keeps the wider society invested in the system. But the price is not paid evenly. The metropolitan elite possesses exit options, foreign education, private institutions, lateral re-entry, that can route its richest children around the most contested bottlenecks. The provincial cousin more often meets the system at the counter. What stabilises the bargain below can therefore radicalise the near-rival beside.

That is why kith and kin matters. Wars between strangers are merely wars; it takes cousins to make one civil. And it suggests an answer to the question the earlier piece left hanging: why might the drawing room admit the socially distant aspirant more readily than the provincial cousin?

Because distance is the safety. The Shudra or Muslim son-in-law stands, call it three or four generations of intermarriage, from the full elite vector; he is a client for a generation, grateful, dependent, an ornament to the letterhead. The Kanyakubja cousin with the right surname and the right presentation could complete the journey in a single season, which makes him not a recruit but a rival. The distant recruit can be assimilated. The near-rival must be displaced.

The drawing room welcomes grateful converts more easily than clunky cousins.

The Scribes

DP is apparently a Karana, a scribal caste (h/t formerly brown), and the quarrel between scribes and priests over the pen is old. In the Gangetic plain the Kayasthas supplied one great scribal tradition; in much of the south Brahmins themselves filled administrative and clerical roles.

The Raj accelerated a merger. As English displaced Persian at the commanding heights of administration, those who mastered the new language of rule, Brahmin, Kayastha, Karana, bhadralok of whatever thread, were increasingly compounded into an apex caste of the pen. The Indian Boston Brahmin is an heir to that merger.

The Complexion of the Elite

This is why counting literal Brahmins misses the point. Indosaurus’s numbers are all presumably correct, three Brahmin chief ministers in thirty-one, Parsi houses atop the business tables, the country’s most powerful politician an OBC, and every one of them is central to the argument rather than fatal to it.

The Boston Brahmin need not stand for election. He may be the other man doing the counting.

Nor are the great Parsi houses counterexamples. Nothing in India is more Boston than a Tata: institutions, philanthropy, English, club, permanence. And Modi’s rise is the civil war’s scoreboard: the provincial revolt captured the ballot while much of the old apex caste retained the drawing room.

The Price of Entry

The private sector matters because it is one of the great remaining mechanisms of elite reproduction. For a country aspiring to sustained double-digit growth, the question is not simply how wealth is divided but whether wealth compounds outward, into productivity, health, capability and prosperity, or pools behind barriers to entry.

Monopoly is capitalism after competition has been switched off. In a genuinely contested market, the Ambanis might be worth less and India more. The fortune and the moat are not the same asset; it is the moat that imposes the social cost. The aristocracy question and the antitrust question are therefore versions of the same question: who may enter, and at what price?

The Muslims of India

The provincial revolt that challenged the old drawing room did not abolish admissions. It opened another admissions office. The Lutyens Brahmin tracked entry silently: assimilation, presentation, marriage. The shakha increasingly determines who actually belongs out loud.

The old Muslim loyalty test was Partition; hereditary, silent and impossible to discharge. It asked what your grandfather’s community chose in 1947, a question no living citizen can answer for himself. No patriotic recitation cleared it; no conduct fully amortised it. That was the Grundnorm in the strict sense: beneath the formal rules and therefore difficult even to contest.

The new exam differs in one important respect. It is spoken. And because it is spoken, it can be passed. or failed.

How to Pass

Jai Hind. Vande Mataram. Respect for the flag. Bharat Mata ki Jai. For better or worse, and I mean both halves,  these increasingly function as tests of national belonging. The old test asked whether you left or stayed circa 1947 and could never be satisfied. The new one asks what you will say today, in public, on your feet. That distinction is not trivial.

The Two-Stanza Compromise

Vande Mataram itself records an earlier attempt to price the test fairly. In 1937 the Congress Working Committee, after consultation including Tagore, restricted official use to the first two stanzas; retaining the land, waters and orchards while avoiding the later identification of the Mother with the goddess. The point was precisely to make a national song singable by a Muslim citizen without requiring idolatry.

At the height of the national movement, the movement adjusted the test to fit the citizen. The present dispensation risks reversing the polarity. Bharat Mata ki Jai restores the personified Mother that the earlier compromise had deliberately bracketed. The old question therefore returns: does the citizen stretch to fit the test, or does the Republic adjust the test so that theological conscience and national loyalty need not collide?

The Map of Exemptions

Every loyalty test has exemptions, and the exemptions reveal where power lies. The Sikh case is the clearest. The Jat Sikh defines his Indianness with a confidence furnished by land, Khalsa, military history and Punjab itself. The farmers’ agitation demonstrated the practical limits of a hegemon confronting a mobilised regional identity on terrain it cannot easily dominate. The litmus test is not administered in Amritsar.

Tamil Nadu supplies the other great counterexample. Dravidianism is a rival grammar of belonging old enough to print its own papers. Vijay took power while explicitly naming the BJP as an ideological opponent and invoking Anna and Periyar. Where the regional grammar is strong enough, the national litmus test simply fails to become the dominant currency; it is not administered in Madurai either.

The Bengal Demonstration

Bengal is the opposite case. The BJP took 207 of the state’s 294 seats this May, ending fifteen years of Trinamool rule amid turnout above ninety-three per cent, with Suvendu Adhikari taking Bhabanipur; Mamata Banerjee’s own seat.

The significance exceeds one election. Hindutva has demonstrated to enormous numbers of Hindus that religious identity can be politically consolidated and, once consolidated, can govern. That may prove one of the era’s largest legacies. The loyalty tests are its civic liturgy.

Filing for Antecedents

The result produces a stranger prediction: minorities may increasingly discover that Hindu antecedence carries value not merely as social genealogy but as collateral against anti-nationalism.

The genealogy itself is old. Syrian Christians have long preserved traditions of Namboodiri descent; Muslim Rajputs retained Rajput identities after conversion. Those claims historically purchased lineage, locality or status.

The new value is political. A Hindu antecedent can increasingly function as evidence that conversion did not constitute civilizational departure.

Christians are well positioned for this almost without trying: Hindu names, local forms of shrine and devotion, deep vernacular embedding, and a religious affiliation tied to the same Western world with which the Indian state itself seeks strategic intimacy.

Neo-Buddhists possess a different but adjacent case. Ambedkar’s conversion was an intra-Indian revolt carried out in constitutional language. Nobody can plausibly mistake Navayana for foreign civilizational allegiance.

Citizens or Converts

And then comes the community for whom the price is highest. Indian Muslims stand apart, proudly, in theology and self-understanding. Tawhid does not sing naturally to a personified Mother, and a community with any dignity cannot be expected to manufacture antecedents or devotional gestures on command.

The supposedly passable audit is therefore not equally priced: what it prices at a shrug for the Christian and a footnote for the Buddhist, it prices at a theological negotiation for the Muslim. It is the negotiation of 1937 reopened, except that the Saffron side now holds the gavel.

Whether the new dispensation accepts something analogous to the two-stanza compromise, or instead demands the whole hymn, is therefore one of the most revealing questions in Indian public life.

I do not claim that the spoken test is fair. I claim that it is spoken and I reflexively follow it (Calvin is given free hand because he is Calvin not Kaleem; DP is a Kayasth not a Sayyid). And what is spoken can be answered, contested, repriced; and, as 1937 demonstrated, amended.

It may even become the Republic’s next constitution of manners: drafted not in Delhi alone, but in the arguments Indians, who form the dominant core of the Indian Subcontinent (with its constituent 7-10 nations), have about who belongs and what belonging requires.

In DP’s telling India is down to three varnas: the Baniya, who owns the temple; the Brahmin, who guards it on salary and calls the arrangement dharma; and everyone else, rebranded anti-national upon objection. Stadium budgets flow to a state without medallists while the akharas that win them go hungry; the newsroom is Brahmin-bylined and Baniya-owned, the vegetarian canteen doing the work the salary won’t; ahimsa is reread as a doctrine of bloodless extraction.

Ahimsa Redefined

Take the milk, spare the cow; take the honey, spill nothing; empty an exchequer without cutting a throat and call it business. Nehru the Pandit, he reminds us, was unmade by Pandits while other men did the counting. And the merchant class, expelled from the fold in its Jain and Buddhist centuries, waited out the millennium and has made the priesthood its front office. “The Nagpur bowl is being refilled in Ahmedabad,” he closes.

The sporting structure he describes is not imaginary, India’s medallists come from Manipur to Kerala to Hyderabad, though Haryana’s share is so disproportionate. DP gives us a priesthood in service. But the priesthood that unmade the Pandit prime minister while other men did the counting was not obeying a master. I see a priesthood at war; with its own cousins.

The Sedimentary Elite

Every durable country is governed by a sediment. India’s old elite predates the Raj: strata deposited through the Sultanates and the Mughal centuries (the Rajputs kept rank by cavalry and accommodation), compacted under the Company, glazed by the ICS, lacquered by the licence Raj. Let’s call the true elite a basis point of its society, one in ten thousand, and give each member a network of a hundred: that is how a rounding error becomes a ruling class. The visible one per cent is essentially the network of the one-in-ten-thousand.

And that old Left-Liberal Nehruvian elite is post-caste in a very particular sense. It behaves like Bollywood: class first, everything else negotiable. It will happily admit the educated aspirant, Shudra, Muslim, anyone, who marries in and learns the table manners; long before it seats the pious, industrious twice-born up from the provinces, whom it privately files under country buffoon and hem them in with Reservations.

The Reservation Cleft

The snub is the point, and the snub is the recruiting sergeant. Reservations don’t block the children of the Old Elite, who anyway train in the West, but blocks their parvenu cousins. For the rural Uppers, the shakha supplies what the drawing room withholds: fraternity, status, vocabulary and eventually power. Hindutva is best read not as the lower orders storming the gates but as an upper-caste revolt of the provinces against a post-caste metropolis; a metropolis whose own bone structure is nonetheless upper-caste.

The Old Left-Liberal Elite looks on their rural Upper-Caste kin in a way a WASP may despise a Southerner but would never daresay to a minority for performing the exact same action.

Rahul Gandhi, a Brahmin whatever the exotic ancestry, personifies the drawing room; Modi, an OBC, commands a movement built and propelled by upper-caste cadre. The founders, cadre and intellectual infrastructure are provincial upper-caste, while the electoral coalition the movement later assembled reaches deep into OBC and Dalit India. Brahmins man both barricades. Hence the title of this piece.

The Elite Civil war

Nations inherit the pathologies of their founding elites, and the civil wars attending them. English liberty was less a gift from below than the residue of prolonged civil war within the ruling class; America is still litigating the quarrels of its founding stock. India’s peculiarity is the refusal to name its Left-Liberal elite at all. There is a half-serious case for titles: an aristocracy with letterhead can be balanced, taxed, mocked. It is the unnamed aristocracy that proves immortal.

(A Pakistan aside, since Kabir’s linked piece on provinces is still ringing in my ears. The provinces were not drawn for the parties, but they function as if they had been; redoubts where a movement beaten in Islamabad can govern, recruit and wait: the PPP in Sindh, the Sharifs in Punjab, PTI in KP. PTI are the proto-Pakistanis: the first cohort to buy the middle-class Pakistani identity whole – consolidation, not secession; the new Medina on layaway. Their war is generational: children formed by Pakistaniat against elders steeped in a shrine Islam that spent centuries absorbing local idiom alongside Hindu devotion.)

Which brings us to who actually needs religion. At the summit, tradition tends to ossify into heritage. No elite lives the orthodoxy: the Khans of Bombay are half-Hindu by blood or marriage, marinated in a Hindu environment whatever the surname. Tamil Nadu, Dravidianism’s own fortress, is so Hindu that the state emblem carries a temple gopuram even Periyar never troubled to contest; T.M. Krishna’s We, the People of India (a very good book and he is the Carnatic Singer of last night’s excellent performance) sits with that fact at length.

The Middle

Orthodoxy turns out to be a middle-class necessity: religion as portable code, standardised, legible, compatible with school, office and the nuclear family, lived exam to exam and paycheck to paycheck. The poor drift to the shrine and the syncretic edge because they have nothing to lose; the elite drift there because they have nothing to prove. The middle holds the line because the line is all it holds.

So yes: Nagpur’s bowl may well be filling in Ahmedabad. But look closer at the temple queue. The priesthood is not merely in service; it is in schism; metropolis against province, drawing room against shakha, cousin against cousin. Pattanaik sees a Brahmin who rented out his voice. I see two Brahmins fighting over what the voice should say. Civil wars are hardest to see when both sides wear the same thread.

Launch of the Unruly Bodies Art Exhibition

Tamil, Sanskrit and Hindi.

When I see Hindustani or Desi classical music; I think of Kabir.

As my friend Arjun reminds me; it’s actually Carnatic music and the musician is so so good.

He was the youngest full prof @ 37 ever for the university. A meteoric career rise through 4-5 other prestigious universities. Hired for his dissertation on critical race theory. According to his backstory – non verbal till 11, illiterate @ 18, phd @ 31. Ran 600 miles in 6 days through will power. There is also the epilepsy due to a race attack & magnanimity in forgiving his attackers.

These are just the highlights, there is so much more. Sounds too good to be true? It really is a crazy story and most parts are quite unverifiable or inconsistent.

What was provable was his rampant plagiarism in his papers and dissertation. The people who pointed it out (on substack) – Nathan Cofnas, got fired from Cambridge. David Harris, the original whistle blower, got dropped from his college in plymouth. A journalist who reported it, got investigated by the met police on a complaint by Arday.

Arday has now resigned, the met police has apologised, Cofnas is crowing on substack and David Harris has been reinstated.

Questions are now being asked as to why Arday’s ludicrous claims were never challenged by the various universities, he was given uk govt work, for race related curriculum matters, a book deal (claimed million $ + advances).

This scandal, though far more explosive, mirrors the ousting of Harvard president Claudine Gay for plagiarism.

Are people progressive abroad and conservative at home? Do Indians and Pakistanis identify with progressive movements abroad, to make common causes amongst people of colour, then make a hard right turn on the plane back home? Statistically I would say, this seems to be the case. Indians being to the Right of Pakistanis abroad (due to higher income & religion?). But is this sensible, internally consistent, and should people abide by it?

Where do brown people feature in critical race theory?

Addendum: There are some errors, many thx to A for pointing them out.

• Arday was not the youngest full professor at Cambridge, only the youngest Black professor. For instance, Isaac Newton was younger when appointed a professor at Cambridge.
• Cofnas was not fired for his (in) famous substack post commenting on Arday’s alleged plagiarism. That came recently. He was fired a couple of years ago for an article on differential academic abilities among different groups (sometimes called “ races”).
• Ditto for Harris. He was dismissed for his critique of Critical Race Theory. He was then reinstated by Plymouth after a public backlash from various quarters.

Also as fair warning to the Commentariat, Flame Threads will be put down and any violator will have fines ranging from mass comment deletion to revocation of Author Rights. Say what you like but tread carefully in how you say it since I did want to write on White Intellectuals hogging the “South Asian” space after Indosaurus’s excellent piece on the Great Gandhi but this just tumbled out)

Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Mohsin Naqvi, told an Islamabad seminar last week that the country’s 80-year-old governance system has “collapsed” and that Pakistan needs new provinces. A day later the DG ISPR called on the parties to consider an “administrative reset.” This week Naqvi assured the press that Shehbaz Sharif will serve his full five years; while standing by every word about the destroyed system, and reprising, for good measure, his claim to the biggest scam in Pakistan’s history: judges, bureaucrats, politicians and bankers, all implicated, an inventory that conspicuously omits one institution. The scam has an address, One Constitution Avenue, a two-decade property saga Naqvi has been prosecuting in public since May; the individuals remain nameless, naturally.

Naqvi is a Husayni Sayyid, the surname is the pedigree, claimed descent from the Tenth Imam, which makes us cousins by caste, and at present the unluckiest good Shia boy in the Islamic Republic: sent out to fly the Deep State’s kite and left to absorb the fire alone.

The PPP demands his resignation; Khawaja Asif suggests he reset his own ministry first; Raza Rabbani reminds everyone that the disease is constitutional violation, not cartography.

A Coup is surplus to requirements

My read: there will be no coup, because the Army no longer needs one.

Since the May ’25 war, a war Naqvi lists among the government’s achievements, “won” and all Asim Munir carries the Field Marshal’s baton under the Twenty-Seventh Amendment: the rank permanent, the immunity lifelong, the command secured to 2030 and extendable. He enjoys a genuine measure of popularity at home and a working line to Trump abroad (though the diplomatic dramatics are not his monopoly; Shehbaz has cultivated that relationship with some skill of his own). An institution in this position does not send tanks to the PTV building. Coups are expensive: they cost legitimacy abroad and deniability at home.

What Rawalpindi has learned is that informal supremacy is fragile and formal seizure is expensive; constitutional guardianship is the durable middle. The Twenty-Seventh Amendment is not a retreat into shadow, quite the opposite: supremacy made juridical, public, permanent.

The Iranian lesson

Iran is the model here not for its theology but for its architecture; a guardian centre embedded in the constitution, an elected state kept on stage to absorb blame and supply legitimacy, power that never again depends on winning anything.

Once the throne is legal, the day-to-day hand can withdraw from view, and in this the Army has a tutor the Pasdaran never had: its own ISI. Authority formalised, operations deniable. Visible power depreciates; hidden power compounds.

Four instruments:

(1.) The constitutional squeeze. New provinces, “administrative resets,” and the six months Naqvi reportedly allowed for the system to be sorted out, which Archer read it as a notice period served on the civilian administration. On deeper reflection it is not a paranoid reading. Redraw the map, dilute the Punjab and Sindh dynasts, all under colour of law. This is a measure I support and wrote on in my Princely piece.

(2.) The cockroach revolt. Naqvi invoked the cockroaches as a warning, not a recipe, the dismissed young uniting to overturn an order that offers them neither merit nor work, and Aijazuddin already has a column on the breeding of them.

Rawalpindi has summoned crowds before, and the Faizabad judgment recorded whose hand was on the tap. A Dhaka-style reset is far easier to encourage than to end, ask Sheikh Hasina, which is why this stays Plan B.

(3.) The Imran card. Only one institution can bring Khan out of Adiala, and it would do so on its own terms but the true objection is not that crowds are unsteerable. It is that Khan may be impossible to domesticate a second time; the card may no longer belong to the hand that holds it. That the establishment can afford to keep him inside, and keep the option open, is itself the measure of its confidence.

(4.) The formal coup. Least likely because least necessary. Why seize what you already hold?

The civilians will comply, because they must. The PML-N and PPP of 2026 are not the mass movements of the 1990s; they are heritage brands with shrinking congregations, and the young have gone to Imran. Parties that cannot win the street need the garrison more than the garrison needs them. Yet it is a bargain, not a surrender: office, patronage and protection from the street flow one way; a lectern, an election and diplomatic cover flow back. The hybrid persists because each side holds what the other lacks. Consent of the weak, convenience of the strong.

Regency, not rupture.

Let a thousand Lotus flowers bloom on Mother Indus; sincerely, and not as the Chairman meant it. (RNJ may keep pining for his desi Deng in the meantime.)

Except of course, he decided who was in charge, set the tone for independent India, inspired various other freedom/rights struggles and maybe the British would not have released the rest of the empire without India going first. They didn’t let go of Malaysia till 57, Rhodesia till 64, HK until the lease was up, and they still cling on to the Falkland islands. Not forgetting the resulting apartheid regimes in Zimbabwe & SA.

The Hindu right wing has always been upset with Gandhi, this is unsurprising and the political drift has worsened over time with the Congress squatting squarely on Gandhi’s legacy. Yet, happily, no harsh moves have been made over the BJP decade to degrade his stature, or any public space erasure.

Instead what is new, is the attacks from the liberal left. Cancel culture loves skewering cultural heroes out of time and context. They are constantly rewarded on social media for it.

I came across this article on substack – Gandhi was a creep. It is time we stop pretending otherwise and saw all the cheering, the love, the clapping by so many liberal leaning Indians. The Guardian does it too quoting from Ramachandra Guha.

Except they both lack context. And so I clipped on my keyboard and rode out to defend the strangest and hard to defend thing Gandhi did. I do feel it deserves some discussion though, not merely one sided cheering (or defence). Let the readers of BP hold court.

https://indosaurus.substack.com/p/in-defence-of-gandhis-creepiness