A reader posted a map in our WhatsApp group in October: “Pre-Independence Punjab, Partitioned in 1947”, with Dera Ghazi Khan and Multan circled in red. His father’s family is from Bahawalpur State and his mother’s from Montgomery. Another reader said his family spoke Seraiki. I sent the same map to my Urdu teacher, a Seraiki speaker, and he picked out “Bahawalpur state” at once. The question underneath was the same one: which parts of that outline are actually Punjab?

My teacher has a stake in the answer. He is from Rajanpur, at the bottom of the province, and I wrote in September about the rice-flour dosa his family eats with saag. In 1947 Rajanpur was a tehsil of Dera Ghazi Khan district, one of the two circled on the map. His family moved to the city from Cholistan, and they are the Muslims of the opening. In a class on 6 November he told me that they call themselves Seraiki, that his grandfather spoke Marwari, and that they still speak a mixed Marwari with their own community. The Hindus, he said, call themselves Marwari and speak Seraiki. When I sent him my September post on Lahnda, he translated it into Urdu for his family group, and wrote back that the regional languages are part of the culture and should be kept.

That Lahnda post was about what happened inside the box: the canal colonies, Partition and the census. In 2019 I asked whether the British, entering from Bengal, re-Indianised the north-west, and Major Amin’s review of The Garrison State took up what the colonial Punjab was for: the army’s recruiting ground.

How the Punjab was Colonised

So the outline the reader posted is the Punjab after 1912. By 1947 it had twenty-nine British districts in five divisions, with the princely states of Bahawalpur, Patiala, Nabha, Jind, Kapurthala, Malerkotla, Faridkot, Chamba, Mandi, Suket and the Simla hill states inside the line but under their own rulers. The province was run by a Lieutenant-Governor from 1859 to 1921 and a Governor after that.

Sir Robert Montgomery was Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab from 1859 to 1865. In 1864 the headquarters of Gogaira district moved to a station on the railway line, which was named Montgomery after him in 1865, and the district took the name; the town and district became Sahiwal in 1966. Lyallpur, named for Sir James Lyall, Lieutenant-Governor from 1887 to 1892, became Faisalabad in 1977. Two of the names on the map are British officials, and both have since been removed.

Three Punjabs

The word carries three meanings that the map runs together.

The first is the land of the five rivers: Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, which is to say the doabs between them, the Sindh Sagar Doab west of the Jhelum, and the Bist Doab between the Beas and the Sutlej. On that reading Punjab ends at the Indus to the west, at the Sutlej to the south-east, and at the Siwaliks to the north-east. Malwa, south of the Sutlej, is outside the rivers but Punjabi in speech, which is where the first two meanings part.

The second is the Punjabi language, in its central dialects, Majhi, Doabi, Malwai and Powadhi, and its western ones, Shahpuri, Dhani and Jhangvi. The edges are disputed. Potohari, spoken on the plateau around Rawalpindi, has no column of its own in the Pakistani census and is listed as a separate language, Pahari-Potwari, by Ethnologue. Seraiki, spoken from Jhang southwards, has been a separate census language in Pakistan since 1981. My teacher put the gap in practical terms: by his own estimate a Seraiki speaker and a Pothohari speaker understand about thirty per cent of each other’s speech, and the food, the dress and the accent differ as well.

The third is political: whatever a government calls Punjab today. On the Indian side that was cut back to the Punjabi-speaking districts in 1966. On the Pakistani side the 1947 box, minus the Indian share and Islamabad and plus Bahawalpur, has never been divided on language.

Sorting the twenty-nine districts

This is my grouping of the districts against the first two meanings. The margins are mixed: Hoshiarpur, Gurdaspur and Ambala were split in 1966, and Patiala and Jind held land on both sides of the language line.

By my count fifteen of the twenty-nine districts are Punjab in both the river and the language sense, and four more are transitional. Three in the south-west are Seraiki, with Bahawalpur State beside them; five in the south-east are Haryanvi; and two in the north-east are Pahari. The two circled districts, and the state below them, are exactly the parts of the map with the weakest claim to the name.

What 1947 and 1966 did to Greater Punjab

Partition cut the box along a line that Radcliffe drew in five weeks, through the core: Lahore west, Amritsar east, Gurdaspur split at the tehsil. It did not touch the question of where Punjab ends.

India then answered that question. The princely states east of the line had become PEPSU in 1948, and PEPSU was merged into Punjab in 1956. The Punjab Reorganisation Act of 1966 took Hisar, Rohtak, Gurgaon, Karnal and Mahendragarh out as Haryana, with parts of Ambala district and the Jind and Narwana tehsils; gave Simla, Kangra, Kullu, Lahaul and Spiti, the Nalagarh tehsil and parts of Hoshiarpur and Gurdaspur to Himachal Pradesh; made Chandigarh a union territory; and left an Indian Punjab close to the Punjabi-speaking districts. The States Reorganisation Commission had refused a linguistic Punjab in 1955; the Punjabi Suba movement got it eleven years later, and the state that resulted is a Punjab whose boundary was argued on the ground of speech. Pakistan’s never has been. In the notes to a 2019 podcast with Professor Majeed I called this the great victory of the Sikhs: Punjabi is a vigorous language of state in India in a way that it is not in Pakistan.

Pakistan kept the Punjab but swapped out Punjabi. Bahawalpur State, which acceded to Pakistan in October 1947, lost its separate existence in One Unit on 14 October 1955 and came out of One Unit in July 1970 as districts of Punjab, not as itself; I have asked whether Pakistan should restore its princes. The Seraiki districts, the Potohar plateau and the central doabs sit in one province of 127.7 million people at the 2023 census, and the argument about new provinces that opened my Lahnda post is an argument about whether to do what India did in 1966. In 2018 I wrote, in The Siraiki question, that Pakistani Punjab had not had its Haryana moment yet. It still has not. Urdu has done some of the binding instead; an earlier post argued that it works as a link language inside a province with large linguistic minorities.

The Punjab is both Fact & Fiction

Punjab, in river and in speech, runs from the Indus to the hills, and south of the Sutlej across Malwa as far as Punjabi is spoken. The 1947 outline runs past it because the British added the Delhi districts in 1858 and kept Dera Ghazi Khan in 1901. India corrected the eastern and northern overshoots in 1966. The western and southern overshoots are still on the map, and they are what the people of Multan, Dera Ghazi Khan and Bahawalpur mean when they say they are not Punjabi.

This is the Open Thread for Diwali. Talk about it, or about anything else.

In the Brown Pundits WhatsApp group this morning, a reader asked who wanted to talk about the history of Indian food. Red chillies and tomatoes came up first: the Portuguese brought them from South America. Another member shared B. G. L. Swamy’s Kannada book Namma Hotteyalli Dakshina Amerika, “South America in Our Stomach”. The first reader added that traditional Konkani poha is made without tomato, potato or chilli.

Poha is also a Diwali dish. Most Goans make five kinds for the festival: with milk, yogurt, jaggery, coconut milk and potato. The potato also came from the Americas. What on your Diwali table arrived after 1498?

Last week brought X.T.M’s 1,000th official post on Brown Pundits. The first, Hello world, went up on 30 December 2010. That is the official count. Errors in the back archives confuse attribution: if about a third of the uncredited posts are X.T.M’s, the number may be closer to 1,300.

The last thread, Open thread: Musk the sociopath?, is now closed. Carry on here.

The Iran question

Mooné Rahimi put it this way on X on 4 November:

This war began with US and Israeli strikes on Iran on 28 February 2026. It has not ended; talks were held in Qatar on 31 October and 1 November (Al Jazeera).

A strategic victory for Iran

Trump’s reply on Truth Social was that he was not on the ballot, and that if he had been, Republicans would have won.

Did Trump’s war with Iran help cost Republicans Congress? I think it did, and this is what Tehran was counting on: that the cost of the war would reach American voters, and that they would punish the government for it. They have. That is not support for Iran. It is support for a quick end to the war and a return to normal gas prices. But it looks like a strategic victory for Iran.

Seats that changed

Democrats won seven Senate seats that Republicans held:

Darline Graham is Lindsey Graham’s sister. Governor Henry McMaster appointed her to the seat on 13 July 2026, after Lindsey Graham’s death.

Talarico is the first Democrat to win a Texas US Senate race since 1988 (AP).

El-Sayed and Sky News

In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed held the open seat for the Democrats, beating Mike Rogers. He becomes the first Muslim elected to the Senate (AP).

On Election Day, outside a polling site, he asked the Sky News correspondent James Matthews whether he was registered to vote in Michigan. Matthews said he was not. “Then why would I care to have a conversation with you?” El-Sayed replied (The Hill).

The desi ballot

The five Indian-American House winners listed are all Democrats. Two familiar names were already out before November: Shri Thanedar lost his Democratic primary in August, and Raja Krishnamoorthi lost the Illinois Senate primary to Juliana Stratton.

Muslim voters and Pakistani Americans

In Britain, Pakistanis stand for both South Asian and Muslim politics. In the US they stand for neither. Every South Asian winner for Congress listed above is Indian American. The first Muslim senator, El-Sayed, is the son of Egyptian immigrants.

Pakistani Americans appear at state level. Saud Anwar (Connecticut Senate) and Salman Bhojani (Texas House) lead their races, as does the Bangladeshi American Md Masudur Rahman (Connecticut Senate). Nabeela Syed won Illinois Senate District 26.

More on Brown Pundits

Earlier: Inside Pakistan’s High-Stakes Gamble on Trump.

The current Open Thread is Open thread: Musk the sociopath?

What the ministry said

The ministry’s statement, carried by the Saudi Press Agency, opens with four Quranic verses: 7:56, 28:77, 2:205 and 5:33. The last, 5:33, concerns those who “wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth to cause corruption”, and lists death among the penalties.

The statement then says that the two committed immoral acts inside a mosque in the holy city; that a court convicted them and sentenced them to death under ta’zir, weighing the gravity of the acts and the sanctity of the time and place; that the relevant judicial authority upheld the sentences; and that a royal order authorised the executions, carried out in the Makkah region.

It does not name the mosque, say what the acts were, or publish the judgment.

What ta’zir means

A common classification of Islamic criminal law has three kinds of penalty. Hudud are fixed penalties set by scripture for a short list of offences. Qisas is retaliation for killing or wounding, which the victim or the victim’s family may waive for compensation. Ta’zir is the rest: a penalty left to the court’s discretion where no fixed penalty applies, or where its standard of proof is not met.

The ministry did not call this a hadd sentence. Unlawful sex, zina, carries a fixed penalty: the Quran gives one hundred lashes (24:2), and stoning for a married offender (muhsan) comes from the hadith. The court did not apply it. Nor did the ministry describe the case as hiraba, the offence of 5:33. The verse is quoted in the statement; the legal category the statement gives is ta’zir.

Classical jurists debated how far a discretionary penalty could go. Rudolph Peters, in Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law (2005), records that all the schools came to allow death as ta’zir in some circumstances. Saudi courts use it often:

Sources: ESOHR, 2024 report; Amnesty International, 2025 figures.

So the Quran does contain capital punishment, and the ministry quoted the verse. But the sentence it announced was discretionary. No verse required these two deaths. A court chose them, and the judgment that explains why has not been published.

What Bangladesh knew

According to a consular memorandum reported by The Daily Star, Nazrul was detained on 1 August 2023 with a cybercrime allegation recorded against him, and Suety Akhter (Sweety Akhtar to her family) on 2 August 2023 with an adultery allegation. Both had worked as cleaners for a contractor, Al Majal. The consulate received a prisoner list with their names on 30 September 2026; it did not say they had been sentenced to death. Neither family had asked the consulate for legal help.

So Dhaka knew the two were in prison. It was not told of the death sentences or of the executions, and learned of the executions from the press. The consulate then asked the Saudi authorities for details. On 17 October the state minister for foreign affairs, Shama Obaed Islam, told reporters that the government had received no information on the sentences and called the case “a major lesson for us” (Prothom Alo).

Both countries are parties to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. Article 36 requires the authorities to tell a detained foreigner, without delay, of the right to have the consulate informed. Whether the two were told, and whether they had lawyers, is not on the record.

Bangladesh sent 754,369 workers to Saudi Arabia in 2025, about two-thirds of all its workers who went abroad that year (UNB). About 3.5 million Bangladeshis live there (Arab News), and in 2025-26 the kingdom has been Bangladesh’s largest source of remittances (The Daily Star). The minister’s lesson was addressed to them: obey the host country’s laws.

What is not known

As of 2 November: what the two did; what evidence the court accepted; how a cybercrime entry and an adultery entry became a conviction for immoral acts in a mosque; whether they had lawyers; and whether they were told they could contact their consulate. The verses in the statement tell us how the ministry presented the case. They do not tell us how the court decided it.

My own view is that these two innocents did not deserve to be executed. At the very worst they should have been deported back to Bangladesh, and even that is highly arguable.

What is there

The site is a low mound on the right bank of the river, where it opens into a lagoon before the Bay of Bengal. It is widely identified with Poduke, a market town named in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek sailing manual of the first century CE, and in Ptolemy’s Geography of the second century.

The brick pillars and arches that visitors photograph are not Roman. They are what is left of an eighteenth-century French missionary seminary and residence, usually dated 1771 to 1773 and abandoned in 1783, with some of the ancient bricks reused in its walls. The ancient remains, which the excavators read as warehouses, tanks and drains, lie in the trenches and under the ground.

How it was found

The finds include amphorae, Arretine ware, Roman lamps, glass, beads of glass and stone, gems, and the waste of a bead-making industry. Wheeler read them as a trading post opened under Augustus and closed within two centuries. The later digs showed a much longer settlement history, with Rome as one trading partner among several. Finds from Arikamedu are displayed in the Puducherry Museum.

What it looks like now

She found the site neglected: used for selfies, littered, loud. The mangroves along the lagoon were full of plastic, and the estuary too. I have been there myself; I went kayaking on that river.

The site is protected by the Archaeological Survey of India. The visible walls are eighteenth-century, the finds are in a museum, and the river that made the port is choked with rubbish. What should a site like this be for, and who should look after it?

This is X.T.M’s 1,000th official post on Brown Pundits. The first, Hello world, went up on 30 December 2010. That is the official count. Errors in the back archives confuse attribution: if about a third of the uncredited posts are X.T.M’s, the number may be closer to 1,300. Of the 1,000 counted here, 514 came before X.T.M came back in October 2023, and 486 since. The 999th was Brown Pundits on Autopilot.

What the autopilot runs on

The site now has about 240 loyal, regular readers and 14 regular commenters. The Open Threads do most of the work. The Navarātri and Durgā Pūjā thread and the Gandhi Jayanti thread drew more readers this month than any essay.

October in numbers

Figures from Google Analytics, Google Search Console and the site’s own records.

Each commenter brings readers

My estimate is that every regular commenter brings 10 to 15 regular readers with them: people who come back for the reply, follow the argument and read the post underneath it. Fourteen commenters account for most of the 240.

That is the ecosystem. It needs a live thread, not a new essay every day, and it keeps itself going.

What it cost

The site publishes far fewer posts than it did in the summer, and most of them are mine. I think the autopilot has depressed the readership a little. Weeks with new writing bring in readers that the threads alone do not.

Writing for the comments

Since the “revival” of BP, I essentially wrote for the comment thread. A post was sort of like a prompt: built to start an argument. The Open Threads now do that job, so my posts no longer have to.

That frees the posts for longer work, such as The Raj With a New Flag, Ambedkar’s Grammar of Anarchy and Who Made the Brahmins and the Goddess Vegetarian?.

What comes next

I have been doing deep work on my writing, and there is more of it to come. Four pieces are in drafts: where Punjab really ends on the 1947 map; a Bahá’í couple in Yazd raided for the second time; two Bangladeshis executed in Mecca, and what ta’zir means; and Arikamedu, the port near Puducherry that traded with Rome, a piece inspired by Agni. The Open Threads stay, and comments stay open on every post.

In our age of internet echo chambers, this immortal line has new meaning, not of privilege and poverty but about disparate views of the same time and space as fed to us by our information sources.

For instance I viewed the Delhi crackdown on the CJP/Congress as exemplary state action against disruptive protestors out for anarchy on the streets and attempting regime change of the govt.

If you feel the characterisation far fetched, it isn’t. Both Prashant Bhushan and Neha Bora voiced these sentiments in the midst of making appeals for people to hit the streets.

While the SC indicated its pre-emptive displeasure of a planned shut down of metro services and wholesale protestor detainment, their tack changed sharply days later when the protestors marched on the SC. Turns out even the court is not immune to a volte face when it realises the pitchfork rabble have started discolouring the walls of its ivory tower.

No one died. No shops were looted, no masked banditry on the streets, some arrests and lots of drama. The opposition attempted an overwhelming human tsunami and the govt put in enough police breakwater friction to dissipate the surge into mild salty back spray.

It is hard to explain to the ideologically fervent that anarchic protestors effecting regime change Bangladesh or Nepal style, i.e. overturning popular mandate by street violence in urban centres is not democratic. Quite the opposite.

Happily, like a metronome with near perfect synchronicity France had its own ‘Gen Z’ protests. Unlike Delhi, they were not prepared for it. The interior minister offered his resignation admitting that the police lost control of the crowd.

It is as if the French wanted to provide an alternate reality as to what might have happened in Delhi without sufficient police presence. Widespread looting, violence, arson, massive property damage and the death of at least one protester directly connected.

France has now shut down Metro stations, banned public protests and arrested thousands, deploying tear gas, riot police, mounted police, armed response vehicles, the entire interior state arsenal.

The protests have spread countrywide and across country lines to Milan, where Meloni has deployed the Italian Army.

The net result of all this, is that it brought the endless hypocrisy of western media into stark relief.

France24, for instance, was simultaneously glazing Neha Bora while decrying protests on Paris streets. It is a wonder that their editorial team doesn’t unscrew their heads with all the contradictory spin.

The parallels keep rolling in. Just days after bitter complaints about the de-notification of Jantar Mantar as a protest site in Delhi, press reports are blasé about French police changing protest routes and enforcing ‘no protest on threat of arrest’ zones in Paris.

This October should have been a tale of 3 protests, with actual regime change enacted in Khyber Paktunkhwa. But shoot at sight orders were in place, and the preemptory deaths of over 100 PoK Kashmiri protestors in the previous months was dissuasive. Faced with untrammelled wrath of the Pakistani military machine the ‘martial’ race stayed largely off the streets.

Habitually, liberal editorial media looked elsewhere and instead fed us gloom and doom about democratic backsliding spiced with dire portents about descent into fascism by the BJP.

Protests do have a time and place. Electoral democracy should be sacrosanct, but the opposition shouldn’t be prevented from agitating to garner support on pinch issues. Bandhs, strikes, marches are all too common in India, flash swarming of the capital is new and problematic. The hunger strike by Sonam Wangchuk was appreciable in both its ideological soundness (the necessity for demanding action over the lack of accountability over multiple exam leaks) and the demands made. I wrote a very different post in July, but was wary of the precedent it set.

On a lighter note, our very own shehzada has decamped to Vietnam, to enjoy the warm waters of Halong bay in the South China sea. Apparently 3 days of protest in Delhi has awakened his need for some R&R before the next season. RaGa puts one in mind of a Mayfly, perennially moulting through innumerable larval stages in the hope of one brief flash as an adult which takes wing.

Comments on this thread are closed. The conversation has moved to Open Thread: Diwali.

Satire or history

“Who funded” and “this needs investigation” are phrases used online to question activists and protests. Pattanaik applied them to Brahmin diet and ended: “So it cannot be Baniya funded.” The post can be read as satire of that method. Whether or not it was meant as satire, its historical claims can be checked.

Two claims that hold

Brahmin diet varies by region

Members of several Brahmin communities eat fish, and some eat meat: Bengali, Odia, Maithil, Kashmiri, Saraswat and Konkani traditions all include fish-eating groups. Vedic ritual included animal sacrifice. Vegetarian norms are prominent among Brahmin communities in Gujarat, Rajasthan, the Tamil and Kannada regions and parts of the Hindi belt. Current practice shows variation; it does not by itself show how old any of these diets are.

Jain accounts describe a royal ban on killing in Gujarat

Jain accounts record that in the twelfth century the Chaulukya king Kumarapala, advised by the Jain scholar Hemachandra, proclaimed amari, a ban on killing animals, across his kingdom. The accounts come from the Jain side. How far the ban was enforced is not known.

Arguments against eating meat long before 1000 AD

Pattanaik’s dating concerns texts that promote a fully vegetarian life. The sources below are of different kinds. None shows all Brahmins changing diet at one moment. Together they show that the argument for abstaining from meat is far older than medieval Gujarat.

The disputed Jain passage

Pattanaik’s reading that early Jain texts allowed meat rests in part on the Bhagavati Sutra (Viyahapannatti 15), in the account of Mahavira’s illness. Revati prepares food described with words that can mean pigeon and rooster. The Indologist Ludwig Alsdorf defended the literal meat reading. Jain commentators since the medieval period have read the words as plant names, a gourd and a citron. The passage is disputed and has been for more than a century. It does not settle Mahavira’s diet, and it does not date the origin of Brahmin vegetarianism either way.

Purity rules and the lion before Islam

Dharmashastra texts classified substances, animals and people as pure or impure centuries before Islam reached Gujarat. Lions are native to Gujarat, where the Gir forest and the surrounding Saurashtra landscape hold the surviving wild Asiatic lions, and the lion is Mahavira’s emblem in Jain iconography. None of this rules out later borrowing in particular cases. It does mean that a Muslim import is not needed to explain the purity rules or the lion.

What the evidence explains, and what it does not

Sanskritisation explains spread, not origin

M. N. Srinivas described Sanskritisation in the 1950s: castes seeking higher status adopt the practices of higher castes, often including vegetarianism. This explains how a prestigious diet spreads, and why diet still marks caste boundaries in everyday life. It does not explain why Brahmins in some regions adopted it first.

Competition with Buddhism and Jainism

Brahmanical traditions competed with Buddhism and Jainism for royal and merchant patronage over many centuries, and both of those religions made non-violence central. That is a plausible pressure on Brahmin practice. The sources used here do not establish whether it explains the regional pattern, and the ancient texts above do not measure it.

What the sources establish

Diet is now argued over as a marker of national identity: meat called foreign by one side, vegetarianism called an import by the other. Indian arguments for abstaining from meat predate Islam and Hemachandra. The sources do not identify one moment when all Brahmins changed diet, or one sponsor. Regional practice, religious teaching, patronage and status imitation are separate mechanisms, and each needs its own evidence.

Since then: the goddess and the flies

Pattanaik has stayed on the subject. Three posts since the one I answered above:

The goddess column makes the same argument as the Brahmin post, with the goddess in place of the priest. In Konkan, Gauri comes home after Ganesh and is fed fish or mutton by Koli, Agari and Maratha households. In Bengal, Uma comes home for four days, goats were once killed before her in the old houses, and on Dashami she is sent off with fish and rice. A daughter eats what the house eats. Against this he sets Vaishno Devi of the Trikuta hills, a maiden who hates meat and liquor; both belong to her enemy Bhairon Nath, the disciple of Gorakhnath. He then gives two Jain stories: in Jinasena’s Harivamsa Purana of 783 CE, Durga’s blood cult begins when hunters find a tiger has eaten a Jain nun and conclude that the goddess wants blood; at Osian in Rajasthan, the monk Ratnaprabhasuri gives Chamunda a heap of sweets, she gives up the buffalo and becomes Sachiya Mata, the vegetarian clan goddess of the Oswal Jains. His explanation is the purse. Marwari and Gujarati families, Jain and Vaishnava, paid for the marble, the feeding halls and the trusts; “once the purse comes into their hands, the goat is taken away.” His text is the Devi Bhagavata Purana, 3.26, where verses 30 and 31 prescribe fruit for Navaratri and verses 32 to 34 open a second path: animals offered to the goddess go to heaven, and the killing counts as non-violence. A popular modern Hindi translation, he says, folds those verses into one line about fruit.

I checked what I could. Swami Vijnanananda’s translation of 3.26 reads as he says: “Those who eat meat, they can sacrifice animals in this worship of the Devi; and, for this purpose, goat and wild boars are the best”, the animals “attain to unending heavens”, and “in all the Sastras … this killing of animals in a sacrifice is considered as non-killing.” Chapter 27 adds that “payasa and fresh fish are to be specially offered”. Two menus, both lawful, as he says. One correction: the chapter names goat and wild boar; the buffalo is his addition. The Harivamsa story, the Osian story and the 956 CE inscription at Osian are as he gives them, though I read the Harivamsa in summary, not in the original. The Shrine Board’s own account of the Vaishno Devi legend names Bhairon as “a disciple of Guru Gorakhnath”, so that outline is the shrine’s own. The fish sent off with Durga on Dashami is well attested in Bengal; for Konkan his source is his own 2015 column on the Kolis of Mumbai.

The flies post holds too. All six verses he cites read as he says in Griffith’s translation: the fly that eats the raw flesh of the sacrificed horse, whose share goes to the gods (1.162.9); the men who wait for their portion of the cooked horse (1.162.12); the honey-bee that sang to the Ashvins (1.119.9); worshippers “like flies on honey” around Indra (7.32.2); the fifteen or twenty bullocks cooked for Indra (10.86.14); the horses, bulls, oxen and rams offered to Agni (10.91.14).

What is not shown is the same as before: a date and a sponsor. He dates the spread of the Vaishno Devi story to the twentieth century, through the Arya Samaj, BAPS, calendar art and cassettes, and gives no source; he concedes that the age of the written legend is unknown. The Hindi translation that drops the three verses is not named, so I could not check it. The purse mechanism is documented at Osian and plausible elsewhere, but he gives no second case with dates and accounts. The texts show two traditions side by side for a very long time, and the richer one setting the menu wherever it paid for the temple. That is the finding of the Brahmin post as well.

What the letter says

The statement makes five points. Indian democracy has held for seven decades with working institutions and peaceful transfers of power. Election denial, attacks on constitutional bodies and a preference for “street over Sansad” now threaten it. The armed forces have been pulled into partisan debate. Doubt about democracy has been sown by “weaponizing sub-judice matters” and amplified on the streets by “anarchist forces”. Dissent is essential, but differences should be resolved “through debate, discussion, dialogue and dissent under the roof of constitutional institutions.”

It names no authors and no organisation. It lists no demands.

Who is asked to sign

The form asks for a name, a university email, the university attended and the year of graduation. The intended signatory is a graduate living outside India. Most of them do not vote in Indian elections; overseas Indians can register but must be physically present in their constituency to cast a ballot.

What Ambedkar said in 1949

The letter’s authority is Ambedkar’s closing speech to the Constituent Assembly on 25 November 1949, the source of the phrase “grammar of anarchy”. The passage is worth reading whole, because it is aimed at a specific target.

The grammar of anarchy

Ambedkar said that once constitutional methods for achieving social and economic ends exist, “there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods.” He then named them: “the bloody methods of revolution”, and “the method of civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha.” Those, he said, “are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.”

Civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha were Gandhi’s methods. Ambedkar was asking the new republic to retire the Congress movement’s own toolkit. A letter that quotes the phrase against protesters is quoting a man who meant it against the founding party as much as against anyone else.

The second warning: hero-worship

The same speech carries a second warning, less often quoted. Ambedkar said that in politics “bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship”, and that Indians were more prone to it than any other people. He warned a third time that political democracy would not last without social democracy: liberty, equality and fraternity as “a way of life”. The letter quotes the first warning and not the other two.

The street has written Indian law before

The letter treats “street” and “Sansad” as rivals. The record shows them working in sequence: a movement outside, a law or a verdict inside.

Each of these began outside Parliament. Each ended inside an institution. The Emergency is the exception that proves the sequence: it was the institutions, not the street, that suspended the Constitution.

What the letter gets right

Three things. Peaceful transfers of power have held since 1977, including in 2004 and 2014 when the losing side had reason to contest. Institutions do erode when every result is called stolen; that is the lesson of other democracies this decade. And a movement that lives on social media has to show it can also live inside a legislature, a point the July posts on the Cockroach movement made before the Delhi lockdown.

What it does not settle

“Sub-judice matters.” The protests concern the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls. The scale of deletions is contested, and the letter does not give a number. It calls raising the dispute “weaponizing” it. Whether the deletions were lawful is the question in dispute, not a premise the letter can assume.

Who speaks. A graduate abroad asking voters at home to stay off the street is making a request that costs the signatory nothing. The letter does not address that asymmetry.

The armed forces. The letter says the forces have been drawn into partisan debate but does not say by whom. Without that, the sentence can be read either way.

Sansad itself. The letter asks for debate in Parliament. It does not say what happens when Parliament does not sit on the question, or passes a law in minutes, as it did when it repealed the farm laws in 2021 without discussion.

Where this leaves the argument

Ambedkar’s speech supports the letter on one point and undercuts it on two. It does condemn unconstitutional methods once constitutional ones exist. It also condemns hero-worship and warns that a constitution without social democracy will not hold. Indian practice since 1949 has not followed his advice on the first point, and the laws listed above are the result. The question the letter raises is real: where does a constitutional method end and an unconstitutional one begin? The answer in Indian history has been settled case by case, usually by a court, after the street had already moved.

The statement in full

The text below is “Spare India from Anarchy” as it appeared on the signature form, which has since closed. The form opened with: “We, Indian-origin academics, students, and alumni of universities outside India offer this statement out of deep concern for the troubling developments in India. If you wish to express your support for this statement, please complete this form to add your name as a signatory.”

In the seven decades since independence, Indian democracy has proved its resilience repeatedly. Institutions have flourished, checks and balances have functioned admirably, and peaceful transition of power has remained an enduring hallmark. Unfortunately, a frenzy of election denial, relentless questioning of constitutional institutions, and a preference for ‘street over Sansad’ has gripped certain quarters. Unfavourable election outcomes have led to questions of procedural integrity. Adverse judgements have provoked unfortunate commentary on judicial independence. Even the most apolitical institution in the country – the Armed Forces – has been gratuitously and unjustly entangled in partisan discourse.

An unconscionable and devious plan of sowing seeds of doubt in Indian democracy has been hatched by weaponizing sub-judice matters, which is then amplified on the streets by leaning on anarchist forces, which have historically and philosophically never believed in constitutional form of governance. All in the name of saving democracy. We remain amazed at the irony of all. But more importantly, as informed people who have stakes in the future of this country and travel the world identifying as ‘Indians,’ we are deeply anguished at this state of affairs.

Dr. BR Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian constitution, warned posterity of this scenario. He exhorted that for India to survive as a constitutional republic, we must ‘hold fast to constitutional methods… abandon the bloody methods of revolution [which are] the grammar of anarchy.’ Increasingly, anarchy is becoming an expression of choice – ready to supplant the spirit and wisdom of fraternité.

As concerned global citizens, we express our solidarity with democratic forces globally and reject perverse, regressive means to achieve narrow, self-serving ends. We understand dissent is an essential ingredient of democracy, but we refuse to be silent spectators to the subversion of democratic apparatus in its guise.

We urge all social and political forces to take cognizance of our distress and desires and resolve differences through debate, discussion, dialogue and dissent under the roof of constitutional institutions that our venerable founding fathers created for us. India needs to set an example for the democratic world, for all the right reasons. We hope wisdom will prevail.