Lazy Sunday – Pakistan has the best looking leader in the world now

X.T.M · July 29, 2018 · 19 comments

Lazy Sunday and I didn’t want to spam the BP Whatsapp Group so here goes (I may update as the day goes on):

  • Like Most Americans, I Was Raised to Be A White Man
  • Raza Rumi’s new book uses Pakistan’s culture to reveal a diverse, layered, contested country

  • The Rise, Fall and Rise Again of Imran Khan, Pakistan’s Next Leader

  • How White Is London?! Interesting that Nas (I follow him on Facebook) is an Israel-Palestinians Harvard Grad and uses Brown to define himself. I once wrote in one of my first posts in BP that there has always been an other category in the American imagination that was occupied by the Native Americans (Black, White & Red). America has space for three colours..
  • Imran KhanI’m proud to say Pakistan probably has one of the best looking Leaders (on par with Croatia & Canada) in the world and it may have a female president. I’m extremely optics conscious.. Meet Pakistan’s playboy-turned-prime minister
  • I always admonish Pakistanis who let down the side by not being aesthetic enough that’s why I’m probably anti-Hijab, I don’t like badly worn Hijabis. I do think however that Indian women are obviously the best-looking in the world. I admonished my niece yesterday when she thought that on average white women were better looking than Asian women; psychological colonisation.
  • PTI MNA-elect decides not to take salary, other allowances. I’m rapidly winning over to the PTI side since they present the right image of Pakistan, young electable and non-corrupt chaps. I’ll of course be condemned as someone who supports authoritarian candidates and that’s probably true.
  • Pakistan needs to work on its danger image and with our kin-nations Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan form that erogenous-erotic zone of danger, heady sensuality and restrictions. One interesting thing in the West has been that with the increase in sexual liberalism there is a correspondent decline in eroticism and increase in weird fetishes and an ever increasingly Cornucopia of sexual orientations.
  • Pakistan is a split border territory our kin nations are both Afghanistan and Iran and the Stans however we are of course also tied to our kin nations of SAARC. We aren’t one or the other exactly. Afghanistan is a SAARC nation in the same way as Burma; it doesn’t speak an Indo-Aryan or Dravidian or Munda language which is a central requirement.
  • I think the greatest leader in South Asian history happens to be Indira Gandhi since she neutralised the greatest threat to India for generations to come. Even though I’m partial to Pakistan (how can I not be since I’m partially Paki). I’m quite convinced that one of the avatars of Indira is Vidhi, probably the other is Priyanka..

On ethnicity

Razib Khan · July 28, 2018 · 2 comments


A really strange conversation on ethnicity broke out below. The primacy of lots of different variables was argued.

My family arrived in the USA ~1980 when there were not too many South Asians compared to today. Additionally, they have lived in major urban areas, small towns, and medium-sized cities. My parents grew up in (East) Pakistan, married and had their first children in Bangladesh, but have spent most of their lives now in the United States of America. Both speak English with a strong accent and are moderately religious Muslims. You wouldn’t call them secular, but neither are they visibly or ostentatiously Muslim. In American politics, they are staunch Democrats, while if they have an opinion on Bangladeshi politics they are Awami League (the ratio of discussion of American to Bangladesh politics in my family growing up was about 100 to 1 in favor the former).

Today my parents’ social circle, in a relatively large urban area, are Bangladeshis. Most of these people (almost all in fact) arrived in the United States much later than they did. But in the 1980s my parents had a much smaller pool of social acquaintances who were Bangladeshi. In the early 1980s, there were 15,000 Bangladeshis in New York City. Today there are probably closer to 200,000.

Here are some things I will observe in relation to my parents’ more diverse social circles in the 1980s. First, they were overwhelmingly South Asian. Those who were not South Asian were usually married in, and usually white. Second, a core group consisted of Bangladeshis. But the next group probably consisted by Indian Bengalis. A somewhat more established community. In fact, the boundary between Bangladeshis and Indian Bengalis were somewhat fluid. The two groups spoke the same language, and there was a large dietary overlap.

Next in order to the Indian Bengalis were a variety of other social clusters of South Asians that they met through various acquaintances and friends. For example, one cluster of friends consisted mostly of people from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, but with a large minority from other parts of India. Because there was ethnolinguistic diversity in this social group generally everyone spoke English, rather than Telugu, which was the most numerous language.

Another group consisted of people from Pakistan and Indian Muslims. This group also had some other token Bangladeshis. The unifying factor in this group was that all were South Asian Muslims. The de-unifying factor in this group is that the non-Bengalis would sometimes make the proactive case for Urdu as a unifying language, which my parents and the other Bengalis always objected to (because of their age, almost all the Bengalis in the group could follow the conversation in Urdu, since they grew up in Pakistan).

One issue in social circumstances with Pakistanis is that my parents found the food less palatable. This was a very important criterion for them for social interactions and a primary reason why sometimes they preferred going to parties thrown by their Hindu Bengali friends in preference to their Pakistan Muslim friends. By “less palatable”, I mean here that Pakistani cuisine was not “comfort food” for them.

My parents went to a multi-ethnic mosque several times a year. From what I could tell the South Asians kept to themselves, the Arabs kept to themselves, the Turks kept to themselves, etc. There was no real deep interaction. My parents never had any close Muslim friends who were not South Asian. In fact, we went to dinner with Chinese people (my father’s colleagues) more often than we went to dinner at a non-South Asian Muslim’s house.

That’s about it from me. Below are some genetic plots.

South Asian nationalism

Razib Khan · July 28, 2018 · 62 comments


I happen to have Saloni’s genotype and she is certainly closer genetically to Sindhis than to most other South Asians. That being said, my own response to her tweet is this: my personal experience is that many liberal Pakistani & Indian Americans are highly nationalistic.

To be honest, it’s mostly Indian Americans. I don’t know too many hyper-nationalistic Pakistani Americans. I think that has to do with the fact that despite India’s social-political problems, its democratic and pluralist history, along with the international appeal of Mahatma Gandhi, makes it easier to be an Indian nationalist than a Pakistani nationalist if you are an American.

Also, there is a cultural “code-switching” that is common among Indian Americans, where they are fluent in, and totally embedded within, a Left-of-centre cultural zeitgeist in the American landscape. But, they also are comfortable switching into their parents’ more Indian nationalist views in different contexts. Rather than synthesizing the two worldviews (which may not be possible), Indian Americans just switch facultatively between the two, because the two social milieus never really engage each other.

Because I am Bangladeshi American it is hard for me to relate. Bangladesh is a very young nation. Both my parents have spent more than 3.5 times of their life living in the United States than an independent Bangladesh. In fact, both lived as Pakistanis for far longer than they lived as Bangladeshis! Additionally, it is not a major geopolitical player, and there are ambiguities with the relationship to both India and Pakistan enough that socially my family has felt comfortable with both Indians and Pakistanis in the USA.

P.S. I do get annoyed when I’m identified as Pakistani American by people just because of my last name. Since I am not vocal about being a “Bangladeshi American” I only find out later people had assumed I was Pakistani. Apparently, in some Indian circles, I am known as a “Pakistani American geneticist”, albeit not a particularly nationalistic Pakistani (told to me by an Indian journalist friend).

How English is taking Over

X.T.M · July 28, 2018 · 19 comments

De Swaan divides languages into four categories. Lowest on the pyramid are the “peripheral languages”, which make up 98% of all languages, but are spoken by less than 10% of mankind. These are largely oral, and rarely have any kind of official status. Next are the “central languages”, though a more apt term might be “national languages”.

These are written, are taught in schools, and each has a territory to call its own: Lithuania for Lithuanian, North and South Korea for Korean, Paraguay for Guarani, and so on.

Following these are the 12 “supercentral languages”: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swahili – each of which (except for Swahili) boast 100 million speakers or more. These are languages you can travel with. They connect people across nations. They are commonly spoken as second languages, often (but not exclusively) as a result of their parent nation’s colonial past.

Then, finally, we come to the top of the pyramid, to the languages that connect the supercentral ones. There is only one: English, which De Swaan calls “the hypercentral language that holds the entire world language system together”. The Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura similarly describes English as a “universal language” . For Mizumura, what makes it universal is not that it has many native speakers – Mandarin and Spanish have more – but that it is “used by the greatest number of non-native speakers in the world”. She compares it to a currency used by more and more people until its utility hits a critical mass and it becomes a world currency. The literary critic Jonathan Arac is even more blunt, noting, in a critique of what he calls “Anglo-Globalism”, that “English in culture, like the dollar in economics, serves as the medium through which knowledge may be translated from the local to the global.”

Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

This article seems a bit tired and the entire tone of the Guardian moaning the supremacy of the English language reminds me of the whole furore over white privilege, sometimes it’s simply an exultation that one has it.

Even though I’m writing this in English I don’t think English is taking over; it’s simply reflecting the Anglo-American supremacy from Queen Vic to QE (Trump represents the high water mark of this era).

As China grows in power; 1 point something billion Chinese aren’t going to magically shift to English. Furthermore beyond the Old Commonwealth (the White Dominions + US); English gains its prominence from its usage in the New Commonwealth (Africa & Asia).

One shouldn’t underestimate the importance of a Lingua Franca but neither extol or exaggerate its significance. Just as the Dollar can be easily replaced so can the English language.

As a final thought this is why my idea on Languages + Script = Civilisation is so important (if I say so myself).

Density of Cows Worldwide

X.T.M · July 28, 2018 · 23 comments

I have been wondering this the past week is that how and why did India become vegetarian. Was it simply a theological quirk or were there some geohistorical reasons for it (the cow was such an economic necessity that it made sense to forgo protein). Was it also an Aryan feature or Dravidian or does that question make no sense?

Another thought that came to mind was that would ancient Indians have been wealthier had they been avid meat-eaters. If there had been lesser resources to go around the population densities would have been lighter perhaps but of course this pales in comparison to bad leadership.

As an aside I definitely concede the fact that more often than not local leadership is almost always better for the population than foreign dynasties. Therefore Hindu dynasties probably were better for India than Muslim ones simply because India was home for the former. The Mughal’s great accomplishments were in art and architecture, which may be very well for posterity but didn’t make them a match for the modern age in contrast to the Safavids who built Iran into a successful nation state.

I would hazard that Ashoka was probably a better Emperor of India than Akbar simply because the former gifted the world India’s most successful export, blue-eyed Buddha (believe it or not the Buddha had blue eyes). We sometimes forget that Buddhism probably ranks as India’s greatest accomplishment in the wider world; it transformed all Eastern religions and became the dominant philosophical paradigm for so much of the ancient world. It’s reflective of Western bias that Indian academics and historians are more concerned with ancient India’s influence on the modern West; the Mitanni were a footnote in history compared to the great accomplishments of Indic civilisation in the East.

However the reason why I think India never really matched China in national identity, sovereignty and political cohesion (even when the Chinese were ruled by foreigners they still managed to maintain their cultural coherence to a very great and recognisable extent) is simply because of caste. The greatest faultline in South Asia, after creed, is caste and that made Indian society vulnerable to foreign despots. The court of Mughal Kings is littered with Brahmins and Rajputs and let’s not forget Urdu was an invention of Khatris and Kayasths. The Brits didn’t only come up with divide and rule; the fissures were inbuilt Into Indian society.. The Sikhs achieved the dominance they did was because they welded a caste-light community to achieve assabiyah, which the different children of Brahma frankly eschewed from time to time. This is something to thank Pakistan and the Muslims; they are such a galvanising force for Hindu society to reconsolidate and shed away such internal divisions..

Interesting Links:

Food Writer Becomes A Butcher To Better Understand The Value Of Meat

Pakistan elects first non-Muslim in modern history to general national assembly seat

Only catastrophe truly reduces inequality, according to a historical survey

Thoughts on the Open thread

X.T.M · July 28, 2018 · 1 comment

I thought I would share some of my thoughts on the open thread:

(1.) with regards to ethnicity; there is no doubt there is a post 1947 fork. For instance most Sindhi Hindus do not know that there are Sindhis in Pakistan and vice versa. Sindhi identity is super-strong to each religious group but it doesn’t transcend it.

(2.) It most likely has roots in pre-1947 where the Hindu minority (which was substantial) was the majority in the urban areas (I believe they were the majority in Karachi). As soon as Partition happened their role was essentially swapped for Urdu-speaking Muhajir. Sindhi Muslims are definitely not winners from Partition; Sindh has a whole suffered tremendously. The relocation of the capital from Karachi, for political reasons, was another blow to the province.

(3.) Ethnicity and religion have a start relationship in South Asia and guides most intermarriages. For instance I wouldn’t feel comfortable to marry a Muslim and my choice of marital partners were accordingly limited even though I’m ethnically from a much more Islamicate background. However I remember my Gujarati Ismaili boss telling me his mother was relieved that he was marrying a Gujarati (his wife was a Hindu) so that’s an instance where ethnicity trumped religion in marital preferences (the same goes for me; marrying another Bahai was not a priority for me).

(4.) with regards to Indian Muslim; my experiences are thus. When I go to India if I were to tell a Hindu I’m of Pakistani heritage while they may not hate me but they would be uncomfortable. It’s a bit like being African-American in the US; everyone loves Will Smith but not the kid from the ghetto. It’s a bit like that.

(5.) Of course I have noticed a stark generational divide in India; the uncles and aunties were Congress but the kids are now BJP. There is a latent Islamophobia coupled with Islamophilia; most Indians will interact and be close to Muslims at some point in their lives. Like all things it’s a complicated tapestry.

(6.) the difference between Indian Muslims and Indian Hindus (anecdotally) is their antipathy to Pakistan. It simply not there to the same extent among Indian Muslims; I’ll happily tell them that I’m of Pakistan descent whereas generally with Hindus I’ll tell them I’m Parsi-Persian simply to diffuse tensions. Vidhi calls this “dial the Muslim up, dial the Muslim down” and my best friend call me a chameleon but these are simply my observations.

(7.) Pakistan does hold a fascination for all Indians; it’s not simply just another country. The culture, the music, the heritage and the history have a particular pull on India so much antipathy is towards the State of Pakistan. Pakistan and the Indus have a strong weight on the immediate region simply because it is a border region between many different cultural zones. After Afghanistan got wrecked that exoticness shifted to Pakistan; however this is why I advocate AfPak confederation simply because two Stans are stronger than one. On a personal note I do think a SAARC Confederation is a way to go (Iran has a split identity since 30% of the country east of the two Dasht’s are tied in South and Central Asi) but initially various countries can couple up as a first step. Maybe instead of religious identity we should try Pan-Aryanism; whoops I think someone’s already tried that before ?

(8.) I think if India were to approach 10k USD per capital (with decent HDI & Gini coefficient) it would be a Asian hyperpower. It’s not only by virtue of her large population and economy but because the strong civilisational heritage can rapidly translate into global influence.

The Siraiki question

X.T.M · July 28, 2018 · 2 comments

Spats does give some good points that West Punjab (and by extension her Indus peripheries) were outside the pale of Vedas.

However the key question is the question of the Siraiki language.

* More than Urdu being an “Indian linguistic invasion” into the Indus; the Punjabi language also seems to be a Hindawi pushback from the East into the Lahnda speaking West.

* The remnants of Lahnda, which descends from the same Prakrit as Sindhi, are Hindko and Seraiki.

* In a way Lahore functions a bit like Delhi in diffusing a more Gangetic/Indic bias to the Indus region; one Seraiki leaning website claimed that the invading Sikhs brought Punjabi into the Punjab.

* The Punjab and Sindh are disproportionately influential provinces and “Seraikistan”/Bahawlapur would dramatically rebalance the federation (Pak Punjab hasn’t had its Haryana moment yet).

* The question of Gilgit-Baltistan, Hindko and Pathans in Baluchistan raise up more dilemmas as to provincial rebalance.

* The historic Indo-Gangetic axis, the GT road, is Kabul-Lahore-Delhi-Dhaka. Perhaps if our great British overlords had adopted a more sensible approach to the Subcontinent we could have seen many Indias based on these great cities. I don’t know what would have been equivalent cities in the South; Mysore, Hyderabad?

Some interesting links:

A language buried by Partition

WIKITONGUES: Lillotama speaking Seraiki

Morali Laal : A Hindu living in Pakistan

Reham Khan speaking Saraiki

The Seraiki Subai Bandwagon

Naya politics in South Asia

Vikram · July 27, 2018 · 16 comments

As an English medium Indian, for a while, I was taken in by the ‘corrupt politicians’ are the problem narrative. I thought that any news about them getting taught a lesson, losing power or even getting incarcerated was good news. For some other members of my class, it went much further. I remember reading news about a Bihar politician dying. But what I recall most is the frustration of the few commentators who actually knew about the politician’s work and were trying to pay homage to him, but getting overwhelmed by the ‘good riddance’ type comments most Indians of my type were expressing.

This narrative remains predominant in the English medium class in India even today. With a preponderance of STEM graduates, who are not accustomed to critical thinking and subjective analysis, the ‘great man’ narrative is easy to fall for when it comes to explaining (and solving) social problems. Every achievement is the result of a ‘stern’, ‘uncorrupt’ leader, while every shortcoming is because of ‘corrupt’ or ‘weak’ politicians.

The politics of newly politicized, upper middle class South Asian youth thus revolve around a ‘great man’. The manifestations of this are of course, Narendra Modi in India, and Imran Khan in Pakistan.

In India, with its deep levels of politicization, the influence of the upper middle class is not that great, but played no small part in getting Narendra Modi elected. Modi has moved things since he came to power, demonetisation, GST, RERA, insolvency act, ease of doing business and so on. But a Congress government with the same kind of mandate (a full majority) would have done exactly the same things, with the exception of demonetisation. More importantly, there isnt a single program or policy of the Congress that Modi has substantially altered, be it NREGA (hated by economic conservatives) or RTE (hated by extreme Hindutva folks).

Modi, like any smart politician knows that politics in a feudal and agrarian society like India revolves around patronage. And the key to this patronage is massive state spending on rural development, agrarian subsidies and government salaries. In every budget that the Modi government has presented, the proportion of spending on these patronage enabling items has remained unchanged from previous administrations. Corruption is simply the informal channel that actually makes this money trickle down.

In Pakistan, even though the proclivities of the English class are similar to their Indian counterparts, the situation is different. The scope for patronage spending is already constrained by the high budget demands of the army, its control of key economic sectors and the need to service existing debts. From this perspective, one can speculate that the conflict between Sharif and the army was a structural consequence of the demands of South Asian patronage politics on the one hand, and the vested interests of a small, but powerful group of people (the military). It is not clear what will enable Imran Khan to sidestep this reality. His party is filled with turncoats from other parties who know for sure that without patronage power, they dont stand a chance at getting reelected. But he does not seem to have the will or even the inclination to constrain the military.

Only an industrialized economy in which workers are less dependent on local strong men for employment and crisis-support can really alter things. Can kaptaan take Pakistan there faster than India ?

Pakistan General Elections 2018 – The Silver Linings:

X.T.M · July 27, 2018 · 29 comments

A friend of mine posted this to Facebook and I’m reproducing it below. It’s interesting that Pakistan has a FPTP, like the UK, US, India & Canada. That means that there’s an inbuilt bias for a 2-Party system. At any rate the below is an interesting read. Apparently a Shi’ite lady (PTI) beat a sectarian outfit.

-An absolutely brilliant and inspiring election campaign by Mohammad Jibran Nasir, where he refused to bow down to extremist pressure (ZackNote: he is a Shi’ite and has a bold stance on the Ahmediyya) and never once indulged in condemnation of any community or mud-slinging against any party. It won him 6,462 and 6,109 votes from NA-247 and PS-111 respectively, which in today’s political climate is a huge achievement.

-The first Hindu to be elected to the National Assembly on a general seat: PPP candidate Dr Mahesh Kumar Malani from Tharparkar (NA-222).

-Two leaders of the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement – Ali Wazir and Mohsin Dawar – winning National Assembly seats from South Waziristan and being able to represent the PTM in Parliament.

-Rana Sanaullah, Chaudhry Nisar and Maulana Fazal ur Rehman types being voted out. Just go now, bye.

-The overall underwhelming performance of religious parties such as Tehreek Labaik Pakistan despite all the pre-election hype they had created.

-An over 50% voter turnout despite the targeted attacks that killed three candidates in the election run-up and a suicide attack outside a polling station in Quetta on election day.

-Avoiding a hung Parliament, which would have meant further instability and focus away from governance in Pakistan.

–A stellar victory speech by Imran Khan, hitting all the right notes. Much cause for holding on to hope and a reminder of all the crucial work that is to be done.

Now onwards and upwards Pakistan ??️

FM

East Bengal/Pakistan catches up to West Bengal/Pakistan

Razib Khan · July 26, 2018 · 28 comments


Today I was looking on the internet to get some more information on the Pakistan election. Honestly, I don’t have a strong opinion….

But by chance, I ended up stumbling on articles like this, When East overtakes West:

…a recent article, “East overtakes West,” in The Economist has thrown a spanner in the works. The east is the erstwhile East Pakistan and the west is today’s Pakistan. It shows that the GDP per capita of Bangladesh is $1,538 and that of Pakistan lags behind at $1,470. This is the result of a GDP growth rate of over six per cent per annum in the past 12 years. One-third of the GDP is contributed by industry and the value-added garments exports are larger than India and Pakistan put together.

The truth is that Bangladesh’s better statistics in some measures are due to demographics. Per capita values will change in opposite directions if nation underestimated its population (as Bangladesh did), and another nation overestimated its population (as Pakistan did). Using PPP corrections and such Pakistan is still a more prosperous land per person. But it’s getting close. The trendline is definitely pointing in one direction. A piece at Brookings asks “Why is Bangladesh booming?” The author notes:

Once one of the poorest regions of Pakistan, Bangladesh remained an economic basket case—wracked by poverty and famine—for many years after independence in 1971. In fact, by 2006, conditions seemed so hopeless that when Bangladesh registered faster growth than Pakistan, it was dismissed as a fluke.

But I’ve always thought that the infant mortality and life expectancy statistics in Bangladesh were things that were more important to be proud of (and on this score Bangladesh does indisputably better than Pakistan). And curiously, on this measure, Bangladesh does even better than India! But to a great extent, that’s not a fair comparison, as India is a coalition of regions, while Bangladesh would just be a very populous Indian state.

More comparable is West Bengal. Bangladesh and West Bengal look to be at parity in terms of life expectancy and per capita GDP. And metropolitan Dhaka and Kolkotta now have about the same population, at ~15,000,000.

We live in interesting times.

Brown Pundits