The tragedy of Pakistan

Pakistan has spent its entire life trying to be an answer to an Indian fringe. The end result has been chronic political instability, retarded economic growth and shambolic human development. In its deluded and inexplicable search to be an answer to extreme right wing Hindus, Pakistan has been egged on by both the US and China. The superpowers have had their own strategic and political interests at heart, and Pakistan has been a victim of their cynical and self serving maneuvers.

Pakistan should take a leaf out of its Muslim counterparts to think about its relations with India. UAE, Saudi, Oman and Bangladesh all have excellent relations with India. Indonesia, the largest Muslim country on earth provides visa on arrival to Indians (but not to Pakistanis). Iran trades with India in Indian rupees. Afghan cricketers are feted as heroes in the IPL. All this is with a right wing party in power in Delhi for nearly a decade. Yet Pakistan clings to its self anointed role as the shield to India’s right wing.

Pakistan’s own history should remind it that extreme political movements (left, right, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Communist etc) eventually become a bigger problem for the communities that breed them.

On the Great Mughals: Indian or not?

The above are portraits of Akbar the Great and his grandson Shah Jahan that date to about 1630. Akbar had died about 25 years before the portrait, but its likeness seems close to how he was described by his relatives; fair-skinned and with a definite East Asian cast to his features. Akbar’s mother was ethnically Persian, while his father was mostly of Turco-Mongol background. Shah Jahan, in contrast, looks typical for a North Indian noble. This is reasonable because three of his grandparents were Hindu Rajputs. Only Akbar himself was not ethnically Indian.

But they say do not judge a book by its cover. A stylized fact of the Mughals at their peak is that from Akbar, to Jehangir, to Shah Jahan and finally Aurangzeb, there was a progressive ratcheting up in the power and influence of Sunni orthodoxy in the inner circle of the court. The 100 years after the reign of Akbar can be seen a series of victories by international Sunni institutions like the Naqsbandi order. This integration into a broader Islamic world can even be seen in Shah Jahan’s choice of Muntaz Mahal, an ethnic Persian of recent immigrant background, as his primary consort.

I think of these things sometimes because periodically there are outbreaks of argument about whether the Mughals were Indian or colonizers on the internet, and the two sides are extremely reductive and stark. This makes sense since it’s all rhetoric. But often they collapse and erase the texture.

One thing that is important to note is that it does seem clear that the Mughal conquest of India saw a deeper integration of India into the Islamic world than the period of the Delhi Sultanate and its successor states. Though many of these states were of Turco-Iranian origin, and cultivated Persian high culture, they were not as coherent or focused in their ideology as the Mughal Empire that succeeded them (during the Bengal Sultanate that Bengali did become a language at court). India had long been seen as a land of opportunity for Muslim adventures, but the Mughals systematized it, encouraging the migration of Iranians, especially Sunnis fleeing a newly Shia state, into its civil administration and Afghans and Turkic Central Asians into its military.

India’s lost decades: A failure of discourse

Plot of world gdp growth versus Indian gdp growth

There is much historical work on the Indian economy under British rule. The top line summary is indicated in the graph above, while the world grew quickly from 1800 to 1950 (per capita gdp more than tripling), India stayed exactly where it was. Plenty of reasons have been offered, but India’s troubles in this time come down to two reasons:

  1. A lack of natural resources necessary for industrial growth.
  2. British racial attitudes that deemed Indians unworthy of human investment.

The period I am more interested is the time between 1965 and 1982. The world experienced a surge in output in this time. South Korea went from around the same GDP per capita as India, to 7 times India’s output.

 

Swastika: Good Fortune? or Nazi Hate Symbol?

Amish Tripathi is an author who also has a popular youtube channel where he regularly posts videos about aspects of Hinduism/Dharma. I happened to run across the above video and wanted to start a discussion about the topic, and about how “pro-Hindu” (or if you prefer, pro-Indic) influencers tend to address this question and if that approach can be improved.

 

Brown Pundits