Brown Pundits

These thoughts emerged as I was replying to the 100+ comments on Omar’s post, India and Pakistan, Back to the Future..

Flight, Fragility, and the First Bollywood Snake

My first memories of Pakistan are tangled with flight and childhood fiction. In 1990, as we escaped Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion, our car crossed into Pakistani Baluchistan carrying five adults and three children. After over a month in Iran (the family gardens of Shiraz are a blurry childhood memory), where we were understandably low-key about being Bahá’ís, I remember yelling out the car window the moment we crossed the border, “I’m Bahá’í! I’m Bahá’í!” My family laughed (I was the youngest and always the most impetuous). The story has been retold so often I don’t know where memory ends and performance begins.

But the innocence of that moment gave way quickly. I remember the poverty at the border: raw, overwhelming on both sides of Baluchistan. And then, in Karachi, came my first exposure to India—through a Bollywood film featuring a dancing girl in a Sari transforming into a snake. That, more than any textbook, was my introduction to Hinduism. Try as it might, Pakistan is the ineffable portal to Hindustan, a mirror that reflects what it cannot contain. These memories—flight, fragility, and fantasy—etched into me the idea that culture moves where politics cannot.

Restraint Is the Strategy: Rethinking Peace in South Asia

South Asia is home to nearly 2 billion people. It’s a region of nuclear states, frozen conflicts, and postcolonial trauma. Yet every time a cross-border terrorist attack kills 20 or 30 civilians, it makes global headlines. That’s not just because of the violence—but because the violence is rare. This isn’t an excuse. It’s a signal: South Asia has already learned restraint. The question is whether it can remember why.

The Bug in the Democratic Mind

After 9/11, the U.S. was angry. George W. Bush gave the people what they wanted: a war. Two, actually. Instead of a tactical mission to dismantle a terrorist network, America destabilized entire regions, wasted trillions, and incubated future threats.

This is the paradox of democracy:

• Populations demand retribution.

• Leaders comply.

• Strategy is hijacked by spectacle.

India must adopt a radically different approach. Treat Pakistan the way South Korea treats North Korea: sidestep, outperform, outgrow. Engagement legitimizes provocation. Retaliation restores parity. Indifference signals dominance. Continue reading Let Pakistan Throw Stones. India Should Build the Skyline.

Notes on Identity, Gharbzadegi, and the Azizam Effect

Yesterday, a Persian friend casually asked me if I was Sri Lankan. I wasn’t offended. Startled, yes — but not offended. I take pride in being Desi. And truthfully, there isn’t a stark difference between many South Asian and Persian phenotypes at the human level. But the interaction stayed with me.

Because while I can understand a Scandinavian confusing Indians and Iranians — my Danish friend, for example, couldn’t reliably tell them apart — it hits differently when Persians, especially non-Muslim, Westernised Persians, make the same mistake.

Immediately, another half-Indian, half-Iranian friend interjected:

“Zach doesn’t look Sri Lankan at all.”

For what it’s worth, when I was in Colombo over New Year’s, I fell in love with Sri Lanka — the island, the people, the everything. Also the phenotype range in Sri Lanka is extensive since there is so Dutch, Portuguese & Moorish ancestry in addition to the native ones. Some Sri Lankans even thought I was Sri Lankan myself. Truly, it is Serendib.

Continue reading Are You Sri Lankan?

Six years ago, I wrote an outraged post on BP when a British historian casually claimed that “the British created India” (we had a very thriving commentariat then); a breathtaking erasure of one of the world’s oldest civilizations.

Today, reading Francis Pike’s piece in The Spectator, I feel the same cold disdain. Pike repeats the same old colonial fantasy: that India was a “patchwork of principalities,” and that Nehru and Gandhi “invented” the myth of Indian unity. Let’s be clear: this is not history. It’s imperial nostalgia dressed up as analysis.

“India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Mahatma Gandhi both propagated the myth that India had always been a unified country.”

“More reflective commentators knew that this was hogwash.”

“It was the British who… for the first time introduced the rule of law and a democratic form of government.”

This is colonial gaslighting at its most refined. Continue reading The Myth of the British-Made India

May those who lost their lives in the Pahalgam tragedy rest in peace. May the injured find swift healing. And may the perpetrators be brought to justice.

False Flags, Fragile Ideologies, and the Weight of History

I don’t want to take away from Omar’s excellent piece, India and Pakistan: Back to the Future—he nailed it on the trajectory of Pakistan’s self-conception and the road ahead for India.

But what began as a comment evolved into something more. I wanted to briefly address the misinformed murmurings online about the attack on Pahalgam being a false flag.

Caesar’s Wife

There’s an old line: Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion. If you want to be taken seriously on the world stage, perception is half the battle. India has a clear civilizational and national narrative. Despite its contradictions, it’s attempting—seriously—to join the ranks of the U.S. and China. And it’s making real progress.

Pakistan, by contrast, seems increasingly defined by what it opposes rather than what it builds. Its civilizational narrative has, over time, narrowed into a single impulse: block India at any cost. There are dozens of Muslim-majority nations. But there is only one India. That asymmetry matters—culturally, strategically, metaphysically.

Zia’s Logic: Annihilation as Strategy

One quote making the rounds—attributed to General Zia-ul-Haq—offers a glimpse into a mindset that’s still disturbingly prevalent: Continue reading Caesar’s Pakistani wife must be above suspicion

Sathnam Sanghera recently alluded to a moment from his 2019 Channel 4 documentary The Massacre That Shook the Empire. In it, the great-granddaughter of General Dyer, the man responsible for the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, is brought face-to-face with descendants of the victims.

In the clip, Dyer’s descendant calls the massacre victims “looters” and praises her great-grandfather as an “honourable man.” Twitter was predictably outraged. KJo chimed in. Think-pieces bloomed.

But why does her opinion matter?

This wasn’t justice, it was television. And like most televised reckonings with Empire, it was a performance. One more entry in the growing archive of aspirational brown catharsis, where the goal is not transformation but temporary relief; therapy instead of revolution.

Yes, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre was horrifying. No one disputes that. But to repeatedly stage these moments of inherited guilt and symbolic outrage is to substitute emotional spectacle for actual change.

Britain is not closer to redress. The Commonwealth isn’t inching toward reparations. British Asians are not about to own a fairer share of land, institutions, or equity. But we are expected to feel healed by the awkward mutterings of a descendant who’s not even sorry; just embarrassed that another cousin openly defended their ancestor.

This is not about historical accountability. It is about managing the mood of postcolonial subjects. Keep us emotional. Keep us visible. Keep us grateful.

But don’t give us power.

That is the unspoken logic of these curated moments: mourn the wound, not the cause.

And it works — because so many of us still seem to want respect more than justice. To be seen, included, affirmed.

But history will not be rewritten through awkward Channel 4 moments. It will only be reckoned with through real structural change.

Until then, let the Twitter mobs rage. But some of us will remain quietly asking the harder question:

What are we really performing here?