Bombay Badshah is on vanvas. He earned it. He posted, in passing, personal details of another commenter, which he should never have been examining. He was warned, apologised, and is now serving his time in the forest. Lord Ram took Sita and Lakshman with him for fourteen years. BB is taking the IPL and Dhurandhar reruns for ten days. The proportions are different. The principle is the same. You leave the city when you have offended its order.
This is not a defence of him. It is the opposite. BP must be a safe space for reader, commenter and author. Privacy is the precondition of opinion. If a person cannot post under a handle without a hostile interlocutor looking them up, the room collapses into a lower kind of theatre. We do not run that kind of room.
Engrained Hinduphobia
But his exile is also the moment to say the thing we have been postponing. Hindus on this site have a real grievance, and it has accumulated because the language of liberal discourse equips one side of the argument with a vocabulary the other side does not have. Islamophobia is an institutional word. Hinduphobia is still scratching at the door. The asymmetry shapes every thread:
The Shijrah and the Y-Chromosome
A sequel to “Arab Fathers are not fabrications (entirely)“
The previous post answered BB. The comment thread produced an objection from Q, who concedes the cultural point and grants that Sayyid status mattered, then argues that Y-DNA is unreliable because Central Asian Sufism accepted matrilineal Sayyid descent and that South Asian Sayyids are 95 per cent autosomally local in any case. BB and Q essentially reach the same conclusion by different routes.
The mother’s status
Hinduism and Christianity both carry the mother’s status as load-bearing. Varna purity is bilineal, and the maternal line is policed: pratiloma unions, where a lower-status man fathers a child on a higher-status woman, are catastrophic in Manusmriti. The Christian veneration on the Virgin runs the same logic by inversion. A story of “foreign father, local mother” collapses status in both systems, so it gets erased. Brahmin origin narratives almost never claim foreign paternity.
Islam does not police the maternal line the same way. The line is the father’s, and a slave concubine’s son inherits paternal status undiluted. The eleventh Imam was the son of a Nubian concubine. The Abbasid caliphs from the mid-period onward were almost all sons of Turkic, Greek, Berber, or Slavic mothers. Classical fiqh weighs maternal lineage in kafa’ah and in some legitimacy disputes, but that is stratification, not pollution metaphysics.
The same asymmetry produced two radically different slavery histories. In the Atlantic system, partus sequitur ventrem fixed the child to the mother’s status; the descendants of African slaves remained enslaved and congealed into a marked descendant class. In the Islamic system, the child of an African concubine inherited his father’s status as a free Muslim; the descendants assimilated into the general population over generations. The genetics ratify the divergence: Sub-Saharan ancestry is diffused across Arabian, Iranian, and Turkish populations rather than concentrated in a separated descendant community.
Hence the asymmetric record. Mappilas, the Hadhrami diaspora, the Swahili coast all preserve foreign paternal lineage, and the Y-DNA converges with the claim. Arab nasab tradition demands at least ten generations of fathers in living recall.
Shia and Sunni Sayyids
India is Not a “Muslim Power”
In the comments on “Pakistanis=Indian Muslims With Sovereignty”, BB argued that India is a “Muslim Power”. This is a patently ridiculous argument but it merits a full rebuttal.
The simple fact is that India is NOT a Muslim country. India is 80% Hindu. Muslims are a minority (approximately 15%). India is a constitutionally secular state. So under no reasonable definition is India a “Muslim Power”.
Pakistan is the world’s second-largest Muslim-majority country. It is projected that within five years it will overtake Indonesia to become the world’s most populous Muslim country. Additionally, Pakistan is the only Muslim-majority nuclear power. Finally, Pakistan is an “Islamic Republic”.
This argument is so blatantly ridiculous and disingenuous that I can’t believe this clarification is even necessary. But here we are.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to clarify my exchange with El Khawaja. He argued that “Pakistanis are Pakistani and that’s it”. I disagree with this position. I am as patriotic as the next Pakistani but this quote expresses the belief of the State — a belief I argue is fundamentally wrong.
Post the loss of East Pakistan in 1971, the Pakistani State has doubled down on the belief that we are all “Pakistanis first”. The argument goes that if people are allowed to identify as “Punjabi”, “Sindhi” etc this may lead to secession. This is obviously a red line for the State. Thus, the introduction of “Pak Studies”, a course that all students must take from primary school through their undergraduate studies.
However, this indoctrination has not served to lessen people’s feelings of being “Punjabi”, “Sindhi” etc.
It would be much healthier if the Pakistani State accepted that Pakistan is a multi-ethnic–NOT multinational– country.
Seccession is not a realistic possibility since Pakistan is a nuclear power. So I think the State’s worries on this ground are overblown.
The efforts of BB (and to some extent RNJ) to undermine the Pakistani identity and classify us as “Indian” are patently obvious and not intellectually tenable.
However, I do believe that my compatriots also go too far and try to downplay the links that Pakistan has with the “Indian subcontinent”.