Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Masoud Pezeshkian sat in the same hall in Delhi this morning while an American fleet blockaded Iran’s coast.

Narendra Modi opened the 18th BRICS summit at Bharat Mandapam by saying the grouping is “not against anyone“. Xi had landed a few hours earlier, on his first visit to India in seven years. Prabowo Subianto came for Indonesia, the country that hosted Bandung. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi came for Egypt. The UAE was in the room, and so was Iran, which the UAE cut off from trade and finance in August after Iranian missiles landed on Emirati soil.

The New Delhi Declaration went to the wire because Tehran and Abu Dhabi both dug in. It passed on the first day. Pezeshkian said on his way to Delhi that the BRICS bank exists to free countries from the dollar. Modi used his closing remarks to say that outdated institutions cannot steer a changed world. Two men in one building, each alluding to the same hopes from a GS (Goldman Sachs) derived acronym for GS (Global Southern) based organisation (the irony). BRICS is the new non-aligned movement reborn except there is now only one hegemony to be non-aligned against.

The hurried decapitation that failed

On 28 February the United States and Israel struck Iran. Regime change was the stated aim. Ali Khamenei died in the strikes. In January, protests had spread across the country with Washington’s open encouragement. By every Western model the Islamic Republic should have fallen by March. It did not. Mojtaba Khamenei is Supreme Leader. Pezeshkian is in Delhi.

Iranians are suffering greatly. The rial was in free fall before the first bomb. But the state survived a killed leader, an uprising and a naval blockade. The Islamic Republic was never plugged into the global economy the way Dubai or Riyadh is. Sanctions since 1979 had already cut most of what could be cut. Iran came into this war poorer for it, and harder to shock. The sanctions built a fortress by accident, and in 2026 the fortress seems to have held.

The failed ceasefire that was made in Islamabad

Pakistan brokered the first pause on 8 April. JD Vance and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf then sat across a table in Islamabad, the highest direct contact between the two states since 1979. The talks failed, the blockade came, and the talking carried on. On 12 June Shehbaz Sharif announced the final text. On 14 June Vance and Ghalibaf signed it electronically. On 17 June Donald Trump signed it at dinner with Emmanuel Macron at Versailles, Pezeshkian signed in Tehran, and Sharif’s name went on it as well. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt helped in the wings. The document has fourteen points, runs to a page and a half by Vance’s own description, and is called the Islamabad Memorandum. A billboard in Islamabad showed Sharif and Asim Munir under the words “the nation is grateful“. Now Asim Munir wants to spend that dividend on a 28th Amendment that redraws the provinces of Pakistan.

Trump declared it over on 8 July after Iran fired on ships in Hormuz. It lapsed in August. On 3 September Iranian missiles hit bases in Kuwait and the UAE, and Vance told reporters he would not call it a war.

Twenty-five years ago this week Pakistan was told it was with the United States or against it, and it chose the only option on offer. In 2026 the same state wrote the ceasefire between the United States and Iran and signed it as a party. Pakistan was one of the five governments that convened Bandung in 1955. It took seventy-one years to act like one.

On the eve of 9/11 the United States stood at the height of its prestige and its power. Twenty-five years on, misadventures in the Greater Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran) have cost it both.

The Ummah’s quarrels are its own

The UAE has severed Iran. Iranian missiles have hit Riyadh and the Ras Tanura refinery, and Saudi jets have quietly struck launch sites inside Iran and militias in Iraq. On 8 September the Houthis hit oil facilities in the Saudi south and wounded 73 people.

Hormuz is near shut, so Saudi crude had been leaving through Yanbu on the Red Sea, about five million barrels a day. On Thursday drones launched from Iraq hit the pipeline that feeds Yanbu, and on Friday Riyadh shut it. Regional officials say the Houthis helped plan the strike. The Houthis now hold Yemen’s whole western coast and Mayun island in Bab al-Mandeb, the exit for whatever Yanbu still ships (Asir, Jizan and Najran were Yemen until the Treaty of Taif in 1934).

Pakistan, bound to Riyadh by the defence pact the two signed last September, stands with the Saudis on paper and hosts Tehran’s negotiators in person.

This is what post-coloniality looks like from inside. The old order gave Muslim states two roles, client and target. In 2026 they are choosing their own enemies. The right to fight each other without permission is a poor kind of freedom, and it is the only kind any post-colonial state has ever started with. India and Pakistan can confirm.

The West’s favourite non-Western power

On 17 June, the day Trump signed the Islamabad Memorandum at Versailles, Modi was at the G7 in Evian shaking his hand. India can do that. India can dissent from the West and stay inside the system. Iran cannot. Rajiv Bhatia, a former Indian ambassador, described Delhi’s BRICS posture this week as non-Western rather than anti-Western, and the phrase is exact. India chairs BRICS, thanks Xi for his support, buys Russian oil and stays welcome in the G7. Chietigj Bajpaee at Chatham House reads the last year as Delhi reinvesting in other relationships after strains with Trump. Reinvesting is a banker’s word.

India’s post-coloniality is licensed. It was earned at Bandung. The Ummah’s version is unlicensed, and it is paid for in a Hormuz that nobody controls. The rivalry in that hall was between two kinds of post-colonial, the approved and the unapproved.

Taste follows power

Post-coloniality arrives in stages: foreign policy first, then war, then aspiration, then taste. The elites of the Muslim world remain, in Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s word from 1962, gharbzadeh, westoxicated. I use the Persian because English has nothing as precise. The condition now lives in wardrobes and holiday plans rather than in parliaments. Modernity was sold to the global South as a lifestyle, and the lifestyle was measured by the ability to spend August in Paris.

The condition is most acute in the small Gulflet states the Great Powers dreamt up. The Arab states, which could have been one nation, were splintered instead and taught to take their taste from Western high culture. This may change.

A Saudi family that spends €15,000 in Paris can spend €5,000 in Istanbul and may have a better holiday culturally. Istanbul and Sarajevo already fill with Gulf families every summer. When enough of the South reroutes its August, the West stops being the place you arrive at once you have made it. London luxury houses already depend on Chinese, Gulf and Indian buyers. The hall in Delhi this morning was the political half of that switch. The shopping bag half is coming. Gharbzadegi ends at a till in Istanbul.

So they need to integrate their economies into the Global, not antagonise either China or the US, and somehow weave in traditionalism.

Israel, India, which have very long democratic traditions and also see themselves as “Great Powers” seem to have a more grandiose foreign policy. Israel seems to have swung, reputation wise, in a single generation.

I’m just spitballing here. Of course India is on the scale of the EU, US, China & Russia in terms of geopolitical heft but as girmits says, India also *sees* itself that way.

The comment thread went bezerk after last night’s post but I guess the Commentariat enjoyed themselves?

Pakistan’s GDP is about $400 billion while India’s is around $4 trillion. Since the ratio of their economies has stayed roughly constant for decades, their nominal growth rates should be similar from the 1960s onwards.

So why has India pulled ahead in GDP per capita? The reason is simple. Pakistan’s high fertility has driven population growth faster than India’s. In 1952 Pakistan had about one-tenth of India’s population; by 2025 it had grown to nearly one-seventh.

The other explanation why Pakistan finds it easier to maintain the status quo is that it is located in a geopolitically sweet spot. It can extract geopolitical rents from the US. It’s location close to Afghanistan is strategically important and the US has used many Pakistani airbase.

Thanks 0M for the article.

Also as fair warning to the Commentariat, Flame Threads will be put down and any violator will have fines ranging from mass comment deletion to revocation of Author Rights. Say what you like but tread carefully in how you say it since I did want to write on White Intellectuals hogging the “South Asian” space after Indosaurus’s excellent piece on the Great Gandhi but this just tumbled out)

Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Mohsin Naqvi, told an Islamabad seminar last week that the country’s 80-year-old governance system has “collapsed” and that Pakistan needs new provinces. A day later the DG ISPR called on the parties to consider an “administrative reset.” This week Naqvi assured the press that Shehbaz Sharif will serve his full five years; while standing by every word about the destroyed system, and reprising, for good measure, his claim to the biggest scam in Pakistan’s history: judges, bureaucrats, politicians and bankers, all implicated, an inventory that conspicuously omits one institution. The scam has an address, One Constitution Avenue, a two-decade property saga Naqvi has been prosecuting in public since May; the individuals remain nameless, naturally.

Naqvi is a Husayni Sayyid, the surname is the pedigree, claimed descent from the Tenth Imam, which makes us cousins by caste, and at present the unluckiest good Shia boy in the Islamic Republic: sent out to fly the Deep State’s kite and left to absorb the fire alone.

The PPP demands his resignation; Khawaja Asif suggests he reset his own ministry first; Raza Rabbani reminds everyone that the disease is constitutional violation, not cartography.

A Coup is surplus to requirements

My read: there will be no coup, because the Army no longer needs one.

Since the May ’25 war, a war Naqvi lists among the government’s achievements, “won” and all Asim Munir carries the Field Marshal’s baton under the Twenty-Seventh Amendment: the rank permanent, the immunity lifelong, the command secured to 2030 and extendable. He enjoys a genuine measure of popularity at home and a working line to Trump abroad (though the diplomatic dramatics are not his monopoly; Shehbaz has cultivated that relationship with some skill of his own). An institution in this position does not send tanks to the PTV building. Coups are expensive: they cost legitimacy abroad and deniability at home.

What Rawalpindi has learned is that informal supremacy is fragile and formal seizure is expensive; constitutional guardianship is the durable middle. The Twenty-Seventh Amendment is not a retreat into shadow, quite the opposite: supremacy made juridical, public, permanent.

The Iranian lesson

Iran is the model here not for its theology but for its architecture; a guardian centre embedded in the constitution, an elected state kept on stage to absorb blame and supply legitimacy, power that never again depends on winning anything.

Once the throne is legal, the day-to-day hand can withdraw from view, and in this the Army has a tutor the Pasdaran never had: its own ISI. Authority formalised, operations deniable. Visible power depreciates; hidden power compounds.

Four instruments:

(1.) The constitutional squeeze. New provinces, “administrative resets,” and the six months Naqvi reportedly allowed for the system to be sorted out, which Archer read it as a notice period served on the civilian administration. On deeper reflection it is not a paranoid reading. Redraw the map, dilute the Punjab and Sindh dynasts, all under colour of law. This is a measure I support and wrote on in my Princely piece.

(2.) The cockroach revolt. Naqvi invoked the cockroaches as a warning, not a recipe, the dismissed young uniting to overturn an order that offers them neither merit nor work, and Aijazuddin already has a column on the breeding of them.

Rawalpindi has summoned crowds before, and the Faizabad judgment recorded whose hand was on the tap. A Dhaka-style reset is far easier to encourage than to end, ask Sheikh Hasina, which is why this stays Plan B.

(3.) The Imran card. Only one institution can bring Khan out of Adiala, and it would do so on its own terms but the true objection is not that crowds are unsteerable. It is that Khan may be impossible to domesticate a second time; the card may no longer belong to the hand that holds it. That the establishment can afford to keep him inside, and keep the option open, is itself the measure of its confidence.

(4.) The formal coup. Least likely because least necessary. Why seize what you already hold?

The civilians will comply, because they must. The PML-N and PPP of 2026 are not the mass movements of the 1990s; they are heritage brands with shrinking congregations, and the young have gone to Imran. Parties that cannot win the street need the garrison more than the garrison needs them. Yet it is a bargain, not a surrender: office, patronage and protection from the street flow one way; a lectern, an election and diplomatic cover flow back. The hybrid persists because each side holds what the other lacks. Consent of the weak, convenience of the strong.

Regency, not rupture.

Let a thousand Lotus flowers bloom on Mother Indus; sincerely, and not as the Chairman meant it. (RNJ may keep pining for his desi Deng in the meantime.)

Tomorrow, Andy Burnham will be sworn in as Britain’s seventh prime minister in ten years. Keir Starmer resigned ten years, almost to the week, after the Brexit referendum. The CNN piece I read over breakfast had all but reconciled Britain to middle power status, and nobody in London seems to find the phrase strange anymore. Britain will have had seven prime ministers this decade. India has had one since 2014.

Everything I have been thinking about this week turns out to be the same question at different scales. The state of India. The state of Britain. The state of my own small republic of letters. What does continuity buy, and what does churn cost? Delhi will not let me put the question down.

Oh, could I have one more? Yes, please. Thank you. My fourth cup of sambar. Right now, it is sublime.

South Indian meals are, I always say, like Arabic food: a very good balance of taste and health, neither sacrificed to the other.

Ghalib at the Airport

The first thing that met me in Delhi was Ghalib. His line is the city’s standing epigraph: Ik roz apni rooh se poocha, ki Dilli kya hai? To yun jawab mein keh gaye: yeh duniya mano jism hai aur Dilli uski jaan. I asked my soul, what is Delhi? It replied: the world is the body, and Delhi its life. My own origins are in Delhi. Coming in past the airport and the diplomatic enclave, the couplet does not read as nostalgia. It reads as a forecast. The airport connects this city to everywhere; the enclave fills everyone with the Ghost of Lutyen; Delhi, in a way, is the soul of the world, and the capital of a fledgling superpower.

Did Modi make India great again?

The Quantum of Greatness

In 2013-14, India was roughly the eleventh largest economy in the world. The government’s end-of-year review for 2025 declared it the fourth, at 4.18 trillion dollars, past Japan, behind only the United States, China and Germany. The government, for its part, projects 7.3 trillion dollars by 2030 and Germany overtaken within three years.

Every forecaster of consequence, the IMF, the World Bank, Moody’s, S&P, Fitch, the ADB, puts Indian growth for 2026 somewhere between 6.2 and 7.4 per cent, the fastest of any major economy, and has done for years. That is the continuity dividend in its purest form: eleven consecutive budgets from the same government, no coalition collapse mid-reform, no Truss interlude, no markets pricing in the next resignation. Compounding is boring. That is rather the point. Britain’s decade was interesting.

The State That Builds

Scale is the headline; state capacity is the story. The dullest subject in political economy is the one this decade most changed. The Indian state learned to deliver things.

Take the payment rails first, because they are taped to the counter of this restaurant. The QR code beside the till, is a terminal of the largest instant-payment system on earth. UPI now carries roughly 49 per cent of the world’s real-time payment volume, about 85 per cent of India’s digital payments, some 66 crore transactions every day, and has grown twelve-thousand-fold in a decade. The IMF calls it the global benchmark. Frenchmen and Emiratis can pay through it.

The physical plumbing kept pace with the digital. On the government’s count the country’s airports have roughly doubled since 2014, from 74 to about 160; one of them greeted me with Ghalib. The national highway network has grown by more than half, from about 91,000 kilometres to about 146,000, at a construction pace that touched 30-odd kilometres a day. More than half a billion bank accounts were opened for people who had never had one; an identity number now covers more than a billion; cooking gas, toilets and piped water reached crores of rural households through delivery machinery that mostly works, which in India is the miracle. And in 2023 Chandrayaan-3 put a lander near the lunar south pole, the first country to manage it, on a budget smaller than a Hollywood film’s.

The World Comes to Delhi

The diplomatic enclave I drove past is multi-alignment made concrete. This is a capital that sits in the Quad with Washington and Tokyo, photographs itself at the SCO with Moscow and Beijing, and sees no contradiction. It bought Russian crude at scale through Western displeasure, took Washington’s tariffs last August over exactly that, and kept buying. It hosted the G20 in 2023 and used the chair to walk the African Union into permanent membership, a fact Africa remembers. It signed a trade pact with the Emirates and built a Hindu temple in Abu Dhabi. Its diaspora is the world’s largest and remits well north of 100 billion dollars a year, the biggest such flow on the planet.

And it has shown reach of the harder kind. Fourteen months ago, after the Pahalgam massacre, Operation Sindoor sent Indian strikes across the border at terror infrastructure. We wrote about Sindoor at length at the time, and I will not relitigate the doctrine here. The point is a state willing to accept escalation risk in pursuit of deterrence, and an arms industry that noticed. Defence exports were 686 crore rupees in 2013-14. In the financial year just ended they touched 38,424 crore, a record, up 63 per cent in a single year, going to more than 80 countries, with the public-sector yards’ exports up 151 per cent in the year after Sindoor. The defence budget itself has grown from 2.5 lakh crore to 6.8 lakh crore across the decade. One may like or dislike what that buys. It is not the balance sheet of a middle power.

Here comes my filter coffee. Thank you. Thank you.

Steelmaning our arguments

The fourth largest economy is also, per head, a poor country: around 140th in the world in per capita terms. The growth is real and its distribution is lopsided; consumption tells a K-shaped story; manufacturing’s share of output has sat stubbornly in the mid-teens through a decade of Make in India, which is why the jobs question will not go away no matter how many airports open.

The institutional column is darker. In April, Reporters Without Borders ranked India 157th of 180 countries for press freedom, down six places in a year, in the category the index calls very serious, citing the judicial harassment of independent media through defamation and national security statutes. V-Dem has filed India under electoral autocracy since 2021. The investigative agencies show a durable appetite for opposition politicians. Defenders answer with turnout and with the fact that power still changes hands, and they are not wrong: in 2024 the voters themselves pruned Modi’s majority, and he has governed since in coalition, dependent on allies in Andhra and Bihar. Uncontested was always the wrong word for this tenure. Undisplaced is the right one.

And undisplaced keeps being renewed. Two months ago the BJP won West Bengal, the state it could never crack, taking 207 of 294 seats on a turnout of about 94 per cent, the highest ever recorded in an Indian election, with Mamata Banerjee losing her own seat in Bhabanipur to Suvendu Adhikari, who now governs the state. The first right-wing government in Bengal’s history, in the old citadel of the Left. The pollsters missed it by more than fifty seats. Whatever this dominance is, gravity or greatness or something less lovely, the electorate keeps voting for its continuation.

From We to I

But since Ruchira’s passing, I want to be more personal in my connections and more intentional about what Brown Pundits is for. I try not to meditate too much on the blog, and then I do, and it becomes a little autobiographical. That is the truth of it: in our constructs, we put so much of ourselves into it.

The Last Vestige of the Blogosphere

We are in a post-factionalism phase, and it has clarified something for me. Building a community matters more to me than building a rival to the Juggernaut, or whatever. We are the last vestige of that era of the Brown Blogging Dynasts and that is not nothing.

Why, in an essay whose title contains Modi, am I spending words on a blog?

What a decade of continuity does for a state, a community does for a small republic of letters. Britain churns prime ministers; the internet churned its communities; both lost something they have never properly priced. Brown Pundits is my love letter to India perhaps..

What Twitter Ate

There was something idiosyncratic and very homely about the early days of the internet. People could know each other. Twitter ate that world. Brown Pundits, in a way, should preserve it: keep a room where it survives away from predatory capitalism of the trillionaire class.

The Line between a Person and their Ideas

Keeping such a room requires a rule, and I have been meditating on the exchange between online safety and precedent. The rule is simple. Individuals must and always should be respected; there is never an excuse for crossing that line. Ideas enjoy no such immunity. Not all opinions and beliefs need to be respected. They should not be flagrantly disrespected, but they can be actively questioned.

Brown Pundits started as a diaspora blog. We look at things from a perspective of Western values, especially on gender.

DLV is an academic powerhouse; why should I yearn for a traditional Patriarchy, where that would be denied to her? The deeper point is that difficult conversations can happen without anyone being diminished.

Velocity and Quality

I have stopped caring how active the comment threads are. If you want high velocity, there was a time when the threads ran to 200 comments a day. That is a very different quality of conversation. Different, not better. This blog is about good quality writing, and quality does not scale the way velocity does.

Two Thousand and Two Thousand

My newsletter grew to a considerable height: roughly 2,000 subscribers, against the blog’s 2,000 readers a day. Readers replied to the newsletter (Ruchira used to). But I do not know why Brown Pundits always grabs my attention. On the blog you get the stimulus of the community, and community is everything at the end of the day. There are those who remember you, and you who remember them.

Middle Power, Great Power

Britain is reconciling herself, in the pages of CNN, to being a middle power, and her political culture has made the reconciliation easy to believe: a resignation ritual so familiar that the staff know where to stand on the pavement. The enclave I drove past was laid out by an empire that once audited its Indian possessions from London; the auditors’ successors now count their own prime ministers by the decade.

India, meanwhile, under a tenure, a reign really, that has run undisplaced since 2014, pruned in 2024, renewed in Bengal in 2026, is being asked the opposite question: is she becoming a great power?

Did Modi make India great again?  I borrowed it from an American slogan of restoration, and it does not quite fit. Restoration is Britain’s temptation, not India’s. On Ghalib’s arithmetic, Delhi never stopped being the world’s life; what the last decade did was reconnect the body.

A state that learned to deliver, an economy compounding past its old masters, a foreign policy with reach, and, in the other column, a poor country per head with a press ranked 157th and agencies that lean on the opposition. Becoming is the honest word.

Greatness of this kind accumulates: in airports and enclaves, in payment rails and export manifests, in students and capital and diplomats, in the dull compounding fact of continuity.

Tomorrow Britain swears in her seventh prime minister of the decade. India has had one since 2014. I do not offer the arithmetic as a verdict on either country; stability can curdle, and churn can renew. But sitting here, over the last of the filter coffee, the couplet at the airport reads less like poetry and more like reporting. I asked my soul, what is Delhi? The world is the body, and Delhi its life.

Yet for all the strategic plans drawn up over the past three decades, the island has progressed little beyond its role as a transshipment port –more than 80% of the cargo on ships docked in Sri Lanka is never unloaded here, but transshipped onward. 

Most of this cargo is bound for Indian ports, through terminals run by Sri Lanka’s state-owned Ports Authority, the China Merchants-backed Colombo International Container Terminals, and India’s Adani Group-linked Colombo West International Terminal.

The Pakistani elite has quietly secularised. And far from hollowing the state out, this is precisely how Pakistan became what it was always designed to be: the successor state to British India’s Muslims. Islam was the vehicle. Pakistan is the destination.

Islam remains the public language of legitimacy.

Privately, among the stakeholders who actually run the place, the operating priorities are entirely secular. The society on the ground is conservative and devout. The class at the top, the one that keeps the state alive, believes in Pakistan far more than it believes in Islam.

It helps to separate three things that we mean by Islam. There is Islam as faith, the private conviction of the believer. There is Islam as identity, the badge of who one is and whom one stands with. And there is Islam as state language, in which Pakistan explains itself to itself and to the world.

The elite has not surrendered the third, and it has not wholly shed the second. What it has let go of is the first as a terminal value: the notion that the purpose of the state is to realise Islam, rather than to deploy it.

Faith has gone from ultimate to instrumental.

This migration is what we mean by secularisation. This is not the familiar story of liberalisation. We are not saying Pakistan grew tolerant, or irreligious, or fond of gin. We are saying something narrower and stranger. Pakistan’s elite secularised the priorities of the state without secularising its language. Strip away the Islamic vocabulary and look at what the stakeholder class optimises for, and the list is unmistakable: state survival, strategic depth, military capability, sovereignty, national prestige, and the reproduction of the elite itself.

These are not Islamic priorities. They are Prussian ones. What has emerged among the men who keep Pakistan going is a finely tuned, military-bureaucratic nationalism, disciplined and unsentimental, for which Islam is the flag and not the engine.

Prussia describes the temper of this elite.

For the fate of the faith itself, the better analogy is France. A revolutionary creed, once it triumphs completely, turns ceremonial. No one in the Fifth Republic argues about Robespierre over breakfast, not because the Revolution failed but because it won so totally that the nation absorbed it and stopped debating it. The principle became the backbone.

A French republican today need not be a Jacobin, need not want the Terror back, to hold 1789 sacred; the founding is revered precisely because it is finished, no longer a live programme anyone is required to enact.

Islam in Pakistan is travelling that road. It won its argument in 1947. It produced the state, and having produced it, it no longer needs to function as a working programme. It becomes instead the national myth: sacred, unexamined, saluted on every occasion and enacted on almost none. A Pakistani patriot can revere the idea that made Pakistan without wanting an Islamic state, in just the way a French one reveres the Revolution without wanting another. This is why the secularisation is so hard to see. The reverence is genuine and loud; it simply no longer governs. The founding faith has been elevated into myth and quietly retired from the business of running anything.

It is thus worth dwelling on the Crescentiate.

Among the loudest defenders of Pakistan, the most theologically committed voice is almost always the one not born in Pakistan. The diaspora keeps the faith as identity; the Pakistan-formed elite keeps the state. That asymmetry is instrumental. It tells you where belief has migrated, and which of our three meanings of Islam each camp is actually holding.

China conducts cold realist diplomacy and stays militantly atheist; Saudi Arabia conducts it and stays Muslim. Just about.

But look at the content of Pakistan’s realism, not merely its existence, and a state for which Islam was the terminal value would let creed shape its alliances.

Pakistan does the reverse.

In the year since the brief war with India, Islamabad has bound itself, at once and without visible discomfort, to atheist China, to Shia Iran across an old sectarian divide, to Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, and to a secular and nominally Christian Washington. It made its army chief a field marshal, secured a private White House lunch and the warmest American hearing in two decades, signed a mutual defence pact with Riyadh, deepened the all-weather tie with Beijing, and turned itself into the broker shuttling between Washington and Tehran. The creed of the partner is simply not an input to the calculation.

This is the point the diplomatic noise obscures. A devout society sits at the base; at the summit sits a class that will take any table and collect from each guest, indifferent to the religion of the man across it. Such indifference is ordinary in a secular state. In a state that names Islam as its reason for existing, it nothing less than extraordinary. The secularisation is invisible only because nobody troubled to change the language.

Set India beside it, and the asymmetry sharpens.

India bet on admission. The whole architecture of its recent foreign policy assumed it would be the lynchpin of a respectable Western order, the natural partner of the United States, the anchor of the Indo-Pacific. On precisely that axis it was challenged: tariffed at fifty per cent, called a dead economy, told it was interchangeable with Pakistan, made to watch its rival courted in the Oval Office. India did not collapse.

It adapted, with a trade agreement with the European Union, another with the United Kingdom, a wary thaw with China, and an eventual tariff truce with Washington. But the adaptation is the point. India fell back on strategic autonomy and a scramble of bilateral deals because the club it had courted declined to grant it tenure. Two states, two objective functions. Pakistan played for leverage and took leverage; India played for belonging and learned that belonging was not on offer.

Data is not Destiny

Which brings us to BB, and to the data. BB loves a number and quotes them tirelessly: GDP, fertility, the human development index, the metrics on which Pakistan plainly trails. Every one of those numbers is correct.

The error is not in the data but in the assumption beneath it, that prosperity is the thing the state is playing for. GDP matters. It does not. BB reads the masses and the macro-aggregates as the players; they are not.

The players are the Prussian elite, running a different game. The honest question is not whether Pakistan is poorer, which it is, but what it has been willing to trade prosperity for, and the answer, shown again this past year, is sovereignty and leverage, which Elitestanis will buy at almost any price.

Kashmir is Sui Generis

The same misreading feeds the Saffroniate’s favourite fantasy, that Balochistan or Afghanistan can be turned into Pakistan’s Kashmir, a running wound that bleeds the state. It will not happen, and the reason is structural. Insurgencies are not bought; they are lit. They begin with the sub-gentry and the disaffected elite, not with the poor as such.

Balochistan rages only where its own leaders sustain the infrastructure of resistance, and you cannot wire money to a grievance and expect a nation to rise. A broad-based nationalism appears only once an entire population has been activated to an ideology, the way sustained dispossession forged a mass Palestinian nationalism that now commands the sympathy of much of the world.

That threshold has not been crossed in Balochistan, and it will not be crossed from a spreadsheet in Delhi. Meanwhile Pakistan has persuaded Washington to brand the Baloch insurgency terrorist: the very lever the Saffroniate dreams of pulling is being pulled the other way. The Saffroniate is cloaked to it because it keeps fighting an imagined theocracy the Pakistani elite quietly stopped being.

What BP teaches us

We learned a version of all this from our own house. Brown Pundits ran a reader survey, and thirty people filled it in. The masses, here as everywhere, are silent. Even the sub-elite readership is mostly inert; the few who could mount a real counter-current, by starting a rival shop of their own, will not trouble to. Neglect Brown Pundits for years and it roars back regardless, because the quarrel between the Saffroniate and the Crescentiate is the most interesting argument in this corner of the internet, and it has nowhere else to go.

And in the comments, the discovery. Across all the Crescentiate energy, almost no one argues theology. No one is building the Caliphate. No one is much exercised about an Islamic state. Yet every one of them comes alive the instant Pakistan, the nation, is touched. That is not an Islamic attachment. It is a national one.

We are We

Sitting between the two camps, neutral by temperament, we see what each cannot see about itself. And the revealed preference of the Crescentiate, watched over years, is the sharpest evidence we have. On the whole they do not want a seat at the Western table; they are content to be the exotic token, the interesting outsider, and they reach for absurd lectures on the West’s misogyny and patriarchy partly to keep that distance.

The Saffroniate’s commenters want the opposite: the nod of recognition from respectable opinion. We are describing a commentariat, not a census. But the asymmetry on the page is consistent, and it rhymes with the statecraft. The Indian instinct is to be let in; the Pakistani instinct is to be left alone, intact and exotic. That single difference is why Indian commentary keeps reaching for the Western template, instrumentally and without quite saying why, while the Pakistani feels no such pull.

The Saffroniate is still arguing with yesterday’s Pakistan, the Islamic project the elite abandoned years ago, while today’s Pakistan, secular at the summit and Prussian to the bone, slips past unnoticed.

Jinnah, in the end, got the state he wanted. Nehru got an argument, and he is still having it with a Pakistan that no longer exists.

The Comment thread is afire with the usual (and senseless) India-Pakistan arguments (essentially which of the two is poorer). Q waves the whole question away by pointing at the figure, unimpressed by “an average Indian producing only $2,800 in GDP every year,” and asks what the point even is. There is a point, two in fact.

First: per capita and scale measure different things. Per capita describes the life of a citizen. Scale describes the weight of a state. A single integrated market of 1.4 billion people generates agglomeration, economies of scale, and a pull on capital and talent that no small rich economy can match (India’s ascent in the world of cricket is an extremely interesting meditation). That is why India passed Japan in 2025 to become the world’s fourth-largest economy, why it is the fastest-growing major one, and why it is on course to take third from Germany by around 2028. The market no exporter can ignore, the trade terms a four-trillion-dollar base can lean on, the air defence and roads it can fund: that is concrete power, and it is not nothing. Much of the gain is siphoned by a clutch of oligarchic houses, but the dynamism is real.

Second: however that same wealth does not buy what BB imagines it buys. India outweighs Pakistan in GDP by something close to eleven to one. It has still not turned Pakistan into its East Germany, a dependent satellite drawn quietly into its orbit and, in time, absorbed. Pakistan remains sovereign, armed, and unbought. Pakistanis are not running across the Punjabi wall to their ethnic kin.

In May 2025, after Pahalgam, the larger economy did not dictate terms: Operation Sindoor ended not in surrender but in a ceasefire announced, awkwardly, from Washington, with both capitals claiming the win.

Look West. Iran is a fraction of the wealth of the United States and Israel, yet it has absorbed the most advanced air forces on earth, kept its regime, and kept the knowledge to rebuild what was struck. The guns fell silent at a ceasefire, not a capitulation. Wealth buys reach. It does not buy outcomes.

BB treats the GDP gap as a deed of ownership over Kashmir, and assumes Kashmiris will swallow their pride for a higher income per head, that prosperity purchases consent. It misreads the Islamicate moral economy entirely. In that ledger ‘Izzat and Deen, dignity and faith, are not line items to be outbid. The Hyderabadi Harvard PhD still sings the song of his lost people.

Peoples who set independence above comfort have done so across the whole anti-colonial century, and no balance sheet has ever talked them out of it. Money may buy luxury but not loyalty.

What price will any Indian or Pakistani nationalist accept for their love and loyalty to their homeland?