Hindutva – Brown Pundits

The Honey Trap of the Ummah:

September 15, 2025September 15, 2025X.T.MBrown Pundits, Geopolitics, Hinduism, India, Iran, Islam & the Middle East, Pakistan, X.T.MAarti, Aarti controversy, Aurangzeb, Baby Honey Singh, Biryani politics, blog catalyst, blog discourse, blog wars, blogosphere, Brown blog wars, brown commentary, Brown Pundits, Buddhists, civilizational identity, civilizational politics, commentariat, CPI mutiny, cricket and politics, cultural adaptation, cultural brotherhood, cultural Hinduism, cultural honesty, cultural nationalism, de-Islamization, digital brown spaces, double standards, George Orwell, Hindu India, Hindu-Muslim compact, Hindu-Muslim relations, Hinduism, Hinduization, Hindutva, Honey trap metaphor., identity choice, identity politics, ideological betrayal, ideological clarity, ideological discourse, ideological realignment, India, India-Pakistan debate, India–Pakistan Relations, Indian cricket, Indian minority compact, Indian Muslims, Indian nationalism, Indian secularism, integration, Islam, Jains, Kabir, Kashmir, Liberalism, Modi, Modi era, moral coexistence, Mughals, Muslim exceptionalism, Muslim hypocrisy, Muslim identity, Muslim liberalism, Muslim minority, Nationalism, non-Muslim Pakistanis, Orwellian writing, Pakistan, Pakistani Hindus, Pakistani Muslims, pan-Islamism, Parsis, Partition, pluralism, post-Islam, post-Islamic identity, post-Islamism, post-partition identity, religious coexistence, religious minorities, saffronisation, saffronization, second-class citizen, secularism, Shahid Afridi, Shahid Afridi controversy, Shahid Afridi TV smash, Sikhs, Sindhi Hindus, Sindhis, South Asia, South Asian diaspora, South Asian identity, South Asian politics, Twitter Islam, Ummah122 Comments

🕌 Reflections on Kabir, Afridi, and the Compact of Coexistence

The recent incident involving Kabir / Bombay Badshah / Honey Singh, and the orchestrated drama around his entrapment has, quite unexpectedly, become a catalyst for deeper discussion on Brown Pundits. While none have chosen to focus on analytics (“2,000 daily visitors”—thank you very much:-), the real story lies in how this drama has exposed, yet again, the deep ideological fissures within South Asian identity; especially in the India-Pakistan-Muslim triad.

Let’s begin by being honest: Brown Pundits, for all its digressions into Sri Lanka, Nepal, or Bangladesh, is still primarily a blog about India and Pakistan, and more crucially, about Indian and Pakistani Muslims. This is a feature, not a bug. The origins of the blog lie in the Sepia Mutiny, a scattered band of intellectually independent thinkers questioning dogma from every direction (which started in 2004 and if we are a “daughter blog” that we means have 20+yrs of intellectual antecedents on the Brownet), and it has now matured into one of the few platforms willing to wrestle with the ideological ambiguities at the heart of the subcontinent.

🧕 Kabir’s Point: Brotherhood, Boundaries, and the Big Choice

Kabir made an astute, if difficult, observation: that he views Indian Muslims as “brothers”, but does not feel the same about Pakistani non-Muslims.

This sounds contradictory until one understands the emotional exhaustion of watching Muslims oscillate between claiming ummah-hood when convenient, and weaponizing liberal values when needed. It’s a cognitive dissonance that creates what I can only call the moral coexistence trap: the idea that Muslims, especially in India, demand maximum accommodation, of their food (their nauseating right to murder Gau Mata on Bharat’s sacred soil itself), Faith, festivals, and foreign affiliations, while rarely extending the same pluralistic courtesy in return.

And then there’s that infamous Shahid Afridi clip, the one where he smashed his television after watching an Aarti, being performed. To many of us, that wasn’t just a cringe-inducing moment of bigotry; it begged a real question: Why do Indian cricketers continue to shake hands with Hinduphobes Hindu-hating men like Afridi and his ilk (the Pakistan cricket team)? At what point does tolerance become indulgence?

🚩 The Compact of Indian Minorities: Understand It or Leave It

Continue reading The Honey Trap of the Ummah:

On Hindutva, the good, the bad and the ugly.

August 24, 2025August 26, 2025IndosaurusAncient India, Caste, Civilisation, Colonialism, Culture, Hinduism, Hindutva, History, India, Indian Subcontinent, Race, Religioncaste, Hindutva, history, India, IVC, Shudra, Society, Varnas, vedic50 Comments

Yes, I enjoy Sergio and Clint too much. Anyway, put that image away and lets jump in…

The bad. The surge of unapologetic Hinduism has included attempted rehabilitation of its enduring shame. Casteism.

Normally I flee from caste related conversations like the plague, but I’ve started to see a lot of attempts in writing and in speeches attempting to justify the intent and practice. I want to add my voice to the pushback.

One argument I’ve seen online is that in Vedic Hinduism the Shudra Varna only consists of people who are relegated to a punished status (due to violation of Vedic laws). That there are only 3 Varnas as such, (all commoners are Vaishyas), and instead there are various Jatis. The British then supposedly classified Jatis into 4 Varnas (inventing the caste system in the process).

The other (by Sai Deepak) is that Shudra is not a term of disrespect but they are considered as part of the earth and mother earth is worshipped. As the providers to the upper varnas they are a respected and essential part of society.

Continue reading On Hindutva, the good, the bad and the ugly.

Come Fly with me to Far Bombay

August 19, 2025August 19, 2025X.T.MBrown Pundits, Civilisation, Hinduism, History, India, Iran, Islam & the Middle East, Mughals, Pakistan, Partition, Postcolonialism & the Global South, Race, Religion, X.T.MAmbani wedding, Bharat vs India, Bombay Floods, Brown Pundits, city name changes, failed state Pakistan, heritage hotels, Hindutva, India vs Pakistan, Indian Identity, Indian philanthropy, Iqbal, Jinnah, liberal intelligentsia, Lutyens Delhi, modern India, Mughal legacy, Muslim politics, Sher Shah Suri, South Asian politics, STEM vs humanities, UAE model25 Comments

I. Bombay: Between Beauty and Brutality
I’m writing from Bombay, where the monsoon floods are overwhelming; visually and viscerally. The rain hammers the city with a kind of sublime fury. From certain vantage points, it’s breathtaking. But it’s also undeniably brutal for those without scenic surroundings or structural shelter. It’s a reminder that Indian beauty is often doubled with burden.

II. Burden Burst: The Commentariat Awakens
Lately on Brown Pundits, I’ve noticed a revival. Old voices returning, new ones emerging, and many ideas worth engaging. But some themes have worn thin; for instance I’m in broad agreement with Indosaurus & I don’t want to waste too much breath on Audrey Truschke. And frankly, Aurangzeb is not a hill I want to die on. In fact, perhaps one of the key misreadings by Muslims in the subcontinent was turning every ideological disagreement into a hill to die on. Maybe it began with QeA-Jinnah and the Great Allama but it ossified into a pattern. Everything became a matter of principle, rather than pragmatism.

III. Concession Is Not Compromise
Compromise is seen as weakness, but I’m more interested in the capacity to concede especially when history clearly shows you’re wrong. The Mughals installed a two-tier system, subordinating Hindus and even native Muslims. Contrast that with the Suri dynasty, particularly Sher Shah Suri, who in just two decades built the Grand Trunk Road and reshaped governance without the alienation that marked the Mughals. If Hindutva attacked the Suri legacy, I’d call it pure bigotry. Sher Shah ruled with the land, not over it. Continue reading Come Fly with me to Far Bombay

Aurangazeb, Academia and Asceticism

August 18, 2025August 18, 2025IndosaurusAncient India, Culture, Hinduism, History, Indian Subcontinent, ReligionAscetic, Audrey Truschke, Aurangzeb, Buddha, Cholas, Hinduism, Hindutva, history, Islam, Liberalism, Pandyas13 Comments

My comment started to take a life of its own.

What happens when an American or British university sets up a ‘South Asia’ department to cater to a large number of wealthy, English speaking, foreign education demanding, privileged aspiring humanities majors?
Now you have a well funded branch which churns out year after year of liberal minded students, some determined to make their mark on the world.
They in turn churn out books and articles and go back and teach (rare) in their home countries and push the same viewpoints they learned at school. It becomes a positive feedback loop. The more you rehabilitate the atrocities of Islam, the greater accolades from your peers as one striving for human betterment and religious harmony.

Apologies for the self referential link, but I quickly covered the liberal-islamic compact in this post.
https://www.brownpundits.com/2025/06/28/how-did-we-end-up-here/

Continue reading Aurangazeb, Academia and Asceticism

Brown Pundits: Broad Church or Narrow Canon?

July 25, 2025July 25, 2025X.T.MAncient India, Bahá’í, BRAHM, Civilisation, Culture, Geopolitics, Hinduism, History, India, Pakistan, Partition, Postcolonialism & the Global South, X.T.MAkhand Bharat, Bahá’í, Bahá’í Voice, Brown Pundits, Civilizational Discourse, civilizational state, Diaspora, Diaspora Perspectives, Hindu-Muslim relations, Hindutva, Identity, India, Islam, Islamic Reform, Pakistan, Partition, pluralism, postcolonial identity, reform, Religion, secularism, Secularism in India, Shravan Reflections, South Asia, South Asian identity, Ummah & Modernity12 Comments

Brown Pundits Must Stay a Broad Church

Reading Kabir’s thoughtful post on the “soft Hindutva” bias at Brown Pundits, I found myself both agreeing with parts of his argument and diverging from its framing. My own journey with BP goes back to its inception. The blog was born in Twixmas December 2010; 10 days after I had met Dr. Lalchand, whose presence has profoundly shaped my civilizational views.

I say this not as a biographical aside but because BP, at its best, is where the personal and civilizational collide. We bring who we are; our marriages, our migrations, our contradictions, into this messy, brilliant conversation.

At the time, like many Pakistanis, I held a deep-seated assumption: that Hindus were fundamentally “other.” It wasn’t overt hatred; just a civilizational distance, internalized from birth. But Dr. V & Brown Pundits challenged that.

A Forum With Bias? Yes. But Which One?

The heart of BP is not neutrality; it’s the willingness to host contradiction. That is its genius, and it must be protected.

Continue reading Brown Pundits: Broad Church or Narrow Canon?

Let Hindus Decide for India

July 7, 2025July 13, 2025X.T.MBRAHM, Culture, Hinduism, India, Iran, Islam & the Middle East, Pakistan, Politics, X.T.MBangladesh, civilizational agency, civilizational continuity, civilizational politics, cultural sovereignty, Geopolitics, Hindu identity, Hindu majority, Hinduism, Hindutva, India, India’s future, Indian Identity, Indian nationalism, Indian pluralism, Islam, Kashmir, Muslim politics, national identity, Nehruvian legacy, Pakistan, Pakistan strategy, political Hinduism, Politics, South Asia, South Asian geopolitics118 Comments

There’s a quiet but persistent coalition, inside and outside India, that seems intent on denying Hindus the right to define their own future. It includes unreformed Islamists who refuse to reckon with modernity, English-speaking liberal elites still shadowboxing for Nehru, minorities with veto power but no stake in cohesion, and a chorus of Western (and increasingly Chinese) voices, eager to manage India’s trajectory from afar. What unites them? A shared discomfort with Hindu political consolidation.

Let’s be clear: Hindu identity is not a new construct. Whether you place its roots 3,000 or 5,000 years ago, it’s one of the world’s oldest living civilizational continuities. That identity has always been plural, regional, and evolving. But it has also always been there; visible in memory, ritual, geography, and language. Today, that identity is waking up to its political form. And it will not be put back to sleep.

Hindutva is not going anywhere. Nor is the Indian Union. Those who hoped Kashmir would stay outside this arc have already seen the direction of travel. Pakistan’s decision to opt out of Hindustan, and then build an identity against it, has led not to strength but to strategic stasis. Bangladesh, too, for all its cultural richness, now stands as a separate civilizational lane. And so we arrive at the core truth: Hinduism and India are coterminous.

This isn’t a call for exclusion. But it is a reminder that those who opted out do not get to dictate terms to those who stayed in. That includes foreign commentators and diasporic gatekeepers alike. There is a difference between pluralism and paralysis. There is a difference between nationalism and denial. And if majoritarianism is the anxiety; perhaps the deeper fear is that Hindus are no longer apologizing for being the majority. Let India decide. Let Hindus decide. Let the world, finally, learn to listen.

South India Makes British India Hindu?

May 21, 2025May 22, 2025X.T.MHistory, India, X.T.MBritish India, Demographic Engineering, Demographics of South Asia, Dravidian Identity, Federation vs Fragmentation, Hindu Majoritarianism, Hindu-Muslim Divide, Hinduism, Hindutva, Hyderabad 1948, Identity, India, Indian Muslims, Indo-Gangetic Plain, Islam, Muslim Majority Regions in India, Muslim Political Power, Nationalism, Partition, Partition of India, South India and Partition, TNT, Two Nation Theory, Why India is Hindu-Majority25 Comments

TNT Saved Hinduism; Dravidia preserved Aryavarta?

S. Qureshi: “Muslims are today a majority of the population >50% of North British India. If peninsular south was made into its own country in 1947, India would be a Muslim majority country today. Many Muslims actually wanted South India to be a separate country and North India (including Pakistan/Bengal) to be one unit. To say that Indian Muslims who lived in the historical centre of Muslim power for centuries would just get up and leave for Pakistan is just farcical and delusional. These types of ideas were only proposed by extreme right-wing Hindu organizations after partition, and these ideas seem to become mainstream today with BJP. Historical reality, like always, is very different.”

The demographic map of the subcontinent tells a startling story. If South India had formed a separate state in 1947, the rest of British India — encompassing Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the northern Hindi belt — would today constitute a Muslim-majority civilizational bloc. This isn’t conjecture. It’s arithmetic.

The Numbers That Reorder the Narrative

Here’s what the Indo-Gangetic arc looks like today (please fact check me): Continue reading South India Makes British India Hindu?

Podcast: A “Frank” conversation about modern Indian politics

June 22, 2023Omar AliPodcastHindutva, Indian politics, Nehruvian elite1 Comment

Another Browncast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher (and a variety of other platforms). Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe to one of the links above!

In this episode Akshar and I talk to “Frank”, an Indian financial professional with an interest in Indian history and politics. We discuss everything from Nehruvian India to Modinomics, Hindutva and whether a boom is coming…

Frank tweets on twitter as @frankisalegend1

Browncast: Koenrad Elst, Indologist and Hindu Nationalist

February 25, 2021February 26, 2021Omar AliPodcastAMT, Hinduism, Hindutva, Koenrad Elst, OIT17 Comments

Another BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher. Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe at one of the links above.

Would appreciate more positive reviews!

In this episode Srikant Kṛṣṇamācārya and I talk to Koenrad Elst, an Indologist who is also a supporter of what can be fairly described as “Right wing Hindutva politics”. We ask him about his understanding of Hinduism, Hindu identity and other topics (including the “Aryan Migration Theory”, which he vigorously opposes, though we did not have the time or inclination to discuss this much further; you can read more of his writings at this link and here to get a clearer idea of where he is coming from and you can read this and this to see the pro-AMT point of view)..

Saffron on the outside, woke on the inside

January 9, 2021January 9, 2021Razib KhanCultureHindutva71 Comments

Every few weeks or so I “get into it” with parts of Hindutva Twitter. Some parts of Hindutva Twitter I’m quite friendly with. Other parts, not so much. There is the weird incel-like “Trad Twitter” faction…that always ends up to be strange perverts. But I don’t want to focus on them.

Rather, I want to highlight what I feel is descriptively a fact that though Hindutva and “Woke” factions are opposed in a theoretical sense, the former draws on the style of “thinking” of the latter quite a bit. E.g., the emphasis on many Hindutva sectors on feeling, the lack of humor, and, identitarianism.

The identitarianism is straightforward. Despite the fact that I’m an atheist they regularly accuse me of being a Muslim. In some cases, this is an honest false positive. Look at my name! In other cases, they assume since I’m making fun of them, I must be a secret sulla with Muhammad or whoever. I’m against them, so I’m for their enemies, or with their enemies. Sometimes they revert to forms of racism (e.g., they are upper-caste Punjabis, so genetically superior, despite being J1 Dasyus!). The ultimate takeaway is the fixation on the group and historical identity, rather than updating to individual identity.

Remember when Ayanna Pressley said someone had to be “politically black” to be black? A sort of primitive identitarianism has taken root amongst Woke people where individual views are derived from group identity, and individual views can negate one’s group identity because the two are so closely tied.

Second, the lack of humor. On my Twitter posts, I engage in a lot of prodding and poking at Hindu shibboleths as well as synthesizing it with absurd genetic points. The whole performance is ludicrous…but some portions of Hindutva Twitter find it problematic. OK, they wouldn’t say “problematic,” but it’s the same reaction. Woke ideology is a form of secular sacredness. Similarly, Hindutva Twitter has sacred cows which I gore now and then. Sometimes people react back playfully…but other times, they don’t get the joke, and when others point out that it’s a joke, they refuse to believe it’s a joke and move to identitarianism. That is, the joke is fake, and I’m actually a Muslim.

A truncated and shriveled sense of humor is common on the modern Woke Left (google Social Justice Comedy; it’s like Communist opera). It is also a feature of very religious Muslims and Christians. A portion of Hindutva Twitter suffers from this.

The last to me is the most important, the emphasis on feeling. This is a personal bias, as I’m a bit “dead on the inside,” so have always been weak on the feels. I hurt the feelings of these people, making fun of them, mocking them, and making light of their culture. I’m a bit of an online barbarian, like the scorpion, I’m going to sting. A portion of Hindutva Twitter can’t understand that my behavior isn’t due to the fact that I hate Hindus, but because I’m an unfeeling asshole. I’m R1a1a-Z93 and U2b. Those who know what this means know that I was born to be a lord over you Dasyus!

There are more than 1 billion Hindus in the world. India is 80% Hindu. This emphasis on feeling, on hurt pride, is classic “wounded civilization” stuff. Hindutva cannot realize whatever its ambitions are until it looks forward, positively, and without concern for feeling, into the future. Woke ideology is deeply regressive, despite its adherence to the label of progressive. Its fixation on “white supremacy” and “colonialism” looks backward, not forward.

All this goes back to Audrey Truschke. My point is that Truschke point in the generality is correct. Indians should object to her scholarship, not to her person. Truschke herself is a hypocrite about this, getting into ideological food fights, and bringing her gender into the discussion. But Hindu nationalists who engage in “Woke Olympics” can only win by hamstringing their own attempts to fashion a positive identity. Woke Olympics is the to maximal oppression and lack of self-respect and dignity.

To end the Kali Yuga you can’t use the tools of the Kali Yuga.