India – Brown Pundits

A follow up on Women’s Rights in Pakistan

Kabir · May 9, 2026 · 3 comments

Since we have been having quite an impassioned debate about gender relations in Pakistan (as an aside that thread has close to 300 comments and has become unwieldy to navigate), I thought I would briefly follow up on a few points here.

Firstly, I want to state up front that I do not agree with Q’s repeated invocations of “Onlyfans”. Yes, he is technically on my team (the “Crescentiate”) but I am able to call him out when it is necessary. I would expect the other team (the “Saffroniate”) to also be able to call each other out when it is justified (as for example in the case of one of their members making a direct threat of violence). BP would be a much nicer place if some of the really egregious trolling (mostly by BB) is brought under control.

Q is of course entitled to his views and I suppose that our views differ mostly because I was raised almost entirely in the US. I was also not raised in a particularly conservative family. As an anecdote, my mother has never covered her head. When I was a young adolescent and had a bit of religious fervor and asked her to do so, I was given the firm response that I was living in her house and she would do exactly as she pleased. The conversation obviously came to an end there.

Back to “OnlyFans”: I believe in the right of consenting adults to do whatever they want with their own bodies. This doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t negatively judge someone who chose to start an OnlyFans. It is, after all, a kind of sex work and I don’t really understand why someone with education and opportunities would choose to get into this line of work. That said, it is of course the individual’s choice.

Q is correct that Pakistan is a conservative society and that the normative expectation is that women are kept out of the public sphere. The woman’s domain is seen to be the home. “Chador aur char divari” (I would translate this as the veil and the four walls) is an important concept in Pakistani interpretations of Islam.

Some links of relevance:

1) Sindh govt issues Aurat March NOC with conditions for participants’ clothing, slogans

According to the NOC, Aurat March organisers are “bound to comply with all laws in force” and shall be responsible for the “internal cordon security of the participants”.

It further stated that “all participants/organisers shall ensure peaceful conduct” during the march.

The NOC prohibited “anti-state slogans, banners, speeches or activities”, as well as “anti-religion slogans, placards or objectionable remarks”. It also ordered that “no hateful, provocative, unethical or anti-social content shall be displayed on charts, banners or flexes”.

“Participation, support or representation by any banned outfit /proscribed organisation such as BYC (Baloch Yakjehti Committee), JQSM (Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz) shall strictly not be allowed,” the NOC read.

The district administration also ordered participants not to “wear objectionable clothing” or carry out “promotion for the LGBTQ” community, which includes transgender persons.

The “Aurat March” participants have also been told that they cannot make speeches against the “ideology of Pakistan” or speak against the armed forces.

For the record, I am against this decision that the participants cannot promote the rights of the “LGBTQ” community. This is homophobic and transphobic.

2) Review: Kafeel Offers A Rare Glimpse Into How Trauma Travels Between Generations

3)India refuses to criminalize marital rape. This new series shines a light on it

(Hat tip to Nivedita for mentioning this series “Chiraiya”. Incidentally, this word is usually spelled “Chiriya” in Urdu).

The BBC article notes:

Some 6.1% of Indian women who have ever been married women have experienced sexual violence, according to government data. But despite years of campaigning by activists, India remains among three dozen countries – along with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia – where marital rape is not outlawed.

Activists have filed a number of petitions in recent years in the Supreme Court calling for marital rape to be criminalised. But the government, religious groups and men’s rights activists oppose any plans to amend the Colonial-era law, which exempts a man for having forced sex with his wife if she is not a minor.

On marital rape, I just want to mention that even in the UK, this was only criminalized as late as 1991, which is surprisingly late. As I mentioned in my review of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, marital rape plays a major role in the plot of this novel and was not at all considered a crime during the Edwardian era (the time period in which the novel is set).

Indians and Pakistani dramas

Kabir · May 7, 2026 · 29 comments

Recently, BB made a comment claiming that Indians don’t watch Pakistani dramas while Pakistanis are very familiar with Bollywood. While it is certainly true that Indian media has greater penetration in Pakistan than Pakistani media does in India–which is only to be expected since Bollywood is a much larger industry– it is also a fact that there are many fans of Pakistani dramas in India. As I pointed out in a comment, Fawad Khan and Mahira Khan became well-known in India after the success of Humsafar. Sanam Saeed also became well-known after Zindagi Gulzar Hai (in which she starred opposite Fawad Khan) aired on Indian TV. While the film industry in Pakistan has struggled for many reasons, our drama industry is going strong. One point to note is that unlike Indian soap operas, Pakistani dramas generally come to an end after twenty five or thirty episodes. This means that there is no need to keep a story going by having people return from the dead etc–this is not specific to Indian soaps since American soaps are also like this.

I personally don’t watch Pakistani dramas (I don’t really watch TV and what media I do consume tends to be Western). I think the last Pakistani drama I watched was Barzakh which also starred Fawad and Sanam and was coincidentally made for an Indian streaming service (ZEE Zindagi).

Anyway, I came across this reel today on IG which is called “Indians after watching a Pakistani drama” and I thought I’d share it here. This is basically light entertainment but it does prove that there is an audience in India for Pakistani content. Presumably, the user didn’t make this video just for the Pakistani audience.

I am of the opinion that art transcends national borders so there is nothing wrong with this. Just as Pakistanis are fans of Lata Mangeskhar, Asha Bhosle and Muhammad Rafi, Indians are fans of Mehdi Hassan, Ghulam Ali, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan etc. Though the two countries obviously have political tensions–both see each other as hostile states– we do share a common culture and there is nothing wrong in acknowledging that fact.

Biggest takeaway of Assembly elections

GauravL · May 7, 2026 · 175 comments

I was listening to this interview of pollster Pradeep Gupta with Barkha Dutt and this line stuck out. {Copied at relevant point}

Last few assembly elections including the Maharashtra landslide were suggesting that direct cash transfers to women 1 year prior to elections was turning elections sharply in favor of incumbent. Notable examples being BJP in MP in 2023, JMM in Jharkhand 2025, BJP in MH 2025 etc.

All 5 states went into handout mode in late 2025-2026 for this election, but incumbents have only one in 2 small states out of the 5 states. Most notably – DMK which has spend significant amount from state funds last year {apart from usual vote for Cash campaign} has lost big. My contacts in TN tell me that both DMK and AIADMK had spend their significant party coffers on cash for votes – whereas T Vijay had not – only giving away flags and whistles. {not sure if this is 100% true but seemed to be the sentiment}.

If true this truly is the biggest positive of these election results.

Also appending Shekhar Gupta’s post
Key takeaways from West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala elections

Matuas – Dalits mostly from Bangladesh – who are one of the communities specifically touched by SIR had backed BJP despite that – owling to increased violence against them in Bangladesh :

Why Bangladesh played a big role in BJP’s West Bengal win

Ayan Guha, British Academy International Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex, told ThePrint that while it is a fact that a substantial section of the Matuas has suffered exclusion from electoral rolls due to SIR, it seems they have chosen to stay with the BJP this election. The reason, Guha believes, is Bangladesh.

“While this exclusion has created anxiety and frustration, it is quite evident that the BJP still remains their preferred choice. It clearly appears that widespread violence and atrocities committed on the Hindus in post-Hasina Bangladesh have made them vote as Hindu refugees,” Guha said.

The Hindification of East India

X.T.M · May 7, 2026 · 57 comments

The Saffron Block

The map of East India has changed colour. Bihar fell to the NDA in November 2025 with 202 of 243 seats, and Samrat Choudhary now sits as the first BJP Chief Minister Bihar has ever had. Odisha went saffron in 2024 under Mohan Charan Majhi. On 4 May 2026 Mamata Banerjee lost Bengal after fifteen years; the BJP took 206 seats and will form its first government in Kolkata. Himanta Biswa Sarma returned in Assam with 82 seats, a two-thirds majority and a third consecutive term. The old Bengal Presidency, once the largest province of British India, is now a single saffron block.

This is the completion, by ballot, of a partition the British attempted by map.

1905

In 1905 Curzon split Bengal. The eastern half was to be Muslim and centred on Dhaka; the western half was to be joined to Bihar and Orissa, which made the Bengalis a linguistic minority in their own province. The Bengali Hindu elite, the bhadralok who ran Bengal’s commerce and letters, fought it bitterly. They did not want to be drowned by Bihari and Oriya numbers. In 1911 the British relented and reunited Bengal.

The Biharis, for their part, had spent two decades campaigning to escape Bengali domination. The 1912 reorganisation that gave them their own province, jointly with Orissa, was their reward.

Linguistic identity then was the prime axis. Hindu and Muslim mattered, but not as much as Bengali, Bihari, Oriya.

The Historical Axis Flipped

A century on, that axis has flipped. The Bengali, the Bihari, the Oriya and the Assamese are voting as Hindus, and they are voting for the same party. The two-nation theory, which Bengal once threw off, is doing its work the long way round.

Hindi,, Hindu, Hindustan

Continue reading The Hindification of East India

What Being a “Center-Left” Pakistani Means to Me

Kabir · May 5, 2026 · No comments

Since my center-left credentials are frequently questioned on BP, I am sharing this post here. Perhaps it can stand as a precedent post so that this debate can be put to rest once and for all.

I have been repeatedly accused on BP of not actually being “Center-Left”. A commenter has said “Pakistani liberal is an oxymoron”. I have been called an “Islamist” and “Islamofascist”. While it doesn’t particularly make a difference to my life what some random people (whom I am unlikely to ever meet in reality) think of me, I would like to take this opportunity to define what precisely being center-left means to me. I do not attempt to speak for other Pakistanis–though I believe there is a significant proportion of the population who share some of my beliefs– but only to describe my own personal background and ideology. This exercise will also hopefully help me to examine some of my own assumptions.

As I have previously mentioned in some comments, I come from a family that believes in Nehruvian Secularism and in the “idea of India”. This ideological influence comes primarily through my father. My paternal grandmother was from Agra and came to Pakistan only after her marriage to my grandfather (who was from Peshawar). My grandfather was an official in the Pakistan Railways and prior to the 1965 war, my father and his siblings used to travel by train to Agra every year to see their maternal grandparents and relatives. The war unfortunately put an end to that. While I never had an in-depth discussion with my grandmother about what exactly Pakistan meant to her, my father has told me that she was deeply saddened by the fact that she was separated from her parents and one of her brothers. Such tragedies were common in many Pakistani and Indian Muslim families. I was lucky enough to be able to visit India as a child and spend time in my dadi’s ancestral home. There are pictures of me in front of the Taj.

On my mother’s side, my maternal grandfather was born in Amritsar (though he was ethnically Kashmiri). In 1947, he was living in Sialkot and married to my nani (who was from West Punjab). However, his relatives came to Sialkot as refugees from Amritsar. For decades, they continued to carry the keys to their houses in Amritsar. In fact, when my mother spent time in Indian Punjab in the 1990s (while doing some international development work) people there were surprised to learn that she could describe Amritsar neighborhoods in great detail without ever having been there before.

It is also important to note that though I was born in Pakistan, I spent most of my formative years growing up in the United States. My parents had many Indian friends. Also, my entire family was deeply involved with Hindustani classical music and this naturally tends to be an Indian diaspora activity. My ustad was Bangladeshi-American but very few of his students were Muslim. While I was learning to sing khayal, I also learned bhajans and shabads in various ragas. Continue reading What Being a “Center-Left” Pakistani Means to Me

You Cannot Demolish His Mosque and Claim His High Culture

X.T.M · April 29, 2026 · 22 comments

A precedent post on hybridity, custodial duty, and the elites who want it both ways

The argument running through the recent threads is sharper than the usual India versus Pakistan braggadocio. It is a claim about high culture itself. A civilisation cannot demolish a man’s mosque and claim his high culture in the same breath. The two moves cancel. The elites on both sides of the 1947 line have been performing both moves for eighty years, and the contradiction is now visible.

What high culture is

High culture is the foundational settlement of values, ordinarily anchored in religion, that a civilisation runs on. It can be syncretic in formation. Plural ownership is harder to sustain, and most attempts eventually close into a single settlement or fracture into rival ones; some imperial frames (Ottoman, Mughal, the Republic of India itself) did hold the tension for longer than the simple model would predict. The point is not that plurality is impossible. The point is that plurality is unstable, and the instability is what generates events like 1992.

England is the cleanest worked example of closure. The English high culture is a hybridisation of Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and an absorbed Celtic remainder. Scotland and Wales sit inside the matrix without breaking it. The hybridisation closed; one settlement emerged.

Ireland is the test case in the negative. The same Anglophone substrate produced a different high culture in the Catholic south, and in the Catholic pockets of the north, because religion did the foundational work and religion would not blend. Two islands, one language family, two high cultures. Language is the medium. Religion is the substrate.

Ludwig von Mises, in Nation, State, and Economy, argued the related half. The nation is a speech community, but the speech community is shaped by what the school teaches and what the church says. Plattdeutsch villages on the Dutch border could have gone either way two centuries ago; the descendants would now be just as good Hollanders or just as good Germans, depending only on where the school and the church sat. Language carries national consciousness. The religious settlement decides which language wins.

Notre Dame: The custodial bargain Continue reading You Cannot Demolish His Mosque and Claim His High Culture

India and Pakistan Are Playing Chicken; simply to hurt themselves

X.T.M · April 27, 2026 · 96 comments

Two comments are worth picking up on, and one claim worth interrogating.

N disagrees that contact ameliorates ties. EK suggests the only Islamicate voices the Indian RW respects are those who have “debased their own civilizational integrity.” We do not know who he is shadow-tweeting. It could be us, the Founders of this blog, who are Islamicate by heritage and recognisably friendly to Hindu right-wing readings. Either way, the framing is off. And then there is Q, on the thread as we write, claiming Pakistanis “will eventually take over the Islamicate world.“

The cost of distance

The dominant idea of the last decade is that less contact means more security. Fewer visas. Less trade. No cricket. No artistic exchange. Reduced diplomatic warmth. This is sold as realism. It is, in large part, self-harm.

Distance does not produce clarity. It produces mythology. When people stop meeting one another, they begin imagining one another. The imagined neighbour is always simpler, darker, and easier to hate than the real one.

He is also, as Dhurandhar showed, sexier. Hatred and desire run on the same current. The more villainous the Pakistani on screen, the more the Indian audience leans in.

Civility is built by proximity. Not sainthood. Habituation. When people share space, study, trade, marriage, and culture, the room for fantasy narrows. One can still dislike the other side. But one dislikes actual people, not cartoons.

N’s response to this is that contact theory is “akin to blaming a victim for not engaging with the perpetrator.” That feels like the Israeli security story applied to the Indian Sub-continent. It assumes Pakistanis are a permanent terror-source requiring permanent counter-violence.

Pakistan obliges the narrative by behaving badly enough often enough to keep it alive. India obliges the frame by treating every bad actor as the median Pakistani. Both governments are now invested in the loop.

Pakistanis no longer defend hybrid Islamicate culture Continue reading India and Pakistan Are Playing Chicken; simply to hurt themselves

Millions in India stripped of vote before critical state election, as government seeks to ‘purify’ electoral roll

Kabir · April 23, 2026 · 50 comments

I’m trying to stay away from commenting too much about India’s internal affairs. But this is too important not to mention.

From The Guardian:

Millions of people in the Indian state of West Bengal have been stripped of their vote ahead of a critical state election this week, after a controversial electoral revision described by critics as a “bloodless political genocide” and mass disenfranchisement of minorities.

In West Bengal, a total of 9.1 million names have been deleted from the register, more than 10% of the electorate. While many were dead or duplicates, about 2.7 million people have challenged their expulsions, but still been removed.

The process of revising the electoral roll, known as Special Intensive Revision (SIR), has been taking place in states and territories across India, justified by the Narendra Modi government as a way to stop “infiltrators” – a pejorative term largely referring to illegal Muslim Bangladeshi immigrants – from voting.

The divisive exercise by the central Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) government to “purify” the electoral roll – in the words of home minister Amit Shah – has led to a chorus of fury.

And:

SY Quraishi, the former election commissioner of India, was among those who raised concerns over the justification and the processes of SIR, both in West Bengal and other states, and said it raised serious questions over the election commission’s role.

“I feel very awkward and hesitant about commenting on my successor, but as a citizen, I see what is happening and I must speak out,” he said. “The SIR is completely unnecessary, it is designed to harass. Administratively it is a disaster and the intentions are not noble.

He added: “It took us 30 years to achieve 99% accuracy in the rolls. They expect to exceed this in three months. Why this frantic rush if the main objective is accuracy?”

For the “largest democracy in the world” to be removing voters from electoral rolls in such a rushed manner is a transparent attempt to shape political outcomes. One must note the BJP has never been able to achieve a foothold in West Bengal.

There has been a lot of criticism on BP about Pakistan’s lack of democratic credentials. Much of this criticism is justified. It is a fact that Pakistan has had three military coups in its history while India has largely remained an uninterrupted democracy–with the exception of the Emergency. However, this “Special Intensive Revision” indicates democratic backsliding.

Op Sindoor Was Not a Pakistani Defeat: Precedents Two Days From Pahalgam

X.T.M · April 20, 2026 · 136 comments

Two days from the tragic anniversary of Pahalgam (may those brave Martyrs rest in Peace for their sacrifice for Dharma). A useful moment to set down precedents, because a year out the narrative has hardened in places it should not have, and we would like the comments to stress-test these before they calcify further.

Precedent one. Operation Sindoor was not a Pakistani defeat.

Pakistan entered 2025 as a failed state. It exits the Pahalgam year as a diplomatic champion. Whatever happened in the skies over those days in May, the outcome in global perception is unambiguous. A military operation is never only a military operation. It is also how the world reads it, and on that ledger the result is not the one Delhi wanted. No Pakistani commentator across the spectrum treats Sindoor as a setback. Our Pakistani readers can confirm this in the thread, and we invite them to. The Indian premise that Pakistan might now re-engage to recover from some imagined humiliation makes zero sense. The humiliation is not where Indian commentary locates it.

Precedent two. The Crescent commentariat cannot have it both ways.

There is a pernicious Pakistani trait, most visible in the diaspora and the Anglophone class at home. They live distinctly Western lifestyles. They then want Islam for all. Live your beliefs. It is a genuinely offensive thing to cheer on the Iranian revolution, a revolution deeply devastating to the Iranian people, from an American suburb or a DHA drawing room. Only a Pakistani commentator could manage the trick of celebrating the Islamic Republic while exempting themselves from its consequences.

In the Iranian diaspora, religious Shias are quietly ostracised. Persian pride, across pre-Islamic, Islamic and post-Islamic registers, is astonishing in its depth. Some of us, the Baha’is for instance, integrate all three.

The TNT move, which imports Islamist preferences onto others while the class that holds them escapes the reality (QeA typifies this), is the opposite.

Precedent three. The rediscovery of Hinduism is coming, and it will come from South Punjab and Sindh. Continue reading Op Sindoor Was Not a Pakistani Defeat: Precedents Two Days From Pahalgam

The Chess Masters Who Weren’t

X.T.M · April 19, 2026 · 24 comments

The presumption behind the grand-strategist mythos is always the same. Trump, Milei, Netanyahu, Modi and Orbán are playing three moves ahead, and the other side is stupid. Strip the second half of that sentence and the first collapses.

Look at the scoreboard.

Op Sindoor. India’s post-operation strategic environment does not favour India. Whatever the tactical ledger reads, the diplomatic map around South Asia has tightened against Delhi, not loosened. Delhi has learned. The region has taken notes.

Pakistan. The surprise winner of Op Sindoor is not India. Rawalpindi has played the post-operation hand better than anyone expected and is now cashing cheques in Washington, the Persian Gulf and Beijing in the same quarter. On the current scoreboard, Pakistan is the diplomatic champion of the world.

Iran.* Tehran has pushed back harder than the MAGA-Likud axis priced in. Hormuz did not close on Washington’s schedule. The Islamic Republic has not folded on Washington’s terms. The deterrence calculus is running the wrong way.

Lebanon. Netanyahu was ordered to stop. Not persuaded, not incentivised. Ordered. That is a tell about who holds the leash, and it is not Jerusalem.

Hungary. Orbán conceded on 12 April 2026. Sixteen years, gone in a single parliamentary cycle, to Péter Magyar’s Tisza on a two-thirds supermajority. Some say it was thanks to JD’s Kiss of Death. The flagship of illiberal democracy in Europe was voted out by the electorate it was supposed to have captured.

Continue reading The Chess Masters Who Weren’t