Tag: India

The Writ of the Pakistani State into P.A.K

July 28, 2026 165 Comments filed under Popular, X.T.M

Rawalakot vs. Jantar Mantar

  1. Has any other South Asian government fired the anti-national frame at a major protest movement?
  2. What matters, constitutionalism or state resolve?
  3. Can a state be “hard” outwards without treating domestic opposition as an external enemy?

Is this the same as Delhi?

Last night, the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Police issued a statement about clashes at Rawalakot. It said that armed groups of the proscribed Joint Awami Action Committee had tried to force their way into the city, that appeals to disperse were rejected, that fire was opened on law enforcement officials, and that two officers were injured. The phrase used was challenging the state writ.

Five weeks earlier, on 23 June, Dharmendra Pradhan described the Cockroach Janta Party as a B team of disruptive elements and told India Today that tukde-tukde forces were at Jantar Mantar.

The two governments reached for the same instrument. Both took a movement making material demands and attempted to relocate it outside the nation, where its demands would no longer require an answer. This is the standard subcontinental response to a protest that cannot be conceded to.

The difference is what happened next. The JAAC is now banned. Pradhan resigned on 25 July.

Why is the Pakistani case different?

Continue reading The Writ of the Pakistani State into P.A.K

Eliminator, Not Meritocracy

July 22, 2026 139 Comments filed under Popular, X.T.M

Calvin has argued that NEET’s meritocracy is a fiction: the exam is cleared through coaching that costs lakhs, tests discipline rather than aptitude, and predicts nothing about the doctor a candidate becomes. 0M-3 answered that a single centralised exam is the one gate a poor student can afford to prepare for, and that the state-run alternatives leak worse (Punjab’s teachers exam, Rajasthan’s SI recruitment).

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Best of Bharat

July 20, 2026 No Comments filed under X.T.M

My final event at Delhi was attending the Para Athletes and off.

Team India

It’s quite interesting all the flags of the Commonwealth were there including the Star & Crescent.

Everything about this trip has shown to me what an Indian Superpower looks like.

A soft, but strong, Superpower.

As I walked into the room; the Minister was chant Bharat Mata ki Jha and encourage the room to chant it with him.

And why not; if Divine Blessing can help India, that is Bharat, win as many Gold Medals as possible, then best to holler out Bharat Mata ki Jha.

I’ll end with yesterday’s trip to the Lotus Temple.

Yá Bahá’u’l Abhá

Bharat Mata ki Jha

The Self-Confident Hindu

July 20, 2026 53 Comments filed under Popular, X.T.M

The Question the Thread Threw Up

Yesterday I asked whether Modi made India great again. The thread beneath it, the liveliest we have had in a while since the discussion on Gender, promptly asked a harder question: is Modi good for the Muslims? It is a fair question and it deserves to be held properly, so let me put two commitments on the table before anything else. Every minority and every people has its rights. And hatred is to be avoided at any cost. Nothing below moves either commitment an inch.

With that said, there is a question beneath the question, and it is the one this post is about. Is a self-confident Hindu a bad thing? Because that, stripped of the slogans, is what this era is actually contesting: whether the majority population of India, indigenous to the land, which did not opt for Partition, and which wrote its minorities in as full citizens, may consolidate its dharma, its mythos, its ideology into a confident and unified global identity.

Britain swears in her seventh prime minister of the decade today; India, one tenure deep since 2014, argues instead about what its majority is allowed to become. I know which argument I would rather be having.

Who Appropriated Whom

“Indians have been appropriating/adopting foreign culture for at least the past 4,000 years.” Q

Adopting, certainly. But appropriating runs the arrow backwards. Did India appropriate the zero (inventor:  Brahmagupta), or give it like it did the “Arabic” numerals? Nalanda drew students from across Asia for centuries; Buddhism, born on Indian soil, remade China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, and Southeast Asia. One of China’s four great classical novels is Journey to the West, and the west in question is India. Columbus was hunting a route to India when he blundered into the Americas.

Continue reading The Self-Confident Hindu

Did Modi Make India Great Again?

July 19, 2026 204 Comments filed under Popular, X.T.M

Seven to One

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 Continue reading Did Modi Make India Great Again?

From Indus to Exile: Notes from Delhi

July 14, 2026 7 Comments filed under X.T.M

Breakfast in Delhi

There are a lot of things we would say. We are in Delhi, over a good South Indian breakfast, and the first thing we notice is our own silence. We have not been very active on Brown Pundits of late. However we do not have the option of a break or a hiatus; since we have to keep the blog foundationally alive.

We had not been in Asia since January. Six months, and a long six months at that. Ordinarily we would have broken it up with a visit in April, but the gap has made us appreciate India all the more.

One thing we realise in life is that everything is continuity: showing up, and how much work you put into a thing.

The Post-Factional Turn

Continue reading From Indus to Exile: Notes from Delhi

Pakistan & India as Imperial Nation States

July 9, 2026 3 Comments filed under X.T.M

The useful conversations at a conference are never in the room. They happen in the corridor, over bad coffee, among the people who did not get a panel.

What we heard there over the weekend was a single proposition, stated with varying degrees of anger. The subcontinent is held down by two post-imperial states, each of which inherited the Raj’s administrative logic and neither of which has any intention of loosening it. The languages, the peoples, the small nations inside the big ones are being quietly extinguished. The activists who said this were Baloch, Sindhi, Kashmiri and Punjabi (as well as Pushtun, Hazara, and Urdu-speaking).

We should also say at the outset that this essay is about Pakistan. The two-hegemon frame is the activists’ frame, and we have not necessarily adopted it.

I. Ethnicity versus the Pakistani state.

Continue reading Pakistan & India as Imperial Nation States

Geography is Power

July 1, 2026 8 Comments filed under 0M-3, Precedent

The goal of this post will be to act as a counter to XTM’s post about geography not being power. It will rely on realism as a doctrine of international relations to de-cypher the significance geography has had on the Indian Subcontinent and how it has affected the trajectories of the nations within it.

Geography initially reared its head in discussions of strategy during the times of Mackinder and Mahan in the early 1900s. Where Mackinder so boldly stated that “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.”. However, these words were written in colonial era Britain as a device to fear monger about the Russians as they were the perfect counter to their strategy of controlling the world with sea power through internal lines of transportation through Cold Siberia. With that cold logic Russia which had been the ally of British through the two world wars became a target. Continue reading Geography is Power

Geography Is Not Power

June 28, 2026 81 Comments filed under Popular, X.T.M

The Indus Waters Treaty and the Nile

While the previous thread argues about whether Panini held a Pakistani passport, a more useful quarrel is flowing past us. In April 2025, after the Pahalgam massacre, India held the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance. It did this the day after the attack, a fortnight before the missiles of Operation Sindoor. The water came first. That order tells us something: New Delhi reached for the river before it reached for the air force, because it believes the river is the better weapon. We think it is wrong about that, and the reason why takes us a long way from the subcontinent, to the Blue Nile.

The instinct underneath India’s move, and underneath most of the commentary on it, is that the country upstream holds the whip. Sit at the top of the river and you control the tap. It is a tidy idea and it is false. Whether the upstream state is master or supplicant depends not on the map but on which side can make the other bleed.

India is running a bluff it cannot yet call. The treaty India suspended was built to survive exactly this. Signed in 1960 under World Bank mediation, it gave Pakistan the three western rivers and India the three eastern ones, and it contains no exit door. A party cannot lawfully walk away or hold it in abeyance; it stays in force until both sides agree to change it. India knows this, which is why, when it asked twice, in 2023 and 2024, to renegotiate, and Pakistan refused to come to the table, India was left with grievance and no remedy. The Court of Arbitration has since ruled, more than once, that the suspension has no standing and that the limits on India’s water control still bind. India calls the court illegal and presses on.

Continue reading Geography Is Not Power

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