India is richer

Strip away the noise and a simple asymmetry remains. India will almost certainly remain richer than Pakistan for the foreseeable future. The gap in GDP, fiscal depth, technology, and demographic scale is widening, not narrowing. On material indicators, India has the advantage. Yet material advantage does not always translate into strategic dominance.

India is louder

India is a mass democracy. It is electorally accountable, media-saturated, and sensitive to public opinion. Governments must justify escalation. Markets react to instability. Voters punish miscalculation. This imposes restraint.

Pakistan is tighter

Pakistan is structured differently. Power is narrower. Decision-making is concentrated within a smaller elite, with the military as the central institution. That creates rigidity in some domains but flexibility in others. Strategic continuity does not reset every five years. Public opinion matters, but it does not directly determine policy in the same way it does across the border.

Structural Differences

This structural difference shapes behaviour. India must think about global markets, coalition politics, and reputational cost. Pakistan can absorb economic stress more easily because its political system is already insulated from full electoral volatility. That insulation produces durability, even under strain.

The list gets smaller. There are six countries who sent the head of state/government to all three: 1) Beijing military parade 2) Davos Board of Peace launch 3) Washington BOP 1st meeting They are: Armenia | Azerbaijan | Indonesia | Kazakhstan | Pakistan | Uzbekistan

Like Israel

The comparison to Israel is imperfect but instructive. Pakistan sees itself not merely as a normal state but as a mission-driven one; founded around a civilisational claim. That narrative has penetrated deeply, especially within Punjab, which anchors the state. Whatever internal divisions exist, the core idea of Pakistan remains intact among large segments of its population. That coherence matters.

Iran is different

Iran is different. Iran is an old civilisational state that experienced a revolution. Its legitimacy rests on both nationalism and ideology. Economic collapse pressures ideology because there is an alternative identity beneath it: Iranian nationhood. Pakistan’s founding identity is narrower and more defensive. That makes it, paradoxically, more resistant to ideological erosion.

Indian commentary misfires

Indian commentary often assumes that economic divergence will produce political collapse in Pakistan. History suggests otherwise. States with concentrated power structures can endure long periods of stagnation if the elite remains unified and the core population internalises the founding narrative. This does not mean Pakistan is stronger. It means it is structured differently.

Operation Sindoor

Recent crises illustrate the asymmetry. India may dominate on conventional metrics, but limited engagements allow Pakistan to frame survival as success. In strategic competition, narrative often substitutes for parity. If an operation does not decisively alter the balance, as 1971 did, it risks reinforcing the opponent’s domestic cohesion. That is not a moral judgment. It is an institutional one.

Strength versus Weakness

India’s strength is scale, openness, and economic dynamism. Its constraint is democratic accountability and reputational sensitivity. Pakistan’s weakness is economic fragility. Its advantage is strategic continuity and insulation from electoral shock. Analyses fail when they assume both systems operate under identical incentives. They do not.

Two different worlds

India and Pakistan are not mirror states. One is a continental democracy managing diversity through electoral churn. The other is a security state anchored in a founding idea and sustained by a narrower power core. Economic trends favour India. Structural resilience favours Pakistan in certain forms of confrontation. Understanding that asymmetry is more useful than arguing about which country is “better.”

Power in Young States, Authority in Old Ones

A military dictatorship governs by force, hierarchy, and command. Its legitimacy is procedural and immediate: order, security, survival. This form works where political memory is thin and inherited meaning is limited. Pakistan’s army did not overthrow an old order. It stepped into an empty one. Iran is structured differently. It is a civilisational state that has existed in recognisable form for roughly three thousand years. Power there has never been exercised through force alone. Authority has always been tied to ideas that predate any single regime.

Monarchy as Civilisation, Not Administration

When Iran was ruled by kings, monarchy was not merely a system of governance. It was cosmology. Kingship was linked to justice, order, and civilisation itself, from the Achaemenids through the Pahlavis. When monarchy collapsed, it did not collapse as a technical system. It collapsed as a civilisational institution. That distinction matters. Administrative failures can be replaced easily. Civilisational failures leave residue. This is why nostalgia for monarchy in Iran does not translate into simple restoration politics. The memory persists, but the form cannot simply be reinstalled. Iran moved on, but it moved on within its own historical grammar.

Shi‘ism and the Islamic Republic

Shi‘ism explains why the Islamic Republic functions differently from a generic theocracy. Clerics did not invent legitimacy in 1979. They organised an inheritance that already existed. Shi‘ism had been woven into Iranian identity for centuries, shaping law, ritual, memory, and authority. The state did not create religion. It administered a civilisational framework that was already legible to society. This is why Iran cannot be ruled by raw coercion without losing authority. Force alone has never been enough. Power must feel historical to endure.

Why a Military Takeover Would Fail

This is where fantasies about a clean military takeover by the IRGC go wrong. A purely military regime would feel thin and temporary. Force might hold, but legitimacy would not. Iran has never been governed by command alone. Its systems have always required symbolic depth. When that depth disappears, the state destabilises. This is not a moral argument. It is a structural one. Military rule is not a neutral option that can be dropped into any society.

China and the Problem of Self-Rule

China clarifies the same point. The Chinese Communist Party is not democratic in a procedural sense, yet it governs through ideology, bureaucracy, and historical narrative. It claims continuity, national destiny, and collective order. Whether one accepts that claim is secondary. What matters is that it structures authority. Self-rule is not synonymous with elections. Ancient states require legitimacy that is intelligible to history.

India and Civilisational Continuity

India exposes the same analytical error. There is a persistent claim that India did not exist before modern nationalism, as if civilisation begins with a passport. This is untenable. The Indus Valley civilisation is among the oldest on earth, comparable to Egypt and Mesopotamia. India is its inheritor, just as Iran is the inheritor of ancient Persian worlds. This does not make India or Iran virtuous. It makes them continuous.

Why Pakistan Is Different

Continuity is power. It allows societies to absorb autocracy, experiment with democracy, survive collapse, and regenerate authority without disintegrating. There is something old to stitch consensus around. Pakistan does not have this advantage. That is not an insult. It is a structural description. Pakistan is a young nation with a strong ideology and a shallow historical state tradition. Its political struggle has always been to manufacture coherence quickly. The army filled that role. Ideology attempted to compensate for time.

History Is Not Evenly Distributed

Iran will resolve its crisis according to its long memory, not according to modern templates. India does the same. Pakistan is still writing its memory. History is not evenly distributed, and governance reflects that inequality. Recognising this is not elitism. It is realism.

We’re struggling a lot. Universities are mushrooming (95 in 2002 to 269 in 2024) without any meaningful output, just producing PhDs like rabbits (177 in 2002 to 3489 in 2024). Result: not a single Pakistani university ranks in the global top 350.

I’ve visited different universities. (inter-alia):

Riphah International University, Islamabad – a private HEI. The I-8 campus is small, but with multiple campuses they cater to around 30,000 students. What’s interesting is how deeply Islamic morality is embedded in their institutional values. It’s the only university (out of the 8–9 I’ve visited so far) whose vision and mission are explicitly integrated with Islamic principles. They even have around 10 credit hours dedicated to teaching morality. Quite remarkable in this era of modernity and expediency.

University of Haripur – a “big whale” kind of university with stunning views. In the public sector, it stands out for its lush green terrain. The guest house? Phenomenal and all pro bono, of course. 😊

Pak-Austria Fachhochschule Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology – based on the German Fachhochschule model (industry + theoretical study). Students are required to complete around 500 hours of industry experience to graduate. Perhaps the only university in Pakistan operating on this model. Their guest house was phenomenal too.

Meanwhile, a brief I authored is out: Pakistan’s Venture Capital Landscape: Navigating Challenges, Seizing Opportunities. In it, I chart the problems in Pakistan’s VC ecosystem and possible ways forward. Read here

I also met a fellow “dead poet” from my community—the Dead Poets Society of Pakistan—Abdullah, a.k.a. Nuwanda, at a cafe called Shugf (translated as “devotion” or “infatuation”). We tried a coffee variant that had been scaled up to intensify its flavor. And of course, given my addiction, it didn’t disturb my sleep.

On the way back to my hometown, Peshawar, I penned a poem. I hope readers might like it.

While talking of the moon, this line keeps echoing in me: Mein Jo Shair Kabhi Hota (song by Mehdi Hassan).

a silly moon that i was unable to see because of the angle of my seat [1]

i was traveling

to my precious and treasured

city

a typical bus

nothing new

nothing interesting

a person quarreling—

he thought this vehicle

was going towards Lahore

and in silence,

oranges turn up

in your hands with henna patterns everywhere,

tattoos of libido

when i think of you

i want to cry

(maybe due to alignment

of zodiac)

i am fish

it won’t pester anyway

can’t we just go in the deep

iced coffee (not Shireen’s [2] stream but ours)

in the buff and never come back—

by this, we will be

fossilized into another folklore

they would call us

“panic-lovers of the pure land”

a silly moon is saying something to me

but i cannot see it

due to the angle of the seat i am sitting upon

let it enjoy the ephemeral glory

the sunshine would kill it

i am so honored

i am penetrated by a fever

that is insurmountable by any medicine

in this state, i am a slave

and king

at the same time

Note: Please don’t consider this my final version. I’m unable to fully express my feelings right now.

[1] A lovely friend suggested that I look at the moon, but I couldn’t for obvious stated reasons. That sparked the idea to write this.

[2] “Shireen’s stream” comes from the Persian legend Khosrow and Shireen, where Farhad, in love with Shireen, carves a channel through a mountain to bring her water (or milk). It symbolizes devotion, sacrifice, and love that overcomes obstacles.