Yes, he is talking of theater but you can easily replace theater with cinema. The leading lights of Hindi cinema in the years after independence were members of India People’s Theater Association (IPTA). Here is the wikipedia entry on IPTA

What is Pakistan and what is its army like ?

Pakistan was created in 1947 when the British ended their colonial rule over the sub-continent and split on religious lines. It is a culmination of Muslim League’s campaign for a separate Muslim nation. The league and its supporters considered Hindus and Muslims incapable of living together in harmony. It is a well thought out idea of a nation for Muslims. Here are links to two podcasts that will tell you more about the idea of Pakistan.

Creating a New Medina

Omar Ali on Pakistan Myths and Realities

The founders of Pakistan and those who have followed them have kept their word. Non-Muslims cannot hold top constitutional positions. Religious minorities make up for less than 5% of Pakistan’s population and the non Islamic parts of its history are absent from its cultural milieu. It has a blasphemy law on its statutes and in a 2010 Pew Poll 87% Pakistanis identify as “Muslims First” over nationality.

The highest amongst surveyed Muslim countries. Its 1973 constitution declares Islam as state religion. Pakistan is and for Islam. Pakistan frames its identity against ‘Hindu India’. Individual acts of graciousness that one may have encountered or heard of, do not change this reality.

Pakistan’s army is its foremost institution. Its outsized role in running the country is well documented. The saying- Pakistan is an army with a country attached to it exists for sound reasons. What was this army up to weeks and months before Brigadier Nasir’s exchange with Lieutenant Khetarpal? It was slaughtering Bengali Hindus in East Pakistan. Pick up this book, it is essential reading on Pakistan army.

Next time you hear the dialogue “Kaun Dushman” spare a thought for parents of Captain Saurabh Kalia

The motto of the Pakistan army is Faith, Piety, and Fighting in the way of Allah. Its role in fomenting Jihad in Kashmir and birthing and nurturing the Taliban is well documented. An individual officer’s behaviour is not what the institution stands for. Here is its chief laying out its vision and its core ideology.

It is the gap between the reality of India and Pakistan and what its army stands for that makes Ikkis a failed propaganda tool. In the age of social media, it is impossible to hide the truth and talk of Aman ki Asha. Raghavan is not helped by the caricaturesque nature of other characters in the movie and the mediocre performances of actors portraying those characters. Shri Raghavan if you want to make a war movie, don’t let your politics overshadow it. Just give us its brutality and futility. If you want us to join the Aman ki Asha write a more believable story.

If you want us to believe India and Pakistan are the same, do pass on whatever you are smoking. 

By Anwar Iqbal in DAWN:

According to these reports, Pakistan’s military and civilian leadership has been in direct contact with senior US officials, including President Donald Trump, conveying Islamabad’s willingness to facilitate dialogue and reduce tensions.

Some accounts suggest that Pakistan has even indicated readiness to host talks in Islamabad if the parties are prepared to explore diplomatic channels.

Vali Nasr, a prominent Washington-based scholar, argues that any Pakistani diplomatic initiative is unlikely to occur in isolation from Saudi Arabia:

“Pakistan will only step up if it has Saudi backing — and prodding. Riyadh is likely very much in the picture,” he wrote in a post on X.

And:

Pakistan’s value as a potential intermediary also stems from its parallel access to Tehran and Washington — a rare combination in the current geopolitical climate.

Analyst Michael Kugelman makes this point clearly: “Pakistan is far from being an unlikely US-Iran mediator. Many high-level Pak-Iran meetings over last year. The US administration is very fond of Pakistan. Trump has said (Field Marshal Asim) Munir knows Iran better than most. Also worth noting that Pakistan represents Iran’s diplomatic interests in the US.”

Update: Pakistan stands ‘ready, honored’ to host US-Iran talks, says PM Shehbaz 

23rd March 2003. Twenty three years ago today, a Pakistani Operative Zia Mustafa of the Laskhar-e-Toiba walks into the village of Nadimarg, Jammu and Kashmir. Wearing fake uniforms, Zia and his accomplices wake up the the village, and then proceed to murder 11 men, 11 women and a boy after lining them up. Walking away, the terrorists hear a baby crying, and order to silence him. The baby becomes murder victim #24. Link

23 March 2026, I read a comment on a BP thread discussing the West Asia war and Iran’s defiance, and the question that is the the topic of this post is asked.

I feel obligated to answer it. The statistics of so-called ‘non-state actor’ victims inflicted by Pakistani groups on Indian soil, since the 1990s, into the 2000s and beyond are stark. For an Indian who has grown up to adulthood in these years, actually lived through multiple decades where hundreds if not thousands of Indians dying as a result of the Lashkars and Jaish of the world was just part and parcel of life – all given succor by the Pakistani military and state. The datasheet linked here shows the tragedy that has been slowly but surely being deterred – and this is only starting with the year 2000. According to SATP, more than 25000 deaths occurred in J&K between 1988 and 2000.

The change in the public response of the Indian government, starting with the surgical strikes in 2016, and then escalated with the Balakot Bombing raids, and the direct and sharp decrease in the number of terrorism incidents is unmistakable. Operation Sindoor, the 4 day skirmish that took place in May 2025 on the heels of unarmed tourists being murdered in cold blood – is the exclamation mark in a simple statement that demonstrates Indian resilience and response when challenged with terrorism. No more will such attacks go unanswered. And the ultimate sponsors of such evil – the Pakistan Military itself – will have to bear direct consequences delivered. Via Brahmos-Mail.

Nobody needs a degree in statistics, to spot the co-relation in the timeline – India starts executing public retaliation in the aftermath of terror attacks, the frequency of such attacks drops sharply.

As far as the spreadsheets accounting and the nuts and bolts of what targets were hit during Op Sindoor that would count as “actual accomplishments” – there is ample evidence available for any objective observer to get themselves informed. From satellite imagery of multiple PAF bases and runways ‘double-tapped’ into shutting down for months, to ‘hardened’ aircraft shelters being demolished and rebuilt months after the fact.

But what Op Sindoor accomplished goes beyond merely a largely one-sided ledger of inflicting losses to military bases and flagship bases of terrorist organizations – Op Sindoor was a demonstration of commitment by the Indian state – a resolve that no longer will the nuclear umbrella allow the Pakistani Military to continue waging its ‘jihad of a thousand cuts’ without the consequences of a military conflict. One that will inflict costs not just on the bankrupt Pakistani state, with FATF gray lists hurting its citizens. Send terrorists to murder Indians, and bombs will drop on Pakistani Military bases in response. Op Sindoor is a promise of resolve. The Indian government will respond militarily if you threaten the security of its citizens.

Post-script: Apart from making an unambiguous demonstration of Indian deterrence when facing up against terrorism emanating from Pakistan, arguably the greatest indicator of the success of Op Sindoor, is the Pakistani Military’s attempt at copy-pasting their own version on Pakistan’s Eastern Border. Unfortunately, the results for the second sibling that was birthed from ‘Cracking India’ in 1947, have been a lot more….mixed.

A contact in New York mentioned, almost in passing, that the shelves at their local (premium) supermarket were beginning to empty. Not bare, but noticeably thin, the way they go before a blizzard. People panic-buying quietly, without announcement. At LaGuardia, long queues that the local press has barely covered. The official newsflow says nothing. But the supermarket shelves don’t lie.

This is how the consequences of a war 6,000 miles away arrive in the richest city in the world; not with sirens, but with gaps on the grocery shelves and unexplained airport delays that nobody in authority seems in a hurry to explain. The information lag is itself a story. There is roughly a week between what is happening and what is being reported. Don’t believe one’s lying eyes.

BB’s thesis is that military power is ultimately a function of GDP. It is a reasonable working assumption. It is also, we would argue, dangerously wrong in the specific conditions we are now watching play out in real time.

The United States and Israel are the two wealthiest, most technologically sophisticated military powers to have ever jointly prosecuted a war. Their adversary is a sanctioned, inflation-wracked theocracy that has been massacring its own citizens and losing proxy after proxy for two years. And yet here we are, Day 23 of Operation Epic Fury, with Trump issuing a 48-hour ultimatum to obliterate Iran’s power plants unless the Strait of Hormuz is fully reopened, Iran responding that any such strike will be met with attacks on U.S. and Israeli energy and infrastructure assets, Brent crude at $112 a barrel and Goldman Sachs projecting elevated prices through 2027, and the administration having exhausted every economic lever it possesses. The richer side is losing the economic war. The question is whether they know it yet.

Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Sociology of Surrender

The pattern is not new. We have watched it twice in living memory, in the same geography, and both times the lesson was the same.

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the professional Iraqi army collapsed with extraordinary speed. Saddam’s soldiers surrendered in their thousands, sometimes in their tens of thousands. The analysts at the time attributed this to superior American firepower and tactical brilliance.

What they underweighted was something sociological: Saddam, for all his brutality, had delivered two decades of relative stability; a functioning bureaucratic state, salaries, pensions, a middle class with something to lose. Iraqi soldiers had families, flats, futures. They calculated the odds and surrendered. That was rational behaviour in the circumstances.

Then the United States moved into Afghanistan. The experience was entirely different. Afghanistan had not known a stable state since 1978. The Soviet invasion, the civil war, the warlord period, the Taliban; generation after generation had grown up knowing nothing but armed conflict. The American military, to its credit, noted this explicitly: Afghans were ferocious fighters not because of superior training or equipment, but because the threshold of pain they were willing to absorb had been calibrated by decades of collective suffering. They had nothing to lose that they had not already lost many times over. Twenty years later, the Americans left. The Taliban were still there.

Iran today is closer to Afghanistan than to Iraq, and the war planners appear to have modelled it the other way around.

The Martyrdom Variable

Despite more than two weeks of relentless airstrikes, U.S. intelligence assessments now conclude that Iran’s regime will likely remain in place; weakened but more hardline, with the IRGC exerting greater control. The Islamic Republic is structured for siege. Its military has a dual architecture: the regular Artesh of 420,000 men, and the ideologically driven IRGC of roughly 190,000, designed to resist both coups and invasions. The decapitation strategy, kill the leadership, watch the system implode, has instead produced the opposite: the election of a new Supreme Leader signals the Islamic Republic projecting stability and endurance, reassuring the security services and consolidating IRGC power at a watershed moment.

This is the martyrdom variable that wealth-based models of military power simply cannot price. When you tell an ideologically driven adversary that your objective is their unconditional surrender and regime elimination, you have not weakened their will to fight. You have removed any incentive to stop. The Islamic Republic’s theology does not regard death as a cost. It regards it as a currency. Iran’s endgame is not victory but survival; restoring deterrence and regaining the power to dictate the terms of what comes after the war. That is a much lower bar than the one the U.S. and Israel set for themselves, and in asymmetric conflicts, the side with the lower bar almost always outlasts the side with the higher one.

Compare this to Israel’s own recent history. Hezbollah was degraded in 2006, forced back from the border. Then it reconstituted. It was degraded again in 2024. It is now, despite a ceasefire that required its disarmament, already rebuilding its military capabilities while Israel conducts near-daily strikes in southern Lebanon and prepares a ground invasion that has already displaced over a million people. The Lebanese Shia community that produces Hezbollah has not become wealthier or more comfortable in the intervening decades. It has become harder. The bombing campaigns that were supposed to break them have instead been their primary instrument of political cohesion.

The wealthier society, paradoxically, is the one with brittle will. Rich people have one or two children and do not want them dying in open-ended wars for ambiguous objectives. Israel called up 20,000 additional reservists at the outset of this war, on top of 50,000 already mobilised, and the domestic pressure to bring them home is already visible in the polling and the protest movements. Trump’s base, the constituency that elected him precisely because he said he would end the endless wars, is watching oil prices climb and asking when it stops. No more than 20% of the American public supported this war at the outset, with Republican support not exceeding 35%. These numbers do not improve as the Hormuz stays closed and the gas pump climbs. Or the supermarket shelves thin.

Karbala as Operating Principle

To understand why Iran fights the way it fights, you have to understand what it believes it is fighting for. And that requires a detour through theology that most Western analysts, to their considerable cost, have refused to take.

One of the most serious Shia scholars alive argues that the highest human right is not life. It is dignity. The question he poses is stark: if you are kept alive but degraded, humiliated, treated as less than human, what is the value of that life? He roots this in the Quranic understanding that the mission of every prophet was justice, and that dignity falls directly under justice. To be just is to treat human beings as deserving of honour. Not life first. Dignity first.

This is how Shia Islam reads Karbala. Imam Hussein knew he could live if he submitted to Yazid. He could have worshipped in peace. But a life of worship without dignity, having surrendered to an oppressor, had no value. Hussein’s formulation is precise: death is better than losing your honour, and losing your honour is better than going to hell. Most people think death is the worst thing that can happen. Hussein is saying it is the lightest of three doors. Losing your dignity is worse than dying. And surrendering to an oppressor, legitimising tyranny, is the kind of spiritual corruption that leads to hellfire. So submission is both the loss of honour and the road to damnation. They collapse into each other. Death becomes the only clean door. Not a tragedy. A choice.

This is the operating principle of Iran right now, and it is what the Pentagon’s targeting models cannot capture. When bombs fall on Iranian soil, the question the Islamic Republic asks is not how do we survive. It is how do we refuse to be humiliated. These are different questions. They produce different answers. The February 28 strikes did not break Iran because you cannot bomb dignity out of a civilisation that has made dignity its reason for being. You can destroy infrastructure. You can kill people. You can decapitate a leadership. But the idea that human beings deserve to be treated as human beings does not have a military solution.

One observer, writing from within the Sunni tradition, put it this way: for the first time since the original schism, Sunnis and Shias across the Muslim world are united in their reading of this conflict. The leaders may be calculating interests. The streets are not calculating anything. They are feeling something older and more durable than policy.

There is also a question that has not yet received the attention it deserves. Did Ali Khamenei, whatever one thinks of him or of the Islamic Republic, consciously choose the Imam Hussein option? Did he choose to die rather than submit, making of his death a statement rather than a defeat? If he did, even the regional press has not fully absorbed what that means for the civilisational stakes of what follows. A martyr’s death in Shia theology does not close a chapter. It opens one.

Iran Turns the Strait Into a Toll Road

Which brings us to the most audacious move of this war so far; one that has received far less attention than the missile salvoes. Iran is not simply blockading the Strait of Hormuz. It is monetising it.

Iranian lawmakers are pursuing a bill under which countries using the strait for shipping, energy transit and food supplies would be required to pay tolls and taxes to the Islamic Republic, framed explicitly as compensation for providing security along the route. This is not a negotiating gesture. An adviser to the Supreme Leader has already signalled that a “new regime for the Strait of Hormuz” will follow the war’s eventual end, one that allows Tehran to apply maritime restrictions on states that have sanctioned it. And it has already begun in practice: an Iranian lawmaker confirmed that Iran has collected $2 million in transit fees from some vessels, describing it as establishing “a new concept of sovereignty” over the strait after 47 years.

Read that carefully. Iran is not asking to be left alone. It is asking to be paid. It is transforming a military confrontation into a permanent revenue stream and a geopolitical sorting mechanism; friendly nations pass, adversaries don’t, and everyone pays for the privilege of knowing which category they fall into. The IRGC has established a controlled shipping lane near Larak Island, prioritising vessels from friendly nations such as China, India and Pakistan, while those linked to the U.S., Israel or their close allies remain effectively barred. This is not a blockade. It is a new customs regime, imposed by force, on the world’s most critical waterway.

The Trump administration’s 48-hour ultimatum on the power plants is, in this light, a response to having lost the economic argument entirely. You do not threaten to obliterate power plants unless you have run out of other options.

Pakistan: The Indispensable Wildcard

No analysis of this war is complete without Pakistan, and most analyses have shortchanged it badly. Pakistan is not a bystander. It is simultaneously one of the most constrained and most strategically pivotal actors in this entire theatre.

Consider the geography. Pakistan shares a 900-kilometre border with Iran, with deep cross-border ties between ethnic Baloch populations on both sides. Gwadar Port, positioned at the mouth of the Arabian Sea, offers China and Pakistan a strategic gateway that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz entirely; and amid current Gulf disruptions, stakeholders have highlighted its role as an alternative transshipment hub. That single fact reshapes the strategic map. While the world watches Hormuz, the alternative corridor runs through Pakistani Balochistan. China, which is coordinating directly with the IRGC to protect its energy supplies, has every incentive to ensure that corridor remains open and functional.

Pakistan’s domestic position is no less complicated. Public sentiment strongly supports Iran, complicating the government’s position. In Karachi, protesters attempted to storm the U.S. Consulate on 1 March; at least 10 people were killed when U.S. Marine guards opened fire. The Pakistan Navy has launched Operation Muhafiz-ul-Bahr to escort its own merchant ships through the Gulf, while the government has announced emergency austerity measures including a four-day workweek and two-week school closures to conserve fuel reserves. Pakistan is, in other words, already on a war footing’ without being at war.

The deeper danger is Balochistan itself. If instability in Iran weakens central authority in its peripheral regions, the Baloch question could acquire renewed significance, Iranian Baloch grievances have historically resonated across the border and could embolden separatist narratives inside Pakistan’s own Balochistan province. The BLA is already active. CPEC infrastructure, billions in Chinese investment running directly through this territory,  is already a target. A destabilised Iranian borderland does not just threaten Tehran. It threatens Islamabad, Beijing, and the entire overland architecture that China has spent a decade building as an alternative to Hormuz dependency.

This is why Pakistan is genuinely indispensable in ways that have nothing to do with troop numbers or GDP. It sits at the intersection of every pressure point in this war: the Iran border, the Baloch insurgency, the GCC’s security needs, the China-Russia axis’s logistical interests, and India’s energy exposure. It cannot afford to join any side fully. It cannot afford to stay neutral entirely. And its choices in the next few weeks will do more to shape the post-war regional order than most of the countries currently firing missiles.

India’s Miscalculation

The Indian dimension is where the civilisational stakes become most visible. GauravL’s post on the Indian RW’s pivot toward Iran has been one of our sharpest recent observations. The Hindutvavadi commentariat that was photographing itself in solidarity with Tel Aviv eighteen months ago is now quietly posting about Iranian sovereignty. This is not ideological inconsistency. It is economics expressing itself through politics, with unusual speed. 90% of India’s LPG imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz. LPG prices have risen sharply, with long queues forming at distribution centres across the country. When the gas cylinder price moves, Indian public opinion moves with it.

The government in Delhi has been playing a more sophisticated game, and has still miscalculated. Modi visited Israel just 48 hours before American and Israeli warplanes struck Iranian targets. He subsequently strongly condemned attacks on Gulf nations and expressed solidarity with all measures the UAE deemed necessary, while issuing no comparable statement on Iranian sovereignty or casualties. This asymmetry has stripped India of the mediating position it spent fifty years cultivating. India is now among only a handful of nations, including China, whose ships have been allowed safe passage through the strait, which tells you exactly where Tehran is keeping its doors open, and for whom. China, which brokered the Saudi-Iran rapprochement in 2023, is now the only great power with channels into all parties simultaneously. That is not an accident. It is the fruit of not being in the war.

The GCC’s Reckoning

The Gulf states are discovering the price of their own strategic miscalculation. The working assumption in Riyadh was that Iran would be rapidly degraded, the regime would implode or capitulate, and the Gulf’s security architecture could be rebuilt on firmer foundations. Instead, three ballistic missiles were launched toward Riyadh on Saturday, with Saudi Arabia intercepting one while two fell in uninhabited areas, and six drones were simultaneously headed toward the kingdom’s oil-rich eastern province.

The Saudis hired a bodyguard who not only brought the fight to the client’s doorstep but has been systematically killing anyone who might negotiate a ceasefire on the client’s behalf. Israel has assassinated precisely the Iranian officials, Ali Larijani foremost among them, who might have served as diplomatic back-channels for Trump, eliminating the off-ramps before anyone could use them. The question of whether Pakistan or Egypt can fill the resulting security vacuum misses the point entirely. Neither can replace American military capacity. But the relevant question was never military replacement. It was: who now has a channel into Tehran? At present, no one does; by design.

Suez II, or Something Worse

The Suez parallel keeps coming back to us, and it is worth stating clearly why these next 48 to 72 hours matter so much. In 1956, Britain and France launched a military operation they were certain was decisive. The economic and political costs ended their imperial moment within days; but the crucial mechanism was that Washington applied the pressure. Today the aggressor is Washington. There is no external power to apply the pressure. The only check on American escalation is American self-interest, and that brake is slower and less reliable than external coercion.

Two things can happen now. Trump follows through on the power plant threat; and the desalination infrastructure of an entire region goes up alongside it, producing a humanitarian catastrophe that will define his presidency and accelerate every anti-American realignment already underway. Or he backs down, and the ultimatum is revealed as the bluff that the Iranian side has already assessed it to be, Pax Americana formally cedes the Gulf to a new order, and we look back on this week as the hinge.

Either way, what we are watching is a transition. The administration has already exhausted every policy lever, having temporarily lifted sanctions on 140 million barrels of Iranian oil; paying the enemy to survive the war being waged against it. That sentence should be read slowly. China, meanwhile, coordinates directly with the IRGC, protects its shipping, keeps its Gwadar corridor open, and says very little. It does not need to say anything. The new order is establishing itself not through declaration but through the patient accumulation of facts on the water.

These are the most dangerous 48 to 72 hours since the transition from Pax Americana to whatever comes next began in earnest. The Whole Foods shelves in New York will tell you more about how it’s going than the official briefings will.

History’s vote is clear. Wealth doesn’t win wars against people who have learned to live without it.

– XTM, from the two Cambridges

War has no victors.

Interesting screenshots after the jump.

According to Defense Minister Khawaja Asif, the Taliban have become “a proxy for India”.  Asif said: “Our patience has run out. Now there is an open war”.

Those criticizing this operation should recognize that this is exactly the playbook India used in “Operation Sindoor”.  War is obviously not a good outcome for anyone but national security trumps everything.  There had been a Qatar and Turkey mediated ceasefire between Pakistan and Afghanistan but the Taliban have clearly not clamped down on TTP.

There seems to have been a “rally around the flag” effect with even the PTI making social media posts in support of Pakistan’s armed forces.

DAWN’s live blog is here 

The Observation

My Urdu teacher said something that lodged itself in my brain. India is vastly richer than Pakistan; and yet Pakistan’s Punjab, in his experience, feels cleaner. More ordered. Less like South Asia. I pushed back. Then I stopped.

The Numbers

In 2024, India’s GDP per capita was $2,695 against Pakistan’s $1,479; roughly 1.8 times higher on a nominal basis, and India’s total economy at $3.9 trillion is approximately ten times Pakistan’s $372 billion. Until 2008, Pakistan was actually richer per person; India led that measure for only 14 of the 60 years after independence. The divergence is real but recent and accelerating.

The sanitation data cuts against the perception: 81% of Indians have access to basic sanitation versus 72% of Pakistanis (WHO/UNICEF, 2024). On paper, India leads. So the paradox isn’t statistical. It is visual. The question isn’t who has more toilets. It is why certain Pakistani streets feel more governed.

The Answer: 41 Cantonments

Pakistan has 41 military cantonments embedded inside its major cities; Lahore, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Multan, Gujranwala. These are not barracks. They are independently governed urban municipalities under the Federal Ministry of Defence, legally outside provincial and city government jurisdiction entirely. Lahore Cantonment, established by the British in the 1850s, was described by one colonial planner as “a Garden City built half a century before the concept became popular in England.” It remains, today, one of the most ordered districts in Lahore; roads maintained, signals functioning, encroachments cleared, services enforced by a Cantonment Board that answers to the Ministry of Defence rather than to Lahore’s chronically underfunded Metropolitan Corporation.

Layered onto this is the Defence Housing Authority, DHA, formally institutionalised in 1980, now present in every major Pakistani city, run by serving and retired army officers. DHA enforces zoning rules, building codes and maintenance standards with penalties that are actually applied. Wide boulevards stay wide. Garbage gets collected. One Lahore property source describes it with accidental precision: “For people frustrated with the lack of rules, cleanliness, and discipline on Pakistani streets, DHA can be a breath of fresh air.”

The streets my Urdu teacher was walking, the streets most visitors photograph and compare, are cantonment-adjacent or DHA streets. They are not representative of Pakistan. They are representative of what happens when the military administers urban space.

India has 62 army cantonments too, but they cover far less of the urban fabric proportionally. More importantly, Indian civilian governments have progressively asserted municipal authority over cantonment land since independence. Pakistan moved in the opposite direction: the military’s urban footprint expanded, producing a parallel civic order that operates beside the civilian city rather than beneath it. The underlying civilian city, Lahore proper, outside the wire, struggles with the same sewage crises, the same air quality disasters (Lahore regularly tops global pollution indices), the same infrastructure deficits as any comparable South Asian metropolis. Pakistan loses an estimated 6.5% of GDP annually to air pollution-related health costs alone.

The observation is real. The explanation is structural, not cultural. In Pakistan’s Punjab, enforcement wears a uniform.

The Hybrid Regime Effect

Since 2008, political scientists have formally categorised Pakistan as a hybrid regime: elected governments operating under sustained military oversight, with the army setting policy on India, Afghanistan and CPEC while civilian institutions manage the margins. This arrangement is, by any democratic standard, a serious problem. But it produces one visible side effect; a stratum of urban Pakistan that functions because the institution running it is insulated from the pressures that typically weaken South Asian municipal governance.

Islamabad crystallises this. Built from scratch in the 1960s to a master plan by Greek urbanist Constantinos Doxiadis, administered with unusual coherence, it reads less like a subcontinental capital and more like something placed there from a different regional register. That is not coincidence. It is administrative continuity; what a hybrid regime buys when it decides a boulevard should stay wide.

Pakistan did not build cleaner cities. It built cleaner enclaves. The hybrid state is what endows them with structure.

Punjab Is Not Pakistan

Precision matters because imprecision is exactly how this kind of conversation becomes useless heat rather than useful light. Pakistan’s Punjab, 52 million urban residents per the 2023 census (75 million rural), Lahore at 14 million, is the geography where this observation lives. Outside it, the country fractures differently. Balochistan operates through tribal power structures formalised under British colonial officer Robert Sandeman from 1877 onward and never fully dismantled. The Sardars, not Waderas, who are the landed feudal class of Sindh; these are not interchangeable; represent around 70 chiefs across 46 major Baloch tribes. Bhutto announced the abolition of the Sardari system in Quetta on 8 April 1976. It was never implemented. The Balochistan insurgency, currently in its fifth cycle since independence, is a story rooted in that structure. It is not a Punjab story.

The “clean Punjab” perception is a military-administration story localised to one province. It is not a national one.

Sri Lanka, for Comparison

Sri Lanka sharpens the point usefully. With a GDP per capita of $4,516 in 2024, three times Pakistan’s, Sri Lanka’s cities feel organised without depending on military-administered enclaves to achieve it. It reads less like the Indian subcontinent and more like Southeast Asia: functional civic institutions at a higher income level. That contrast flatters neither India nor Pakistan. It simply shows what sustained municipal competence looks like when civilian governance has had time and resources to mature.

The Indus, Briefly

Underneath the cleaner street is a material fact worth noting. The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, brokered by the World Bank after nine years of negotiation, gave Pakistan control of the three western rivers: the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab. These carry roughly 80% of the Indus system’s total flow and irrigate approximately 80% of Pakistan’s arid land. Agriculture accounts for 23% of Pakistan’s GDP. The Indus basin is the material foundation beneath Punjab’s relative prosperity. India suspended the Treaty in April 2025 following the Pahalgam attack, the first disruption in 65 years, currently before an international court of arbitration that India has declined to recognise.

Where This Leaves Us

The observation my Urdu teacher made was not a provocation. It was a data point that demanded an honest answer rather than a hedge. The answer turns out to be the cantonment, the DHA, the hybrid regime, and sixty-five years of military urban planning hiding in plain sight on a wide, clean boulevard in Lahore. Step off that boulevard and the illusion dissolves. But on the boulevard itself; it holds.

Damayanti Tambay was 21 years old, a three-time national badminton champion, when she married Flight Lieutenant Vijay Tambay in April 1970. Twenty months later, war broke out. On 3 December 1971, they drove together to a garage in Ambala cantonment to park their bottle-green Fiat. That was the last time she saw him.

On 5 December, flying a strike mission over Shorkot Airbase in West Pakistan, Vijay was hit by anti-aircraft fire and ejected. Radio Pakistan later broadcast his name among those captured. Damayanti heard it alone. She felt relief. A prisoner of war comes home eventually, she thought.

He never did.

A Loving Wife’s Unending Search

She retired from badminton at the peak of her career and spent the next fifty years petitioning prime ministers, defence ministers, army officials; anyone who would listen. In 1989, Vijay’s uncle was taken to a prison in Faisalabad and shown a cell. Inside sat a bearded man in a white kurta, reading a newspaper. He recognised him instantly. He was pulled away before either of them could speak. Damayanti is still looking. She no longer expects him to return. She is looking for closure.

“For me, he was everything and vice versa. If I don’t look out for him, who will?” There are still 54 Indian defence personnel officially unaccounted for after 1971. That fact is not a talking point. It is not a nationalist weapon. It is not an argument to win. It is a moral wound that has not healed.

What is Wrong is Wrong

What was done to Vijay Tambay, and what has been denied to Damayanti for five decades, is not abstract. It does not belong to India or Pakistan as debating positions. It belongs to the category of wrong.

The deepest strands of every serious moral tradition, religious or secular, insist on one principle before all others: the human being cannot be reduced to an instrument of the state. Not to be traded, not to be erased, not to be forgotten because acknowledgement is inconvenient.

Humanity First. That Is What the Divine Asks of Us.

This blog has lately drifted into abstraction; vocabulary, terminology, identity, provocation, counter-provocation. Those discussions matter. Language shapes memory. History shapes politics. But beneath every identity any of us carries, Indian, Pakistani, AASI, diasporic, nationalist, secular, there is a more fundamental layer of moral reality. A woman parked a car with her husband and never saw him again.

If we cannot begin there, if we cannot agree that this is simply, plainly wrong, then no moderation policy, no pledge, no appeal to high signal will repair anything. Before we argue about civilisation, religion, nationalism, or pride, we must recover something more basic: the refusal to let a human life become collateral in rhetoric. Call it simple decency. But start there. Humanity first.

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.”

Cue the usual voices from Pakistan – “BCCICC”, “India’s money is ruining cricket” blah blah.

But it led me to ponder something – Pakistan itself has a huge population of 250 million + and it isn’t that “much” poorer than India. India’s GDP pci is $3050 while Pakistan’s is $1710 (around 1.8x) . Similarly India’s GDP is $4.51 trillion while Pak is $410.5 billion (around 11x).

So the other numbers should be in the same ratio right?

Here is where the difference comes

Revenue of cricket boards

BCCI – INR 20686 crore
PCB – INR 458 crore

That is around 45x

T20 leagues media rights

IPL – $6.2 billion for four years
PSL – $24 million for two years

That is around 130x (normalized on a per year basis)

And if you look at other stuff these huge ratios persist

Cars sold annually

India – 4.1 million
Pakistan – 200,000

Forex reserves

India – $710 billion
Pakistan – $21 billion

Stock exchange market caps

BSE – $5 trillion
PSE – $65 billion

Why do you think that is?

My theory is because the Pakistan military is stronger than the 1/10 ratio, it kind of effects everything else which leads to these lop sided ratios.

Give your thoughts in the comments below.