Modi – Brown Pundits

India’s Guest. America’s Kill.

X.T.M · March 5, 2026 · 52 comments

On the 4th of March 2026, a US submarine torpedoed the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean, 40 nautical miles off the coast of Galle, Sri Lanka. At least 87 sailors were killed. Over a hundred remain missing. Pete Hegseth called it “quiet death” from the Pentagon podium; bragging it was the first torpedo kill since World War II.

MILAN at Vyzag

The IRIS Dena had just left Visakhapatnam. It had been India’s guest. Formally invited to MILAN 2026, the International Fleet Review hosted by the Indian Navy, attended by 86 ships from 74 nations. The Eastern Naval Command had tweeted a welcome photograph two weeks earlier: “reflecting long-standing cultural links between the two nations.”

Two weeks later, that ship is on the ocean floor. And from New Delhi, silence. Iran’s Foreign Minister Araghchi said it plainly: Frigate Dena, a guest of India’s Navy, was struck in international waters without warning. That line will not be forgotten in Tehran. It should not be forgotten in New Delhi either; because it is the most precise summary available of what Modi’s diplomatic positioning has actually cost India.

When guests are murdered

Say what you want about Pakistan’s post-colonial elite; and there is plenty to say. But since Pahalgam they have been reading the room better than New Delhi has. Not because Islamabad became richer or more competent. Neither of those things happened. What happened is simpler: when the bombs fell on Iran, Pakistan said nothing loud, and that silence was itself a signal. Across the Muslim world that signal was heard. Loyalty travels farther than power. Whether that loyalty is strategic or genuine is a separate question. The effect is the same.

Pakistan Post-Pahalgam Continue reading India’s Guest. America’s Kill.

Modi Puts India Firmly in the Israel-US Camp

X.T.M · March 4, 2026 · 13 comments

Modi’s strong support for Israel – and refusal to condemn the Israel-U.S. strikes on Iran, a long-time friend of India’s – have “diminished India’s stature in the eyes of the world.”

Journalist Bharat Bhushan wrote in Deccan Herald that with the recent visit, Modi has put India “firmly in the U.S.-Israeli camp.”

That is not a space that India should be in if it is hoping to lead the Global South, especially in the context of Israel’s continuing war on Gaza and the latest Israel-U.S. military strikes on Iran.

Double Standards, Modi’s Gamble, and Why Ramadan Gets It Right

X.T.M · February 25, 2026 · 142 comments

Two comments overnight exposed different sides of the the same problem.

You Can’t Weaponise Islamophobia and Then Kneecap Hinduism

Kabir tried to circulate a link around Manu Pillai’s Gods, Guns and Missionaries, a serious book, framed around whether Hinduism was, in some sense, constructed. The question is legitimate. All traditions are constructed. All identities consolidate under pressure.

But Hinduism and Islam are pari passu in this respect. The nineteenth century shaped both. Colonial enumeration shaped both. Reform movements reshaped both. Romila Thapar, Wendy Doniger, Sheldon Pollock; the literature on Hindu consolidation is vast. So is the literature on Islamic reform: Wahhabism emerging from Najd in the 1740s, Deoband crystallising in 1867 directly in response to 1857, Barelvism as counter-movement to both. All traditions have formation moments. All traditions modernise under pressure.

To apply the deconstructive lens to Hinduism while leaving Islamic historiography untouched is not intellectual rigour. It is asymmetry. Kabir, who deploys “Islamophobia” as a first-strike weapon with the hair-trigger of a seasoned litigator, has never shown the slightest inclination to subject his own tradition to equivalent scrutiny. If the lens is universal, use it universally. If it is selective, say so.

Anything else is prosecution dressed up as scholarship.

Pakistan’s Literacy Problem Is Real. The Comparison to India Is Useless. Continue reading Double Standards, Modi’s Gamble, and Why Ramadan Gets It Right

Caste and the Structure of Discourse

X.T.M · October 1, 2025 · 23 comments

I’ve come to realise that it’s often more productive to write full posts than to engage in fragmented comment threads. The richness of thought requires a form that can hold tension, contradiction, and nuance but comments, by design, resist that.

The Upper-Caste Template of South Asian Dharmic Discourse

Take, for example, sbarrkum, who shares personal reflections and images from his life on the common board. While one might raise questions about permissions or boundaries, it’s also important to respect dialectical differences in how people choose to engage. There’s no single valid mode of expression.

That brings me to a broader reflection: how the very structure of discourse in Dharmic South Asia has long been shaped by upper-caste templates; especially under Western influence. Over two centuries, upper castes have Brahmanised, Saffronised, Persianised, and then Westernised themselves, adopting and enforcing norms of discourse, authority, and ‘rationality.’

Why Intermarriage Doesn’t Erase Hierarchy Continue reading Caste and the Structure of Discourse

Brown Pundits and the Echo Chamber Problem

X.T.M · September 30, 2025 · 8 comments

The Echo Chamber of the Commentariat

It has been on my mind that Brown Pundits, for all its liveliness, risks drifting into an echo chamber. The commentariat is our lifeblood: their activity sustains the blog far more than page views alone. And yet, the very strength of that community can also be its blind spot.

I do not want Kabir to end up being the Cassandra of BP, always warning of decline, and being proved right in the end. If we are not careful, we could slide into a right-wing echo chamber where challenging voices fade, and the capacity for deep interrogation, the core of what makes BP unique, is diminished.

Pahalgam and the Question of Narrative Continue reading Brown Pundits and the Echo Chamber Problem

The Honey Trap of the Ummah:

X.T.M · September 15, 2025 · 121 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:

Trump Has Birthed Eurasia

X.T.M · September 2, 2025 · 71 comments

I’ve been busy, but I can’t shake the feeling that we’re living through the beginning of a new world.

It was acute with the SCO summit; not just through the headlines, but the atmospherics. The handshakes, the body language, the ease. It’s the kind of thing that barely registered in Western media, but Modi’s presence, standing shoulder to shoulder with Xi, Putin, and Pezeshkian, felt like the curtain rising on a new geopolitical epoch.

And at the center of it all? Donald J. Trump. Not by design, of course. But by consequence.

🔥 The Modi Factor Continue reading Trump Has Birthed Eurasia

USA, India, Pakistan.. an eternal prickly braid

Omar Ali · August 13, 2025 · 36 comments

Since the 1990s, Western powers (aka the USA and it’s vassals) have been building up a relationship with India that paints India as a fellow liberal Democracy (and a possible future partner against the new enemy bloc led by China). Beyond these propagandistic talking points, there is supposed to be real convergence on some big things: Demographics, slowly laid economic foundations and baseline cultural strengths combine to make India a rising economy; At a time when birth rates are below replacement in the first world, there is going to be no bigger source of labor or talent. If businesses have to “derisk” from china, they have southeast Asia and India as the natural targets. If other Asian countries are to resist total Chinese hegemony, there is no way to do that without Indian help. And so on.

Throughout this period there have been many prickly issues between the partners (eg a recurring complaint from India that the West supports Pakistan, which sends terrorists into India; on the other hand there is a recurring Pakistani complaint that the USA does not pay enough and (especially in the last decade) is too willing to accept India as the regional hegemon; and well justified complaints from everyone that India is too protectionist) but the public diplomacy has remained positive and feelgood for the most part. All that started to change somewhere in May 2025 and it has been rapidly downhill in the last one month as Trump has publicly attacked India for being protectionist, accused it of being a dead economy, and completely ignored Indian “sensitivities” about Pakistan.

Until now, Indian officialdom has tried to stay sober and avoid inflammatory responses, but they have also resisted the choice (already taken as the path of least resistance by UK, EU and Japan) of massaging Donald’s massive ego and nominating him for some Nobel prizes to get past any personal hurdles. But of course India’s social media army has no such hesitation and on that front the bonhomie of the last few years has completely evaporated, with Indian nationalists and White Nationalists (let us not be coy and recognize that MAGA is a White nationalist movement at heart) going at it hammer and tongs.

So what is going on? and why? and what happens next? I have no inside information, so I am perfectly placed to make some general comments and then ask better informed people to tell me why I am wrong. Here goes: Continue reading USA, India, Pakistan.. an eternal prickly braid

Browncast: Trump, Tariffs, Hurt Feelings, and India..

Omar Ali · August 11, 2025 · 4 comments

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 I talk to Kushal Mehra (Host of the Carvaka podcast) and regular Brownpundit Amey Chaugle about the tariff kerfuffle… the public (and on Trump’s side, frequently intemperate) war of words between the USA and India that is partly about India’s protectionist tariff regime but maybe mostly about other things (such as Donald’s ego and his desire to get that Nobel Peace Prize)..
Dig in and add your comments. We too don’t know exactly why this is going on and where it will end.. 🙂

Trump Imposes Total 50% Tariff On Indian Goods, India Hits Back

One or other, both or neither?

Charles Cameron · February 3, 2020 · 5 comments

Reposted from Zenpundit — Modi or Trump, special or chosen? — with thanks to The Emissary — and closing in on the shining suchness of the Tathagata
.

Modi of India, Trump of USA?

Trump of USA proclaims himself the Chosen One, while Modi of India’s supporters claim Modi is the Special One.

Who knew?

Sources:

The Emissary, The Special One

Giphy, I am the Chosen One

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**

Buddhist logic from the beginning differs from its Aristotelian cousin, featuring the chatushkoti or tetralemma:

India in the fifth century BCE, the age of the historical Buddha, and a rather peculiar principle of reasoning appears to be in general use. This principle is called the catuskoti, meaning ‘four corners’. It insists that there are four possibilities regarding any statement: it might be true (and true only), false (and false only), both true and false, or neither true nor false.

Hence my title, One or other, both or neither?

Oh ah:

speaking of the Buddha, Nagarjuna states that the Buddha’s teaching is “emptiness is suchness, not suchness, both suchness and not suchness, and neither suchness nor not suchness.”

Furthermore:

The suchness of the Tathagata is the suchness of all phenomena.

Rumor therefore has it that there’s a fifth possibility, a refuge from all dualities: the shining suchness of the Tathagata.

No, really — please comment!