Tag: Modi

Xi, Putin and Pezeshkian Walk Into Delhi

Since Sbarrkum (Sereno), RIP, had such passionate views about the post-colonial setup, I thought the first post after his obituary would be on this topic. In Memoriam to all the victims of 9/11 and its aftermath. May they all rest in Peace.

Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Masoud Pezeshkian sat in the same hall in Delhi this morning while an American fleet blockaded Iran’s coast.

Narendra Modi opened the 18th BRICS summit at Bharat Mandapam by saying the grouping is “not against anyone“. Xi had landed a few hours earlier, on his first visit to India in seven years. Prabowo Subianto came for Indonesia, the country that hosted Bandung. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi came for Egypt. The UAE was in the room, and so was Iran, which the UAE cut off from trade and finance in August after Iranian missiles landed on Emirati soil.

The New Delhi Declaration went to the wire because Tehran and Abu Dhabi both dug in. It passed on the first day. Pezeshkian said on his way to Delhi that the BRICS bank exists to free countries from the dollar. Modi used his closing remarks to say that outdated institutions cannot steer a changed world. Two men in one building, each alluding to the same hopes from a GS (Goldman Sachs) derived acronym for GS (Global Southern) based organisation (the irony). BRICS is the new non-aligned movement reborn except there is now only one hegemony to be non-aligned against.

The hurried decapitation that failed

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The Brahmin Civil War

(Housekeeping first. Indosaurus is back and in form; “For Gandhiji” and “Liberal college bastions are taking body blows” and k jayas’s “30 seconds please“. Ordinarily I would open with viewer statistics; I’m dispensing with the ritual. The community is flourishing, and I would rather measure biodiversity than traffic.)

In DP’s telling India is down to three varnas: the Baniya, who owns the temple; the Brahmin, who guards it on salary and calls the arrangement dharma; and everyone else, rebranded anti-national upon objection. Stadium budgets flow to a state without medallists while the akharas that win them go hungry; the newsroom is Brahmin-bylined and Baniya-owned, the vegetarian canteen doing the work the salary won’t; ahimsa is reread as a doctrine of bloodless extraction.

Ahimsa Redefined

Take the milk, spare the cow; take the honey, spill nothing; empty an exchequer without cutting a throat and call it business. Nehru the Pandit, he reminds us, was unmade by Pandits while other men did the counting. And the merchant class, expelled from the fold in its Jain and Buddhist centuries, waited out the millennium and has made the priesthood its front office. “The Nagpur bowl is being refilled in Ahmedabad,” he closes.

The sporting structure he describes is not imaginary, India’s medallists come from Manipur to Kerala to Hyderabad, though Haryana’s share is so disproportionate. DP gives us a priesthood in service. But the priesthood that unmade the Pandit prime minister while other men did the counting was not obeying a master. I see a priesthood at war; with its own cousins.

The Sedimentary Elite

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Mocking Modi Is the Only Nationalism Left-Liberals Know

A Trump-coded American (a mix of JD & Rubio) imposes tariffs, restricts H-1B work, threatens war, calls India a “hell-hole.” Modi, eyes lowered, hands folded, writes a cheque for five hundred billion dollars. The signature reads penpencildraw, a left-liberal account. The Instagram account is run by urban anti-Modi liberals who, on most other days, want a poorer, slower, more Nehruvian India.

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The Chess Masters Who Weren’t

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

The Ukrainian Interlude is over

The Iranian One has just started

Nobody seems to be interested in Pakistan’s diplomatic resurrection. What does it mean that a country written off as failed just a year ago is now the hinge of a regional peace settlement and averting World War Three on the double. This is the actual story of 2026 and it is not on our comment boards.

Pakistan: From Failed State to Diplomatic Champion

A year ago, before Operation Sindor, Pakistan was being written off in every serious strategic publication in the English language. The IMF was reluctant. Every mainstream Indian and Western analyst agreed. Pakistan was finished as a regional actor of any significance.

Today Pakistan is mediating, leading, the Iran crisis. The Hormuz situation, which could have escalated into a catastrophic closure of the world’s most important oil chokepoint, is moving toward resolution largely because Pakistan has positioned itself as the only party credible with Tehran, Riyadh, and Washington simultaneously.

The war that looked civilisational is now looking more like a pivot point. Pakistan is not a failed state. India is not uniquely ascendant under PM Modi. The question of whether the BJP holds power post-Modi is now a live one, not a theoretical one. Iran is not isolated. Israel is not unbreakable. The realignment is happening now, in real time, and almost nobody seems to be writing about it.

Iran Stood Up Continue reading The Ukrainian Interlude is over

At the Heart of the conflict

Reams of digital pages on this forum have been devoted to India–Pakistan relations and the broader Hindu–Muslim, or Muslim–non-Muslim, conflict. I think most of these discussions miss the crucial issue at the heart of these conflicts.

I will try to navigate to that core. This particular reflection was triggered by a news item that broke recently:

TCS Nashik conversion case widens: Undercover women cops, Malaysia-linked preacher angles surface – India Today

If, twelve years into the Modi government’s Hindutva agenda, a dozen educated Muslim employees can allegedly engineer a conversion racket in TCS—with all its POSH and diversity guidelines—one wonders what Muslim radicals might get away with in majority-Muslim countries.

One doesn’t need to wonder. A Dawn report from 2014 alleged that around 1,000 non-Muslim girls are forcibly converted and married off every year. Even if the number is 100, that is a huge number for 2-3% of population. The demographic change in East Bengal over the last eight decades is a testament to these currents.

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Dhurandhar The Revenge – The Wrath of Bharat

Writing this review now as I came home at 5 am and slept the whole day.

Will keep it spoiler-free as much as possible.

First of all, if some people had issues with the politics of the first movie, they are going to hate this one as it takes it way way beyond, shifting the overton window so far to the right.

The movie is great, super fun and keeps you engaged throughout. It is a bit looser than the first one, not having the razor sharp focus of the espionage drama that it was, instead transforming into more of an action movie.

The action setpieces are way more brutal and better choreographed and more in number compared to the first one.

The movie starts with one of the setpieces barely a few minutes in and then keeps going for a while before slowing down a bit leading to the interval (which is the best part of the movie) before building up steam and not letting go till the end.

Music, as always is a banger with a variety of remixes of old songs and some interesting needledrops.

Already on it’s way to be the highest grossing Indian movie of all time with massive crowds even in South India.

Anyways, highly highly recommended.

Ya naya Hindustan ka naya cinema hai.

The ‘Hindutva’ attack protocol

A tweet reposted by Azad Essa, attacking Priyanka Chopra as “Hindutva-fascist”, asserting that she is somehow ‘uncomfortable’ standing next to Javier Bardem while he delivered remarks in support of Palestine. This, in spite of the fact that Priyanka Chopra has publicly supported Palestine – signing letters demanding ceasefires, tweeting on Rafah and so on.

Azad Essa, is an author that was recently spotlighted on Brown Pundits itself, via his propaganda work on comparing Palestine to the Kashmir valley. This is a particular echo chamber driven by a very explicit agenda, that seeks to weaponize and co-opt the language of the left, in pursuit of demonizing India and Hindus. Facts do not matter, its Priyanka’s ethnicity that matters, and the fact that she dares to be publicly proud of her heritage, her religion and her nationality.

This is but an anecdotal example, but one that quite neatly spotlights the suspect credibility of aspiring ‘academics’ like Mr Essa. The question is how does the ecosystem of academia defend itself against such explicit bad actors that misuse concepts of ‘academic freedom’ and ‘journalism’ to peddle insidious agendas.

Modi Puts India Firmly in the Israel-US Camp

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.

 

Open Thread: Who Would Be India’s Best Prime Minister, And Why?

Replying to Sbarrkum got me thinking; instead of relitigating India-Pakistan, a more interesting question: across 14 India Prime Ministers, who actually did the job best?

Simple question. Hard answer.

Make the case. What criteria matters most to you?

  • Economic stewardship
  • Institutional integrity
  • Foreign policy judgment
  • Social cohesion
  • Crisis management

No slogans. No party loyalty. Just reasoning.

Moderated for substance. Indian-centred perspectives prioritised.

Brown Pundits