The deeper point is that the cartoon assumes India should negotiate with America as a peer. Ten years ago the same artists would have mocked the premise itself, the militarism, the chest-thumping, the great-power posture. They would have drawn Modi as too assertive, not too pliant. The cartoon’s anger only makes sense if you have already accepted that India belongs at the table. The argument is no longer whether India should rise. It is over who should manage the rise, and for whose benefit?

Once you see that, the hypocrisy follows. A section of India’s liberal commentariat treats Modi’s growth model as a moral failure but discovers its nationalism when Trump tweets. They want Indian dignity in the abstract and Indian poverty in practice. Mocking Modi is the only nationalism they have left.

The second observation is structural. Modi has no children. Yogi has no children. Ascetic leaders lack the direct hereditary incentive structure that has powered South Asian corruption for seventy years. They can still build patronage systems and ideological courts. They cannot build dynasties.

The cartoon mocks Modi for a transactional posture with Trump. Transaction is not corruption. The cheque, if it exists, flows to the United States Treasury, not to a son in London or a son-in-law in Dubai. That is the unglamorous structural improvement of the last decade, but it does not draw well.

The real gripe is distributional. The headline rate is strong. The spread across castes, states, and sectors is not. Bihar is not Gujarat. If penpencildraw wanted to draw something true, they could draw the Gini curve, or the state-level dispersion of per-capita income, or the wage share of GDP. They drew Modi giving Trump a cheque instead, because that is the cartoon the audience already wanted.

It tells us that even Modi’s critics now expect India to act like a great power, in no small thanks to him, and have nothing to say about the country that actually exists underneath.

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.

The structural point is harder than any single theatre. Xi and Putin operate without the constraint of competitive elections, independent courts or coalition arithmetic. The far-right quintet operates inside all three and is trying to match authoritarian tempo from within liberal scaffolding. It does not work. The flexibility differential is not a skill gap. It is a regime-type gap. You cannot out-Putin Putin with a cabinet that has to stand for re-election, a judiciary that can still strike your orders down, and allies that can still walk.

Worse, the bloc has drifted into an Israel-centred alignment as its organising axis. Milei has called himself the “most Zionist president in the world.” That is a narrow base on which to hang a civilisational project. It collapses the quintet’s foreign policy into one theatre, one survival question, and one ally’s political clock.

What looks from inside the movement like civilisational restoration looks from outside like the accelerated stripping of American hegemony. Every arena in which the quintet has tried to project force in the last six months has reverted, stalled or reversed. The chess masters are losing pieces, and the board is being rearranged by others.

Read our comments. Every thread runs the same circuit. Trump does X and a chorus explains why X was the deep play. Modi does Y and the same chorus decodes Y as civilisational mastery. Netanyahu does Z, and Z becomes, retroactively, the only move available.

Demonetisation: the canonical case.

8 November 2016. Five hundred and one thousand rupee notes voided overnight. Stated targets: black money, counterfeiting, terror financing. The RBI’s own data later confirmed that over 99% of demonetised notes returned to the banking system. The policy cost roughly ₹1.28 lakh crore in the first three months alone. Around a hundred deaths attributable. The unorganised sector, the MSME economy, the daily-wage poor and the rural cash economy were eviscerated, because for them cash is not a convenience but the circulatory system of economic life. Every stated target missed. Every unstated cost borne by the poorest.

A decade later, a Ranveer Singh blockbuster, Dhurandhar 2, is enlisted as post-hoc exegesis. A fictional RAW operative named Hamza infiltrates an ISI-Dawood counterfeit pipeline, a fictional ₹60,000 crore note-flood is foiled, and Notebandi is retconned from economic catastrophe into civilisational masterstroke. The chorus cites the film. The film cites nothing.

Cinema is the Evidence by which Theology can justify the Corpses

Men are not gods. Political projects are not revelations. Every serious civilisational tradition has warned against the sanctifying of temporal rulers, and it warned for a reason. This is what the worship of earthly gods produces, not analysis, but hagiography with a box-office gross, making a habit of which rots the capacity to see.

The question BP should sit with is not whether this is happening. It is who picks up what Washington is dropping. Beijing and Moscow, on current form, are not building an order. They are waiting out one. The multipolar settlement that emerges may be something neither the liberal order nor the authoritarian one has a template for.

PS. Power, Constituency, and the News Cycle

One extension to the argument above.

Start with the realist premise. All leaders in power are pragmatic in at least one dimension: they want to remain in power. The interesting variable is not whether they are strategic but whom they are strategic against. The critical constraint is the constituency they have to pacify to keep their seats.

Pakistan is the clean case. The military is the de facto sovereign and its civilian population is an audience, not a veto. Rawalpindi can absorb domestic pain, shift its foreign posture and reorder its alliance map without clearing it with the electorate. Modi cannot. Trump cannot. Netanyahu, increasingly, cannot.

So the real question on Op Sindoor is not whether it was a strategic move against Pakistan. It is whether it was a strategic move at all, or a populist move dressed as one. The two are often indistinguishable at the moment of launch and cleanly distinguishable in the wreckage six months later.

Apply the same test to Trump. The Epstein files are no longer dominating the news cycle. They have been displaced, and the displacement is not accidental. A war on Iran that has not advanced Washington’s agenda, not advanced Jerusalem’s agenda, not advanced any discernible strategic agenda whatsoever, has nonetheless advanced one thing: the news cycle has moved. That is not strategy. That is domestic political hygiene projected outward through airpower.

This is the quiet update to the grand-strategist mythos. The quintet is not playing three moves ahead on a global chessboard. Most of the time it is playing one move ahead on a domestic one, and calling the move a strategy because the word sounds better than the truth.

* Standing Note on Iran

BP Precedent · 19 April 2026

For this post and every future BP post that touches Iran, one thing on the record.

We hold no brief for the Iranian regime. Our argument that Washington and Jerusalem have miscalculated on Tehran is a strategic observation, not a moral endorsement. The two are different categories and BP should not let commenters collapse them.

To our mind, the Iranian government is genuinely evil in what it does to the Bahá’ís. Iran’s roughly 300,000-strong Bahá’í community, the country’s largest non-Muslim religious minority, has faced 47 years of systematic state persecution: exclusion from education and employment, confiscation of property, demolition of graves, mock executions, the 1991 government memorandum that formalised the policy of blocking Bahá’í development, and a sustained propaganda apparatus that brands Bahá’ís as Israeli spies. See ThePrint’s 12 April 2026 report: Iran is oppressing its biggest non-Muslim minority. Baha’i are labelled as Israeli spies.

And not only Bahá’ís. The Iranian revolution has been an unmitigated disaster for every Iranian citizen: Muslim, minority, secular, religious. Women. Dissenters. Journalists. Ethnic minorities. Economic migrants. An entire generation has been immiserated by a theocratic ruling class that has fused state power, religious authority and organised violence.

The strategic point stands independently of all this. Tehran can be a monstrous government and still be winning the board against Trump and Netanyahu. Recognising the second does not dilute the first.

Analysis of regime behaviour is not endorsement of the regime. Any future BP post on Iran should be read with this note in mind.

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

The other half of the story is Iran. Iran stood up to the United States and survived it. That is a sentence that sounds unremarkable until you remember how few states have done it in the last forty years and what happened to most of the ones that tried. Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan. The list is short and the endings are grim.

Tehran has not only survived. It has emerged with its leverage intact, its regional network bruised but functioning, and its diplomatic position stronger than it was before the confrontation began. The mobile phone and the internet did more damage to the regime’s domestic legitimacy in a decade than American sanctions did in forty years. Zan, Zendegi, Azadi forced real concessions. The women of Tehran do not wear the hijab in the way they were required to a few years ago. And yet the state itself is now a global player in a way it was not in 2024. Both things are true at once. That is the interesting part.

Pakistan and Iran together are now running a diplomatic corridor that the great powers, distracted by Ukraine and then by Hormuz, have effectively conceded to them. Neither country should, on paper, be able to do this. Both of them are doing it.

The Far Right in Dissent

The other signal worth reading is the state of the global far right, which looked ascendant eighteen months ago and looks, right now, quietly unwell.

PM Modi is still there but the aura seems thinner? The question of BJP succession is open in a way it was not before. Netanyahu is politically cornered at home and strategically overextended abroad. Orbán is out of power after 16 years on top. Even Trump, who has managed to stay on and who is not going anywhere, is governing a country where his coalition is visibly fraying and where the economic story is no longer the one he ran on.

Four leaders who looked, a year ago, like the vanguard of a durable global realignment. Four leaders who look, this week, like figures who peaked earlier than their supporters expected. The pattern is not universal and we are not predicting their imminent removal (Orbán has conceded). But the civilisational confidence has gone out of the movement. What is left is the machinery, and the machinery without the confidence is a different thing.

The BP Pivot

Instead we are arguing about Aurangzeb. The most commented thread on Brown Pundits this week is about whether Hindus are required to love the Mughals. The second most commented thread is about the TCS Nashik conversion case (which as an aside is an excellent piece by co-editor Gaurav Lele). These are real questions. They are not the question.

The question is what happens when the post-Ukraine pre-Hormuz paradigm breaks and a new one has not yet formed. Four heterodox states, India, Pakistan, Iran, Israel, now sit at the front rank of strategic relevance. The great powers, China and the United States above all, are not setting the agenda in this corridor right now. The middle powers are. That is a historical inflection and it is not a small one.

The World At Large

Pakistan has transformed into a global player. Iran has transformed into a global player by refusing to be broken. The far right is in dissent across four continents. The realignment that looked settled in the spring of 2025 is no longer settled. The story of 2026 is not the story of 2025 with slightly different casualty figures. It is a different story.

We are going to write that story on this blog, whether the commentariat follows us into it or not. The Aurangzeb thread will keep running. The Aryan Migration Precedent Post will get written. But the centre of gravity is moving, and BP has to move with it.

The Crimea-Hormuz paradigm is over. Something else is beginning. We would rather be wrong about what is beginning than correct about what has already ended.

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.

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’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.

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.

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.

Pakistan’s literacy rate sits at approximately 58%. India’s is 77%. The gap is real and it matters.

But literacy and digital literacy are different things. Mobile penetration in Pakistan exceeds 80%. Jazz and Telenor Pakistan have driven mobile-first access across rural Punjab and Sindh such that hundreds of millions of people who cannot read a newspaper navigate WhatsApp voice notes, YouTube, and TikTok without difficulty. This is the pattern across the entire Global South, from Indonesia to Nigeria. Bombay Badshah cited Jio as evidence of Indian exceptionalism. The irony is that Jio proves the opposite of his point; that device access decouples from literacy across developing economies.

The only serious comparison for Pakistan is longitudinal. In 1990 literacy was approximately 35%. Today it is 58%; twenty-three percentage points in thirty-five years. Slow, uneven, insufficient. But real. The harder questions are structural: why public education absorbs only 2.4% of GDP against the military’s 4%; why the parallel madrassah system educates an estimated 2.5 million children outside state frameworks; why telecom dynamism never translated into educational reform.

The reflex comparison to India, always framed to India’s advantage, always carrying a faint note of triumph, answers none of these. The only metric that actually matters for Pakistan is whether Pakistan is better than Pakistan was.

Everything else is theatre.

India Had the Perfect Middle East Strategy. Modi Is Torching It.

Muslims Turn Fasting Into a Party. Why Don’t We?

The Bahá’í Fast begins this Monday, falling inside Ramadan. The proximity, while coincidental (we fast to Naw-Rúz), is also genealogical.

The Bahá’í Faith emerged from a Shi’a Persian milieu in Shiraz in 1844. The Báb was a merchant steeped in Quranic literacy and Shi’a devotional tradition. Bahá’u’lláh declared his mission in Baghdad in 1863, having spent years in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala before his exile westward. The Fast, nineteen days of abstinence from sunrise to sunset, ending at Naw-Rúz on March 20th, carries the direct imprint of that inheritance, shaped further by the Zoroastrian solar calendar that gives Naw-Rúz its ancient date. Persian, Arab, Shi’a, pre-Islamic: all compressed into nineteen days.

What is striking about Ramadan is not the abstinence. It is the architecture. Iftar is communal; a nightly anchor, the day’s discipline releasing into shared tables every evening. From Marrakech to Dhaka to Boston, Ramadan is social infrastructure. The fast is structure; Iftar is renewal. 1.8 billion people inhabit this framework fully and joyfully every year.

The Bahá’í calendar contains its own extraordinary architecture. Nineteen months, nineteen days, names layered upon names; Bahá, Splendour; Jalál, Glory; Jamál, Beauty; ‘Adl, Justice; ‘Ilm, Knowledge. The nineteenth day of the Fast lands on the name Bahá again, completing the cycle. The number nineteen carries the numerological value of wáhid, unity, in the abjad system running through classical Arabic and Persian sacred thought. The Báb chose it deliberately. The structure is not incidental. It is cosmological.

Nineteen evenings. Nineteen households. Nineteen gatherings, each carrying a name from the calendar. The framework already exists.

The difference between abstraction and civilisation is use.

The Rules Apply to Me Too. Full Stop.

Brown Pundits works when standards are consistent; when Hinduism and Islam are held to the same lens, when Pakistan is assessed structurally rather than comparatively, when India’s strategy is examined without reflexive alignment.

The standards apply to everyone.

Including me.

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.”