Nationalism – Brown Pundits

Poorer Pakistan OutFoxes Richer India?

X.T.M · February 20, 2026 · 161 comments

“No one wants a strong India. But PM Modi opened doors. He strengthened the military, advanced the economy, maintained balanced relations with the West, Russia, and China. That is serious statecraft” –Aleksandar Vučić, President of Serbia

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 Continue reading Poorer Pakistan OutFoxes Richer India?

The Importance of Grace

X.T.M · February 14, 2026 · 3 comments

Kabir has resigned. I truly hope he reconsiders. But his impending departure forces a larger point. Online forums need grace. Not agreement. Not deference. Grace.

I have noticed that some of the Saffroniate express themselves bluntly. I saw this years ago in Cambridge as well. They are not always fluent in the soft, coded language of the liberal consensus. They do not always wrap their arguments in silk. That does not mean they should be silenced. Allowing people to articulate their emotions — without crudity, but without stylistic policing — expands the conversation. A forum that only rewards one rhetorical style becomes sterile. At the same time, no single voice defines BP. Not Kabir. Not BB. Not RNJ. Not myself. The site is larger than any one temperament.

What makes BP valuable is that it attempts something rare: a space where Desis can argue without collapsing into communal silos. That is fragile. It requires reflection from all sides. Grace does not mean surrender. It means refusing to reduce opponents to caricature. It means recognising that patriotism, even when misplaced in our view, is not insanity. It means remembering that tone can wound as easily as content. If BP is to survive as a broad church, it will not do so through factional victory. It will do so through a culture where disagreement does not require humiliation. That is harder than winning an argument.

Pakistan Is Not About to Break Apart

X.T.M · December 21, 2025 · 11 comments

There is a persistent habit, especially among our soi-disant commentators, of predicting Pakistan’s imminent disintegration. The arguments are familiar: Baloch insurgency, Pashtun irredentism, low Kashmiri fertility, economic weakness, and analogies to 1971. They are also, taken together, wrong.

To begin with, most people discussing Pakistan do not understand its internal sociology. They begin with a conclusion, “Pakistan is artificial and unstable”, and then select facts to confirm it. This is confirmation bias dressed up as analysis.

Consider the Pashtuns. The claim that they are natural irredentists misunderstands who they are and how they live. Pashtuns in Pakistan are not a marginal population looking across the border for salvation. They are deeply integrated into the Pakistani state, economy, and military. They dominate transport, logistics, security, and large parts of urban informal commerce. Large numbers have moved permanently into Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad. Assimilation is not failing; it is proceeding at scale. Continue reading Pakistan Is Not About to Break Apart

Pakistan and the Act of Union

X.T.M · December 19, 2025 · 51 comments

A Cold Comparison, Not a Romantic One

There is only one historical analogy worth using when discussing Pakistan “rejoining” India: the Act of Union of 1707 between Scotland and England. Not Rome and Greece. Not Yugoslavia. Not German reunification. And certainly not civilizational nostalgia. The reason is simple. The 1707 Union was not about love, memory, or reconciliation. It was about bankruptcy, security, elite survival, and managed loss of sovereignty without humiliation. That is the only way such a union could ever happen.

Union Is an Elite Exit, Not a Popular Dream

Scotland did not join England because it felt British. It joined because it was broke. The Darien Scheme collapsed. The Scottish state was insolvent. The elite faced personal ruin. England controlled capital, markets, and trade. The Act of Union absorbed Scottish debt, protected elite property, preserved law and church, dissolved sovereignty while preserving status. The public opposed it. It passed anyway. Unions are not plebiscites. They are elite exits under pressure.

Pakistan’s Position Is Structurally Similar

Pakistan today is not Scotland in 1707. But the resemblance is close enough to matter. Pakistan is chronically indebted, permanently IMF-dependent, over-militarised by design, economically capped by scale and FX limits. It is run by elites whose lives are already offshore, Like Scotland, the state is failing faster than rents can be extracted, sovereignty has become expensive, security dominates fiscal policy and there is no credible independent growth path. This is not ideology. It is arithmetic.

Why India Is England in This Analogy Continue reading Pakistan and the Act of Union

India Is No Longer Legible to Pakistani Liberals

X.T.M · December 18, 2025 · 19 comments

There is a persistent habit among Pakistani liberals, especially those from elite backgrounds or with deep emotional ties to pre-1947 North India, of speaking about India as if it were still legible to them. It is not. India has moved on. So has Pakistan. But only one side seems unable to accept that.

The Mirage of Patrimony

Many Pakistanis of Muhajir or North Indian lineage carry an inherited sense of ownership over India. They speak as if India is a shared cultural estate, temporarily misplaced. This is a fantasy. The India of 2025 is not the India of 1947. It is not even the India of 1991. It has changed demographically, economically, politically, and, most importantly, civilizationally. Pakistanis who have not travelled to India in decades, who rely on English-language media and nostalgic family memory, do not “understand” India. They are projecting onto it. Projection is not insight. It is displacement.

Code-Switching as Evasion Continue reading India Is No Longer Legible to Pakistani Liberals

Dhurandhar showcases Bollywood’s New Obsession: The Sexy Pakistani Villain

X.T.M · December 12, 2025 · 14 comments

We watched Dhurandhar last night at Apple Cinemas (the last time we went to see Ishaan Khatter’s Homebound). It is the best mass-market Bollywood film I’ve seen since Animal, and far more immersive. What struck me most was not the action, nor the plot, but Bollywood’s new formula: a full-scale fetishisation of Pakistan.

Kabir keeps claiming that Bollywood casts Pakistanis as villains. This misses the point. The villain is always the sexiest figure in any film. Bollywood has finally realised this. Raazi hinted at it. Animal stumbled on it with Bobby Deol’s star stealing turn. Dhurandhar perfects it.

For the first time, Hindu actors are not performing cartoon versions of Pakistan. They are cosplaying Pakistanis with forensic precision; the clothes, the diction, the swagger, the social codes. In earlier decades the attempt was clumsy. Now the calibration is exact. Pakistan, in these films, becomes the Wild West of the subcontinent: familiar enough to feel intimate, distant enough to feel dangerous. Continue reading Dhurandhar showcases Bollywood’s New Obsession: The Sexy Pakistani Villain

When was India’s Golden Age?

X.T.M · December 11, 2025 · 91 comments

When people claim that India and Pakistan are “equally artificial,” they erase the long, uneven civilisational trajectories that produced both. Kabir, who is generally more courteous than the average Saffroniate imagines, still falls into this conceptual trap. But the question this raises is larger than contemporary geopolitics:

When was India’s Golden Age, and for whom?

A Golden Age can be political, cultural, philosophical, or civilisational. The answer depends on what we measure: scale, radiance, confidence, or continuity. Asking it forces us to examine whether India is a recent invention or a very old organism repeatedly broken and reconstituted.

Pakistan complicates this picture. As the Indus zone, it has deep civilisational roots of its own; older than Islam, perhaps as a geographic expression even older than the Vedic world. This is why, despite its ideological volatility, Pakistan will likely persist: it sits on a basin that has generated coherent cultures for five millennia. Its anti-India posture gives it political definition, but its underlying geography gives it durability. Continue reading When was India’s Golden Age?

On the Question of Who “Owns” the Indo-Muslim Legacy

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

Reading Sophia Khan’s superb piece on the lost Muslim cities of Hindustan, and then watching the BP comment-thread unfold, a few thoughts crystallised for me; less about “ownership,” and more about the intellectual pattern that keeps resurfacing whenever Indo-Muslim history is discussed.

First: I genuinely did not know that Khan was originally pronounced with a silent n, nor that paan had such a deep Islamicate turn in its social history. Much like music, I had long assumed paan to be a largely Hindu-coded practice. The article forces a re-examination of how intertwined everything actually was. The same goes for Hindustani music: I once thought of it as essentially a Hindu, temple-rooted tradition. Then you realise how much of the courtly synthesis, Persian, Hindavi, Turko-Central Asian, was shaped by Muslims, even if the Vedic lattice underneath remained foundational.

This is partly why I found Bombay Badshah’s objection (“Pakistan cannot claim any of this”) an odd line to draw. One can, of course, make the territorial argument; but it collapses immediately once you observe what India itself is doing: aggressively appropriating the Indo-Muslim aesthetic while deracinating its historical context. If Bollywood, tourism, cuisine, and the Indian cultural machine can freely claim Delhi, Lucknow, Agra, and Hyderabad as national inheritances, then Pakistanis whose families actually come from those cities are hardly crossing an intellectual red line by acknowledging lineage, memory, or loss. Continue reading On the Question of Who “Owns” the Indo-Muslim Legacy

Macaulay, Macaulayputras, and their discontents

Omar Ali · December 4, 2025 · 19 comments

We had some discussion about Macaulay on X and I wanted to write a piece about it, but I also know I probably wont get the time soon, so I am going to just copy and paste the discussion here, I am sure people can follow what is going on and offer their comments.. (Modi’s speech link at end, macaulay minute text link as well)

It started with this tweet from Wall Street Journal columnist Sadanand Dhume:

In India, critics of the 19th century statesman Thomas Macaulay portray him as some kind of cartoon villain out to destroy India. In reality, he was a brilliant man who wished Indians well. Link to article.

I replied:

I have to disagree a bit with sadanand here bcz I think while cartoonish propaganda can indeed be cartoonish and juvenile, there is a real case to be made against the impact of Macaulay on India.. Education in local languages with hindustami or even English (or for that matter, sanskrit or Persian, as they had been in the past during pre islamicate-colonization India and islamicate India respectively) as lingua franca would have been far superior, and the man really did have extremely dismissive and prejudiced views, the fact that they were common views in his world explains it but does not excuse it. The very fact that many liberal, intelligent and erudite Indians of today think he was “overall a good thing” is itself an indication that his work has done harm.. BTW, there were englishmen in India then who argued against Macaulay on exactly these lines..

Akshay Saseendran (@Island_Thought) replied: Continue reading Macaulay, Macaulayputras, and their discontents

Open Thread: From Floods to LaBal

X.T.M · December 4, 2025 · 21 comments

A few updates from this week:

Sri Lanka is facing severe flooding. Sbarkkum reports major damage to rail and road networks, with Dutch support expected for reconstruction.

Sana Aiyar’s “World at MIT” video touches on her life and work

Sam Dalrymple has a clip on Lahore and Delhi—another reminder of how closely the two cities mirror each other despite partition.

Pakistan’s minority rights bill is worth watching. Continue reading Open Thread: From Floods to LaBal