1. How much of the patriotic framing was strategy and how much was simply the sincere register of the people who happened to be there?

2. Does the Shaheen Bagh comparison hold? The counter-case is that 2020 and 2026 are not comparable because the CAA was a policy the government wanted and the NEET leak was an embarrassment it did not.

3. Can a satirical formation convert?

Sorting out the Cockroaches?

Every major Indian protest movement of the last twelve years has faced the same attempted execution. Not by baton, though the batons come, and came again on 20 July. The execution is attempted when the state tries to answer the question who are these people? before the movement can answer it. Shaheen Bagh was minorities. JNU was tukde-tukde. The farmers held out longest and won their repeal, and were still, in the telling, Khalistanis with tractors.

It is a sorting mechanism. Once a crowd has been sorted out of the nation, its demands become negotiable in the way that a hostile faction’s demands are negotiable, which is to say not at all.

The Cockroach Janta Party won in large part because Abhijeet Dipke understood this and moved first.

The insult

The origin is not the NEET leak. It is 15 May, when the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, sitting in open court on a contempt matter concerning senior advocate designations, described young people who do not get employment and have no place in a profession as cockroaches, as parasites of society.

Dipke, thirty years old, a political communications graduate of Boston University who had previously worked with the Aam Aadmi Party, made a joke about it online. Within a day he had a name, a website, and a logo. By late May the Instagram account had passed nineteen million followers, more than double the BJP’s and comfortably ahead of the Congress.

The inversion

An insult delivered from the highest bench in the country was picked up and worn. The state was thereby denied the first move. It could not tell the country who these people were, because they had already told the country themselves, in the state’s own words, with the state’s own contempt attached. The slogan the outfit chose, Voice of the Lazy and Unemployed, meant that one could not smear a movement that had pre-smeared itself and turned the smear into merchandise.

Dipke is not an accidental figure. He is a communications strategist by trade with an anti-corruption movement on his CV. From Wikipedia:

Dipke lived in Boston, Massachusetts, while studying at Boston University. He returned to India in June 2026 to participate in the CJP’s demonstrations. Following the movement’s rapid growth, his parents publicly expressed concern about the personal risks associated with his political activism.

Incidentally his AAP lineage matters as well, because 2012 is the last time this particular manoeuvre was executed successfully in Delhi. It is vaguely reminiscent of Khomeini flying back from Paris; a returnee from a foreign land transforming their homeland.

The inoculation

Look at what was actually chanted, sung, and printed. At Jantar Mantar on Saturday: the national anthem on loudspeakers, Jai Hind, Vande Mataram, tricolours, sweets. A protester named Tluanga Ralte walking the site with a copy of the Constitution in his hands, telling reporters this was a win for the Constitution.

The CJP’s own mobilisation poster, distributed with a standard operating procedure and a memorandum template, closes on two slogans set deliberately side by side: Inquilab Zindabad, Bharat Mata Ki Jai.

The first is the register of the anti-colonial left. The second is the register the Sangh has spent forty years trying to own outright. It is the systematic occupation of the ground from which the counterattack would otherwise be launched. To call this crowd anti-national, you had to call the anthem anti-national.

This has been tried before

Shaheen Bagh did all of this. The tricolours were everywhere. The Preamble was read aloud nightly. The Constitution was the organising symbol of the entire sit-in, exactly as it was at Jantar Mantar this week. And the sorting worked anyway. In February 2020 Ravi Shankar Prasad stood at a press conference and said, in terms, that people trying to fragment India were getting cover at Shaheen Bagh, where the tricolours were being waved. The flag was in the protesters’ hands and the minister named the flag and reached past it. Nobody in the ecosystem blinked.

So flag-occupation is not sufficient. It is not even close to sufficient.

Shaheen Bagh could be reached past because the crowd was already legible as Muslim, and the frame did not need to be argued, only gestured at. The NEET aspirant is not legible as anything. He is Hindu, he is middle class, he is upwardly mobile by intention if not yet by outcome, he is very often from a household that voted BJP twice, and his single complaint is that the ladder he was told to climb has been sold to somebody else. A senior party functionary put it to Outlook with unusual candour: these families are our own voters, aspirational young people who believe in the system, and if they begin to lose faith it has consequences.

Dipke’s inoculation, in other words, was necessary but was administered to a body that already had partial immunity.

The weapon that failed to detonate

The frame was fired, and this is the part being widely missed because it happened in June and everyone is writing about July.

On 23 June, Pradhan went on the record calling the CJP a B team of disruptive elements, and told India Today that tukde-tukde forces were at Jantar Mantar.

It did nothing. The sit-in had begun on 20 June and it did not break. Sonam Wangchuk started his hunger strike five days later. Kejriwal turned up on 16 July. The crowd on 20 July was north of thirty thousand.

Now read the resignation letter of 25 July, in which Pradhan says he is going so that the anger of students is not exploited by anti-national forces, and does not say who they are. A BJP insider ran the same line to the Tribune, arguing that the government retreated before anti-national forces could infiltrate the agitation, so that, in this telling, democracy might advance.

Between 23 June and 25 July the same category degrades from an accusation with a referent to a hypothetical with none. That is what a weapon looks like after it has been fired and failed to detonate: still being waved, now aimed at nobody, doing face-saving work rather than sorting work. The internet shutdown around Jantar Mantar for most of last week is the same fact in negative. When you cannot define a crowd, you switch off its ability to define itself. That did not work either.

What was actually conceded

Pradhan is a real scalp. He is fifty-seven, the son of a veteran BJP leader, a minister continuously since 2014, steward of the National Education Policy, reportedly part of Amit Shah’s core group, and at one time floated for party president. He is only the second minister to resign over a scandal since 2014, after M.J. Akbar in 2018.

But look at what the CJP actually put on the table when it met Nadda and Jitendra Singh on 24 July. Three non-negotiable asks:

1. Pradhan’s resignation.
2. Compensation.
3. Withdrawal of the FIRs.

Every one of those is retrospective. Not one of them touches the NTA, the CBSE on-screen marking failures that ran alongside the NEET leak, or the structure that produces leaks in the first place. They got the man and assurances on the other two, and the thirty-six day sit-in was withdrawn against a promise of talks in four weeks (sounds a bit like the Iran-USA talks).

The patriotic register that made the movement uncontainable is also a constraint on what it can ask for next. You can demand a resignation under the tricolour. It is considerably harder to demand a redistributive settlement under it, and the grievance underneath NEET is not really about question papers. Verisk Maplecroft has India as the highest-risk country on its civil unrest index, with average protest participation more than doubling in a year. That is the number to watch, not the reshuffle.

And the BJP’s mandate was already about a third of the national vote in 2024. What was punctured over the last five weeks was never Hindutva. It was the assumption that incumbency is costless. Identity politics arbitrages inequality perfectly well as long as the ladder is believed in. The leak was a claim that the ladder is rigged, made by the people who most wanted to believe in it.

What we heard there over the weekend was a single proposition, stated with varying degrees of anger. The subcontinent is held down by two post-imperial states, each of which inherited the Raj’s administrative logic and neither of which has any intention of loosening it. The languages, the peoples, the small nations inside the big ones are being quietly extinguished. The activists who said this were Baloch, Sindhi, Kashmiri and Punjabi (as well as Pushtun, Hazara, and Urdu-speaking).

We should also say at the outset that this essay is about Pakistan. The two-hegemon frame is the activists’ frame, and we have not necessarily adopted it.

I. Ethnicity versus the Pakistani state.

It is acute in Pakistan, and the reason is not that Pakistan is crueller. It is that Pakistan is more religiously homogeneous, and homogeneity does something specific to identity.

Consider what a Baloch nationalist can now say that he could not have said in 1947. He can say that Balochistan is Muslim. Overwhelmingly, unarguably, to a degree the Pakistani state itself cannot dispute. Religion has been settled. It has been taken off the table. And once religion is off the table it can no longer do any distinguishing work, which means it can no longer do any binding work either.

Ethnicity is not resurgent in Pakistan despite Islam. It is resurgent because Islam has become the floor rather than the ceiling. When everyone is Muslim, being Muslim explains nothing about who governs whom, or who takes the gas revenues out of Sui.

II. The racial contention.

The activists say that ethnicity is a foreign import into Islam, a colonial residue, a European infection. Pakistani officialdom says the same thing from the opposite direction. Ethnic feeling is fitna, divisive, un-Islamic.

The argument is thirteen centuries old and has already been had.

Islam never abolished ethnicity. It repeatedly subordinated it without ever eliminating it, which is a different achievement and a more fragile one. The Umayyad state ran an explicit ethnic hierarchy in which non-Arab converts, the mawali, paid taxes their Arab co-religionists did not. The revolution that destroyed the Umayyads was raised in Khurasan and carried by Persians who had had enough of Arab precedence. The shu’ubiyya of the following century was a literary and political movement of Persians asserting cultural parity, conducted entirely inside Islam, in Arabic, by devout men. The Delhi Sultanate reserved its high offices for a Turkish and Persian slave elite and kept Indian Muslim converts out of them.

The Ottomans came closest to a genuinely supra-ethnic Muslim political identity, and they sustained it for centuries. But their subjects were sorted into millets by confession rather than by blood, which is to say that even the great supra-ethnic empire needed a religious cleavage to organise around, and when that cleavage stopped distinguishing anyone; the Arabs went their own way.

Ethnicity survived contact with the profession of faith every time it was tested. Transcending ethnicity was an aspiration about Muslim politics.

III. What India conceded and Pakistan refused.

Potti Sriramulu starved to death in December 1952 demanding an Andhra state. Nehru gave way. Andhra was created the following year, and the States Reorganisation Act of 1956 redrew the country along linguistic lines. This was widely called a capitulation and a threat to national unity. It was in fact the single most successful act of Indian statecraft after independence. It converted linguistic pride from a secessionist force into a routine mechanism of provincial politics.

Pakistan did the reverse. Jinnah told Dhaka in March 1948 that the state language would be Urdu and only Urdu, in a province where almost nobody spoke it. Students were shot in Dhaka in February 1952 for saying otherwise. In 1955 the western provinces were merged into a single unit, precisely to neutralise Bengali demographic weight.

One state decided that language was administrative. The other decided that language was anti-national. Only one of them still has all its provinces.

IV. Bangladesh.

Bangladesh exists. It is the proof that an ethno-linguistic nation can secede from a post-imperial Muslim hegemon and be recognised, and it is the fact that has quickened residual Pakistani nationalism. Bengal was not lost to Hindu conspiracy. It was lost because the state insisted that Muslimness answered a question that Bengalis (proto-Bangladeshis) were no longer asking.

V. Post-Muslim ethnic activists

The activists believe their identities are being snuffed out. We would put it differently. Their identities are what remain after the state has succeeded at everything it set out to do.

It did not make everyone Muslim. That was never the project, and the state’s most famous religious act was a subtraction rather than an addition. The Second Amendment of 1974 legally unmade the Ahmadis as Muslims, and the ordinance of 1984 criminalised their calling themselves so. What the state pursued was not conversion but the policing of a boundary, and it policed that boundary until Islam became the only politically legible identity in the country.

The pattern is not Pakistani. It is what happens whenever an ideology neutralises one axis of identity and mistakes that for having abolished identity. The Soviet Union manufactured a supra-ethnic Soviet man with more force and more success than any state in history, and then dissolved precisely along the borders of the ethnic republics it had drawn to administer him. Arab nationalism unified the Arabs and left behind Iraqis, Syrians, and Egyptians. In each case the ideology did not fail. It won, and the victory removed the thing that had been holding the next question down.

Ethnicity is not the rival of the ideological state. It is its residue.

Did the British take India from the Muslims or from the Hindus? The empire the British inherited had already fallen apart, and it had fallen apart along lines that almost had nothing to do with faith.

The British conquered successor states, not an empire.

Aurangzeb died in 1707, and within a generation the Mughal map was a fiction. Hyderabad went its own way under the Nizam by the 1720s, Bengal and Awadh became nawabis in all but name, and the Marathas took the centre. The spectacular blows did not come from London. Nadir Shah of Persia sacked Delhi in 1739, carried off the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor, and left tens of thousands dead in the streets in a single day. The Afghan Ahmad Shah Durrani came back to plunder again and again after him. By 1788 the emperor Shah Alam had been blinded by an Afghan adventurer and was living as a pensioner of his Maratha keepers. When General Lake walked into Delhi in 1803 he collected a prisoner the Marathas had been holding, not a throne. The British did not topple the Mughals. They arrived to read the will.

The frontiers were not religious frontiers.

Press the communal map onto the eighteenth century and it tears at once. Tipu Sultan, the Muslim tiger of Mysore, ruled a country that was mostly Hindu and ran his revenue through a Brahmin, Purnaiah. Ranjit Singh, the Sikh lion of Lahore, ruled a Punjab that was mostly Muslim. The Maratha and Nawabi states alike were administered by Hindu clerks and financed by Hindu bankers. There was no Muslim India and no Hindu India waiting to be defeated. There were states, and the faith of the man at the top told you very little about the people beneath him, still less about the men who ran his treasury.

The conquest was paid for and fought by Indians.

Plassey in 1757 is remembered as a battle. It was closer to a purchase. Siraj-ud-Daula lost because his own commander, Mir Jafar, stood aside, and Mir Jafar stood aside because the Jagat Seths, the richest Hindu banking house in Bengal, had decided their Nawab was bad for business and bought his army out from under him. Seven years later at Buxar the Company beat the Nawab of Awadh, the deposed Nawab of Bengal, and the Mughal emperor himself, all three together, and then took the right to tax Bengal to pay for the next war. The armies that did this work were Indian, sepoy and Hindu and Muslim in the great majority, marching on credit raised against Indian land. The Company was paramount because Indians found it paid to make it so.

The disunity is the story.

The faith of each beaten ruler is almost beside the point. The British did not conquer a religion. They completed a hostile takeover of a bankrupt estate, with Indian money, Indian troops, and a long row of victories over rulers who were Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh by turns and who would never combine.

The Pakistani elite has quietly secularised. And far from hollowing the state out, this is precisely how Pakistan became what it was always designed to be: the successor state to British India’s Muslims. Islam was the vehicle. Pakistan is the destination.

Islam remains the public language of legitimacy.

Privately, among the stakeholders who actually run the place, the operating priorities are entirely secular. The society on the ground is conservative and devout. The class at the top, the one that keeps the state alive, believes in Pakistan far more than it believes in Islam.

It helps to separate three things that we mean by Islam. There is Islam as faith, the private conviction of the believer. There is Islam as identity, the badge of who one is and whom one stands with. And there is Islam as state language, in which Pakistan explains itself to itself and to the world.

The elite has not surrendered the third, and it has not wholly shed the second. What it has let go of is the first as a terminal value: the notion that the purpose of the state is to realise Islam, rather than to deploy it.

Faith has gone from ultimate to instrumental.

This migration is what we mean by secularisation. This is not the familiar story of liberalisation. We are not saying Pakistan grew tolerant, or irreligious, or fond of gin. We are saying something narrower and stranger. Pakistan’s elite secularised the priorities of the state without secularising its language. Strip away the Islamic vocabulary and look at what the stakeholder class optimises for, and the list is unmistakable: state survival, strategic depth, military capability, sovereignty, national prestige, and the reproduction of the elite itself.

These are not Islamic priorities. They are Prussian ones. What has emerged among the men who keep Pakistan going is a finely tuned, military-bureaucratic nationalism, disciplined and unsentimental, for which Islam is the flag and not the engine.

Prussia describes the temper of this elite.

For the fate of the faith itself, the better analogy is France. A revolutionary creed, once it triumphs completely, turns ceremonial. No one in the Fifth Republic argues about Robespierre over breakfast, not because the Revolution failed but because it won so totally that the nation absorbed it and stopped debating it. The principle became the backbone.

A French republican today need not be a Jacobin, need not want the Terror back, to hold 1789 sacred; the founding is revered precisely because it is finished, no longer a live programme anyone is required to enact.

Islam in Pakistan is travelling that road. It won its argument in 1947. It produced the state, and having produced it, it no longer needs to function as a working programme. It becomes instead the national myth: sacred, unexamined, saluted on every occasion and enacted on almost none. A Pakistani patriot can revere the idea that made Pakistan without wanting an Islamic state, in just the way a French one reveres the Revolution without wanting another. This is why the secularisation is so hard to see. The reverence is genuine and loud; it simply no longer governs. The founding faith has been elevated into myth and quietly retired from the business of running anything.

It is thus worth dwelling on the Crescentiate.

Among the loudest defenders of Pakistan, the most theologically committed voice is almost always the one not born in Pakistan. The diaspora keeps the faith as identity; the Pakistan-formed elite keeps the state. That asymmetry is instrumental. It tells you where belief has migrated, and which of our three meanings of Islam each camp is actually holding.

China conducts cold realist diplomacy and stays militantly atheist; Saudi Arabia conducts it and stays Muslim. Just about.

But look at the content of Pakistan’s realism, not merely its existence, and a state for which Islam was the terminal value would let creed shape its alliances.

Pakistan does the reverse.

In the year since the brief war with India, Islamabad has bound itself, at once and without visible discomfort, to atheist China, to Shia Iran across an old sectarian divide, to Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, and to a secular and nominally Christian Washington. It made its army chief a field marshal, secured a private White House lunch and the warmest American hearing in two decades, signed a mutual defence pact with Riyadh, deepened the all-weather tie with Beijing, and turned itself into the broker shuttling between Washington and Tehran. The creed of the partner is simply not an input to the calculation.

This is the point the diplomatic noise obscures. A devout society sits at the base; at the summit sits a class that will take any table and collect from each guest, indifferent to the religion of the man across it. Such indifference is ordinary in a secular state. In a state that names Islam as its reason for existing, it nothing less than extraordinary. The secularisation is invisible only because nobody troubled to change the language.

Set India beside it, and the asymmetry sharpens.

India bet on admission. The whole architecture of its recent foreign policy assumed it would be the lynchpin of a respectable Western order, the natural partner of the United States, the anchor of the Indo-Pacific. On precisely that axis it was challenged: tariffed at fifty per cent, called a dead economy, told it was interchangeable with Pakistan, made to watch its rival courted in the Oval Office. India did not collapse.

It adapted, with a trade agreement with the European Union, another with the United Kingdom, a wary thaw with China, and an eventual tariff truce with Washington. But the adaptation is the point. India fell back on strategic autonomy and a scramble of bilateral deals because the club it had courted declined to grant it tenure. Two states, two objective functions. Pakistan played for leverage and took leverage; India played for belonging and learned that belonging was not on offer.

Data is not Destiny

Which brings us to BB, and to the data. BB loves a number and quotes them tirelessly: GDP, fertility, the human development index, the metrics on which Pakistan plainly trails. Every one of those numbers is correct.

The error is not in the data but in the assumption beneath it, that prosperity is the thing the state is playing for. GDP matters. It does not. BB reads the masses and the macro-aggregates as the players; they are not.

The players are the Prussian elite, running a different game. The honest question is not whether Pakistan is poorer, which it is, but what it has been willing to trade prosperity for, and the answer, shown again this past year, is sovereignty and leverage, which Elitestanis will buy at almost any price.

Kashmir is Sui Generis

The same misreading feeds the Saffroniate’s favourite fantasy, that Balochistan or Afghanistan can be turned into Pakistan’s Kashmir, a running wound that bleeds the state. It will not happen, and the reason is structural. Insurgencies are not bought; they are lit. They begin with the sub-gentry and the disaffected elite, not with the poor as such.

Balochistan rages only where its own leaders sustain the infrastructure of resistance, and you cannot wire money to a grievance and expect a nation to rise. A broad-based nationalism appears only once an entire population has been activated to an ideology, the way sustained dispossession forged a mass Palestinian nationalism that now commands the sympathy of much of the world.

That threshold has not been crossed in Balochistan, and it will not be crossed from a spreadsheet in Delhi. Meanwhile Pakistan has persuaded Washington to brand the Baloch insurgency terrorist: the very lever the Saffroniate dreams of pulling is being pulled the other way. The Saffroniate is cloaked to it because it keeps fighting an imagined theocracy the Pakistani elite quietly stopped being.

What BP teaches us

We learned a version of all this from our own house. Brown Pundits ran a reader survey, and thirty people filled it in. The masses, here as everywhere, are silent. Even the sub-elite readership is mostly inert; the few who could mount a real counter-current, by starting a rival shop of their own, will not trouble to. Neglect Brown Pundits for years and it roars back regardless, because the quarrel between the Saffroniate and the Crescentiate is the most interesting argument in this corner of the internet, and it has nowhere else to go.

And in the comments, the discovery. Across all the Crescentiate energy, almost no one argues theology. No one is building the Caliphate. No one is much exercised about an Islamic state. Yet every one of them comes alive the instant Pakistan, the nation, is touched. That is not an Islamic attachment. It is a national one.

We are We

Sitting between the two camps, neutral by temperament, we see what each cannot see about itself. And the revealed preference of the Crescentiate, watched over years, is the sharpest evidence we have. On the whole they do not want a seat at the Western table; they are content to be the exotic token, the interesting outsider, and they reach for absurd lectures on the West’s misogyny and patriarchy partly to keep that distance.

The Saffroniate’s commenters want the opposite: the nod of recognition from respectable opinion. We are describing a commentariat, not a census. But the asymmetry on the page is consistent, and it rhymes with the statecraft. The Indian instinct is to be let in; the Pakistani instinct is to be left alone, intact and exotic. That single difference is why Indian commentary keeps reaching for the Western template, instrumentally and without quite saying why, while the Pakistani feels no such pull.

The Saffroniate is still arguing with yesterday’s Pakistan, the Islamic project the elite abandoned years ago, while today’s Pakistan, secular at the summit and Prussian to the bone, slips past unnoticed.

Jinnah, in the end, got the state he wanted. Nehru got an argument, and he is still having it with a Pakistan that no longer exists.

The Comment thread is afire with the usual (and senseless) India-Pakistan arguments (essentially which of the two is poorer). Q waves the whole question away by pointing at the figure, unimpressed by “an average Indian producing only $2,800 in GDP every year,” and asks what the point even is. There is a point, two in fact.

First: per capita and scale measure different things. Per capita describes the life of a citizen. Scale describes the weight of a state. A single integrated market of 1.4 billion people generates agglomeration, economies of scale, and a pull on capital and talent that no small rich economy can match (India’s ascent in the world of cricket is an extremely interesting meditation). That is why India passed Japan in 2025 to become the world’s fourth-largest economy, why it is the fastest-growing major one, and why it is on course to take third from Germany by around 2028. The market no exporter can ignore, the trade terms a four-trillion-dollar base can lean on, the air defence and roads it can fund: that is concrete power, and it is not nothing. Much of the gain is siphoned by a clutch of oligarchic houses, but the dynamism is real.

Second: however that same wealth does not buy what BB imagines it buys. India outweighs Pakistan in GDP by something close to eleven to one. It has still not turned Pakistan into its East Germany, a dependent satellite drawn quietly into its orbit and, in time, absorbed. Pakistan remains sovereign, armed, and unbought. Pakistanis are not running across the Punjabi wall to their ethnic kin.

In May 2025, after Pahalgam, the larger economy did not dictate terms: Operation Sindoor ended not in surrender but in a ceasefire announced, awkwardly, from Washington, with both capitals claiming the win.

Look West. Iran is a fraction of the wealth of the United States and Israel, yet it has absorbed the most advanced air forces on earth, kept its regime, and kept the knowledge to rebuild what was struck. The guns fell silent at a ceasefire, not a capitulation. Wealth buys reach. It does not buy outcomes.

BB treats the GDP gap as a deed of ownership over Kashmir, and assumes Kashmiris will swallow their pride for a higher income per head, that prosperity purchases consent. It misreads the Islamicate moral economy entirely. In that ledger ‘Izzat and Deen, dignity and faith, are not line items to be outbid. The Hyderabadi Harvard PhD still sings the song of his lost people.

Peoples who set independence above comfort have done so across the whole anti-colonial century, and no balance sheet has ever talked them out of it. Money may buy luxury but not loyalty.

What price will any Indian or Pakistani nationalist accept for their love and loyalty to their homeland?