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 Aiyarâs âWorld at MITâ video touches on her life and work
Sam Dalrymple has a clip on Lahore and Delhiâanother reminder of how closely the two cities mirror each other despite partition.
Pakistanâs minority rights bill is worth watching. Continue reading Open Thread: From Floods to LaBal
Maleeha Lodhi in DAWN:
Today however, Pakistan faces a three-front security challenge. On the eastern front an implacable foe continues to issue threats and insist its âOperation Sindoorâ â the name of its military action against Pakistan in May â is not over. On the western frontier, Pakistan and Afghanistan remain engaged in hostilities. Pakistan also alleges active collusion between Kabul and New Delhi in terrorist attacks on the country. The third front is at home, reflected in the surge in militant attacks that is undermining domestic peace and stability.
And:
Given New Delhiâs hostility and absent any communication between the two countries, a high degree of unpredictability and risk of miscalculation characterises the situation. Pakistan thus has to keep a watchful eye on the western front and remain in a state of military preparedness. The existential threat after all can come from India, not Afghanistan.
While Pakistan may be unable to do much in the near term to defuse either of the two external fronts (ideally the Afghan front should be over time) the home front is what it can and should control. Two provinces are afflicted by insurgency while terrorists are also striking across the country. Despite notable counterterrorism gains, the internal security situation remains troubling with rising fatalities from terrorism likely to make 2025 the deadliest year in a decade.
Pakistan needs a more effective counterterrorism strategy. Strengthened border controls must involve zero tolerance for corruption and criminality that allow militant movement. The government should also evolve a differentiated approach to deal with militant violence in Balochistan and KP. In Balochistan, the underlying sources of long-standing public disaffection need to be addressed. Law enforcement should be accompanied by political and economic measures to win hearts and minds. Effective counter-insurgency operations in KP require rising above partisan politics for better coordination with the opposition-controlled province to secure community support.
Defeating militant violence âwithinâ is a strategic compulsion as a continuing three-front situation is obviously untenable.
By Syed Hasnain Nawab in DAWNÂ
[Note: Ustaad Naseeruddin Saami and his sons–The Saami Brothers– won the Patron’s Award at the 2025 Aga Khan Music Awards, held in London on November 22]
Hailing from Delhiâs famed Qawwal Bachcha gharana [musical lineage], Jaan traces his musical ancestry back to the likes of the 19th century Delhi gharana luminary Tanras Khan and Mian Saamat bin Ibrahim â with the latter being the principal disciple of Amir Khusrau. As the Saamis put it, their ancestors were chosen not by happenstance but by what the family believes to be Divine designation, stating, âKnowledge is given to whoever has a right to it, who deserves it. This is chosen and sent by God.”
In this vein, Jaan sees himself and his sons not simply as musicians but as carriers of a spiritual directive. Traditionally, these gharanas have maintained and safeguarded their expansive knowledge by transmitting centuriesâ worth of musical heritage and experimentation seena-ba-seena [from ustaad to pupil].
Here is an excerpt from another story from Bilal Hassan Minto’s Model Town:
There are people who might have felt the neighborhood was against Apa Sughra just like that, without a reason. They could have wondered how anyone could be against a woman so devout that she had fired her cleaning lady Alice on a matter of principle when she found her drinking water from glasses reserved for Apa Sughraâs Muslim household. A woman so righteous that she had summarily dismissed Susan because her husband supplied alcohol to a Muslim. But such people who question our hatred of Apa Sughra are ignorant of the facts.
We had not always been against her. When she rented the house next door, Ammi sent her both meals that first day because her kitchen wouldnât be ready. So obviously, we hadnât hated her from the very beginning. Quite apart from all the terrible things we found out later, what she did to her own daughter Pari, soon after moving to our neighborhood, was enough for us to condemn her, vilify her, and treat her with hostility. Pari was not at all to blame for the incident. Whoever heard of it said âWhat did the poor girl do wrong?â Naveed Bhai had been really angry and said Apa Sughra needed to be taught a lesson but Ammi strictly forbade him, saying there was no need to mess with that witch. Itâs a different matter that I suspected Naveed Bhai didnât have any way to do anything to Apa Sughra even if Ammi hadnât said so. I thought he was just boasting.
Ever since Apa Sughra began living in our neighborhood we had noticed she didnât allow her twin daughters, Fari and Pari, out of the house at all. Meeting us was out of the question; they werenât even allowed to play with the neighborhood girls. We always thought the poor things were locked in the house after school. What did they do all day? Did they play with each other or was that not allowed either? And if they were so constrained, why did Apa Sughra even send them to school? Why was she educating them? Continue reading Aasiya–Translation from the Urdu
Kabir’s defence of Nehru as the moral compass of the Indian republic reveals something deeper than nostalgia for secularism. It exposes how much of India’s founding moment was shaped by a single man whose class background insulated him from the material and psychological stakes of Partition; stakes that Gandhi, Jinnah, Bose, Ambedkar, and even Savarkar understood far more viscerally.
Nehru was unique among the major players of his era. He was the only one born into national leadership, the only one who inherited a political position, and the only one whose life had been marked not by struggle but by access. While others were shaped by jail, exile, poverty, or ideological intensity, Nehru was shaped by privilege, and privilege has its own blind spots.
This matters because 1947 was not a moment for abstract idealism. It was a moment for negotiation between communities whose elites no longer trusted one another. On that task, Nehru was the least prepared of the principal actors.
I. Nehru’s Privilege Was a Constraint, Not a Qualification
Continue reading Nehru, Privilege, and the Missed Settlement of 1947
A far-right senator, Pauline Hansen, recently walked into the Australian Senate wearing a burqa. Muslim MPs (one of whom wearing a hijab) angrily called it racist, bigoted, Islamophobic. They were right. But they also dodged the underlying question: What does citizenship mean when communities fracture along religious lines?
The same evasion dominates debates about Indian Muslims after 1947. One camp says: “They stayed, they’re citizens, case closed.” The other mutters about loyalty tests and fifth columns. Both positions are intellectually lazy. Neither grapples with what Partition actually did to the social contract.
This isn’t about defending bigotry. It’s about refusing to let bigots monopolize legitimate questions.
I. The Contract That Never Closed Continue reading The Unfinished Contract II: Citizenship, Partition, and the Questions Liberalism Won’t Ask
I was speaking recently with a cousin who grew up in India. Their family has been BahĂĄ’Ă for generations, but their older relatives once lived as Sunni merchants in Old Delhi. When they visited their grandparents as a child, they noticed something striking: in many lanes of Old Delhi, long after Independence, the sentiment was not Indian nationalism but Pakistan-leaning nostalgia. This was not hidden. It was ambient.
That single observation exposes something almost no one in Indian liberal discourse wants to say aloud: post-Partition India inherited a large Muslim population whose political loyalties were, at best, ambivalent. That is not a moral judgement. It is a historical one.
And once you notice this, a second truth becomes obvious: Kabir’s secularist vision of an emotionally unified India makes sense only in a world where 1947 never happened.
Continue reading The Partition of Elites: India, Pakistan, and the Unfinished Trauma of 1947
A very important interview with Ramanathan Kumar, former R&AW Pakistan desk head. Those Indians who truly want to understand the implications of the 27th Amendment to Pakistan’s Constitution must listen to this podcast.Â
In the latest edition of Frontline webinars, independent journalist Amit Baruah is in conversation with former R&AW Pakistan desk head Ramanathan Kumar. The two dissect the implications of Pakistanâs recently passed 27th Constitutional Amendmentâa sweeping overhaul that elevates army chief Asim Munir to a new âChief of Defence Forcesâ role, places all three armed services under his command, and grants him lifetime legal immunity. Passed by a two-thirds parliamentary majority, the amendment also restructures Pakistanâs judiciary: it removes the Supreme Courtâs power over constitutional matters and establishes a new Federal Constitutional Court whose judges will be appointed by the executive. Critics argue that these changes represent a dramatic consolidation of military power and a sharp erosion of judicial independence.
For India, this is not just about Pakistanâs internal politicsâit fundamentally reshapes the balance of power in the region. With a trigger-happy Field Marshal protected for life and commanding the entire military, Pakistanâs civil-military equilibrium could tilt decisively toward a more authoritarian and militarised state. Ramanathan Kumar and Amit Baruah explore how the amendment raises serious questions about democratic checks, legal accountability, and how India should recalibrate its approach to a new Pakistan.
So a new trailer for a hindi acshun phillum dropped recently, and its another one of those that throws around the ‘based on true events’ tag for additional street cred. This time around though, there’s a bit of a twist. The plot apparently centers around the Lyari Gang wars in Karachi, with some additional fictional tempering of course.
Unsurprisingly, this will elicit a whole gamut of reactions from either side of the Radcliffe line, especially due west. The preview is unusually long, and somewhat unsurprisingly filled with shocking violence – the recent success of movies like Kill and Animal were bound to result in a race to ever-increasingly levels of ‘ketchup’ and fireworks. But apart from that, at least to me, didn’t seem very novel or interesting. I am mildly curious about the world building that the movie manages to pull off.
Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Netflix series Heeramandi is another example of this phenomenon. Where the Indian movie industry is accused of ‘cultural appropriation’ and telling a story that is “Pakistani, and not Indian”. With that one, as much as I am… unimpressed with Bhansali’s output – I view him more as a choreographer, less of a filmmaker, one who is far more successful at spectacle, not so much with cinema – I still think that the stories of the subcontinent should be accessible to all. Lahore after all, especially pre-partition Lahore is as much a legacy of Ganga Ram as it is of the Mughal Empire, or the Sikh, for that matter.
This time around however, the setting isn’t historical or pre-partition. Is there an argument to be made that this is “cultural appropriation”?
For me, more than anything, its yet another missed opportunity. In an alternate timeline, a movie like this would have been a golden opportunity for Pakistani actors to get visibility on a much larger Indian stage, and the quality of the output could have been immeasurably raised with behind-the-scenes contributions – production design, location and language expertise, to name a few.
Somewhere down the line, if things finally start reverting to ‘normal’, perhaps future projects like these will incorporate Pakistani participation and be better for it.
#Dhurandhar's real life characters & their onscreen depictions! pic.twitter.com/wdM81tJmyd
— Filmynews (@filmynewsnetwrk) November 19, 2025
10 years ago a few collaborators and I set out to make a film about the Lyari gangsters and drug mafia, couldnât raise a Rs locally because a film 80% in Balochi wonât sell, approached Netflix who said Pakistani content not needed, the Twitter page is from 10 years ago too pic.twitter.com/p6LeyyFUEO
— Faisal Rafi (@faisalrafi) November 20, 2025
As Dave mentioned, there is a lively WhatsApp group of BP authors and editors, and it inevitably shapes the comment ecosystem. But one comment on the blog stood out:
âThe very foundation of Pakistan is an anti-position. What is not India is Pakistan. So isnât it obvious?â
Itâs an extraordinarily crisp description of Pakistani identity-building. What is not India is Pakistan. That is not a slur; it is, in many ways, a psychologically accurate frame for how the state narrates itself.
What I increasingly find misplaced on this blog is the recurring assumption that Pakistanis are somehow âIndians-in-waiting,â or that Punjab is âWest Punjab,â Pakistan âNorthwest India,â or Bangladesh âEast Bengal.â These are irredentist projections that simply do not match lived identities. This is not âNorth Koreaâ or âEast Germany,â where both sides continue to imagine themselves as fragments of one common nation.
Yes, Pakistan consumes Bollywood and Hindi music, which themselves derive from Mughal and Indo-Persian syncretic traditions. Yes, Pakistan is culturally embedded in the greater Indo-Islamic civilizational sphere. But emotionally, Pakistan has severed itself from the Indian Subcontinent as a cohesive landscape. It has constructed a hybrid identity; part Turko-Persian, part Islamic internationalist, part anti-India.
I donât personally agree with this move, and my own trajectory has been toward a strong Hinducised, Dharmic identification. But my view is irrelevant here. What matters is that Pakistani identity is defined negatively; as the commentator put it, âWhat is not India is Pakistan.â
Whether that is healthy or sustainable is another matter. But identities can persist in unhealthy configurations for a very long time; the stock market can be irrational longer than your liquidity can survive.
