Tag: Pakistan

The Failure of Pakistani Alliances & The Instability of the Middle East

August 10, 2026 4 Comments filed under 0M-3

After all the pointless flame wars on this website I wanted to tackle some less divisive topics, therefore I have decided to create a short post discussing the failure of alliance structures in the Middle East (including Pakistan going by the World Bank definition). The alliances we will actually look at being the METO/CENTO/Baghdad Pact, SEATO, and the two recent pacts between Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan with Turkey being the most recent entrant.

(P.S. XTM can you add an Active Author Category for me.)
Continue reading The Failure of Pakistani Alliances & The Instability of the Middle East

The Brahmin Civil War

August 8, 2026 104 Comments filed under Popular, X.T.M

(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

Continue reading The Brahmin Civil War

Regency, Not Rupture in Pakistan (Open Thread)

August 6, 2026 113 Comments filed under Open Thread, Popular, X.T.M

(h/t Archer, who called for this thread in the comments on “Erm”.

Also as fair warning to the Commentariat, Flame Threads will be put down and any violator will have fines ranging from mass comment deletion to revocation of Author Rights. Say what you like but tread carefully in how you say it since I did want to write on White Intellectuals hogging the “South Asian” space after Indosaurus’s excellent piece on the Great Gandhi but this just tumbled out)

Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Mohsin Naqvi, told an Islamabad seminar last week that the country’s 80-year-old governance system has “collapsed” and that Pakistan needs new provinces. A day later the DG ISPR called on the parties to consider an “administrative reset.” This week Naqvi assured the press that Shehbaz Sharif will serve his full five years; while standing by every word about the destroyed system, and reprising, for good measure, his claim to the biggest scam in Pakistan’s history: judges, bureaucrats, politicians and bankers, all implicated, an inventory that conspicuously omits one institution. The scam has an address, One Constitution Avenue, a two-decade property saga Naqvi has been prosecuting in public since May; the individuals remain nameless, naturally.

Naqvi is a Husayni Sayyid, the surname is the pedigree, claimed descent from the Tenth Imam, which makes us cousins by caste, and at present the unluckiest good Shia boy in the Islamic Republic: sent out to fly the Deep State’s kite and left to absorb the fire alone.

The PPP demands his resignation; Khawaja Asif suggests he reset his own ministry first; Raza Rabbani reminds everyone that the disease is constitutional violation, not cartography.

A Coup is surplus to requirements

Continue reading Regency, Not Rupture in Pakistan (Open Thread)

Restore the Princes?

August 1, 2026 11 Comments filed under X.T.M

On Pakistan’s thirteen princely states, and what was abolished with them

  1. Why did Swat work and Dir fail under the same institution?
  2. What filled Swat’s courts after 1969?
  3. Can privilege be given function without giving it rule?
  4. Should Pakistan restore its princes?

The abolitions

Thirteen states by the standard count came to Pakistan at Partition, and the republic dissolved them in stages. One Unit swallowed Bahawalpur, Khairpur and the Balochistan states in October 1955. The Dir, Chitral and Swat Regulation ended the frontier states in July 1969. Bhutto merged Hunza and Nagar in 1974, and in March 1972, watching Indira abolish India’s privy purses by constitutional amendment, he issued the Rulers of Acceding States (Abolition of Privy Purses and Privileges) Order, P.O. 15 of 1972.

The Friday Times records the scene at the rulers’ meeting with Bhutto. Someone gestured at the Nawab of Bahawalpur and said, Mulk chalaney kai liye paisa bhi is ne diya tha. He gave the money to run this country. It was true; Sadiq Muhammad Khan V had lent the newborn state its working capital. Bhutto conceded lifetime pensions and the ruling houses passed into private life.

So Pakistan ran the same experiment as India, a few months behind.

Swat against Dir

Swat State was founded in 1915 by a jirga that had thrown off the Nawab of Dir; the state’s very existence was a verdict on its neighbour’s rule. Under Miangul Jahanzeb, Wali from 1949, the state built three colleges, thirty-six high schools, thirty middle schools and over two hundred and seventy primary schools in twenty years. On the independent record, literacy ran higher in Swat, for girls as well as boys, than elsewhere in the country, and its qazi courts settled cases in days. Next door, the Nawabs of Dir kept schools and roads out of the state on the standard account, education being the one import a ruler of that mind could not survive, and Ayub deposed the Nawab in 1960.

Same institution, same paramountcy, same decade, opposite outcomes.

The Royal vacuum & Kalat

Continue reading Restore the Princes?

Dharms are Natural Democrats

July 29, 2026 253 Comments filed under Popular, X.T.M

On what Britain bequeathed, and what Delhi chose

  1. What did Britain actually leave in 1947, institutions or a franchise?
  2. Whose precedent was universal suffrage in 1950?
  3. Why did the wardrobe never decolonise?
  4. Are all South Asians natural democrats?

The Colonial Bequest

The parliamentary system across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh is Westminster’s. The founders, Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, were British-trained lawyers. Liberal democracy arrived in the West through revolutions and arrived in South Asia from the top down. Before the British, the subcontinent was ruled by monarchies, and the political parties are still run by royal houses in all but name, the Bhuttos, the Sharifs, the Gandhis. South Asians, on this account, are not natural democrats.

The chamber, the party system, the common law, the drafting language, the Inns of Court on the founders’ CVs are Albion’s gift. The Indian precedents, Chandragupta and Akbar are kings at scale, and pointing at them concedes the monarchy claim rather than rebutting it. The answer sits in the smaller polities.

The Dharmic republics

Continue reading Dharms are Natural Democrats

The Writ of the Pakistani State into P.A.K

July 28, 2026 165 Comments filed under Popular, X.T.M

Rawalakot vs. Jantar Mantar

  1. Has any other South Asian government fired the anti-national frame at a major protest movement?
  2. What matters, constitutionalism or state resolve?
  3. Can a state be “hard” outwards without treating domestic opposition as an external enemy?

Is this the same as Delhi?

Last night, the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Police issued a statement about clashes at Rawalakot. It said that armed groups of the proscribed Joint Awami Action Committee had tried to force their way into the city, that appeals to disperse were rejected, that fire was opened on law enforcement officials, and that two officers were injured. The phrase used was challenging the state writ.

Five weeks earlier, on 23 June, Dharmendra Pradhan described the Cockroach Janta Party as a B team of disruptive elements and told India Today that tukde-tukde forces were at Jantar Mantar.

The two governments reached for the same instrument. Both took a movement making material demands and attempted to relocate it outside the nation, where its demands would no longer require an answer. This is the standard subcontinental response to a protest that cannot be conceded to.

The difference is what happened next. The JAAC is now banned. Pradhan resigned on 25 July.

Why is the Pakistani case different?

Continue reading The Writ of the Pakistani State into P.A.K

Pakistan & India as Imperial Nation States

July 9, 2026 3 Comments filed under X.T.M

The useful conversations at a conference are never in the room. They happen in the corridor, over bad coffee, among the people who did not get a panel.

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.

Continue reading Pakistan & India as Imperial Nation States

Geography is Power

July 1, 2026 8 Comments filed under 0M-3, Precedent

The goal of this post will be to act as a counter to XTM’s post about geography not being power. It will rely on realism as a doctrine of international relations to de-cypher the significance geography has had on the Indian Subcontinent and how it has affected the trajectories of the nations within it.

Geography initially reared its head in discussions of strategy during the times of Mackinder and Mahan in the early 1900s. Where Mackinder so boldly stated that “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.”. However, these words were written in colonial era Britain as a device to fear monger about the Russians as they were the perfect counter to their strategy of controlling the world with sea power through internal lines of transportation through Cold Siberia. With that cold logic Russia which had been the ally of British through the two world wars became a target. Continue reading Geography is Power

Geography Is Not Power

June 28, 2026 81 Comments filed under Popular, X.T.M

The Indus Waters Treaty and the Nile

While the previous thread argues about whether Panini held a Pakistani passport, a more useful quarrel is flowing past us. In April 2025, after the Pahalgam massacre, India held the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance. It did this the day after the attack, a fortnight before the missiles of Operation Sindoor. The water came first. That order tells us something: New Delhi reached for the river before it reached for the air force, because it believes the river is the better weapon. We think it is wrong about that, and the reason why takes us a long way from the subcontinent, to the Blue Nile.

The instinct underneath India’s move, and underneath most of the commentary on it, is that the country upstream holds the whip. Sit at the top of the river and you control the tap. It is a tidy idea and it is false. Whether the upstream state is master or supplicant depends not on the map but on which side can make the other bleed.

India is running a bluff it cannot yet call. The treaty India suspended was built to survive exactly this. Signed in 1960 under World Bank mediation, it gave Pakistan the three western rivers and India the three eastern ones, and it contains no exit door. A party cannot lawfully walk away or hold it in abeyance; it stays in force until both sides agree to change it. India knows this, which is why, when it asked twice, in 2023 and 2024, to renegotiate, and Pakistan refused to come to the table, India was left with grievance and no remedy. The Court of Arbitration has since ruled, more than once, that the suspension has no standing and that the limits on India’s water control still bind. India calls the court illegal and presses on.

Continue reading Geography Is Not Power

Brown Pundits