Pakistan – Page 4 – Brown Pundits

Links on My Browser Right Now – Open Thread

A few pieces I’ve been reading this week:

The Lies America Tells Itself About the Middle East: (Foreign Affairs) – On how U.S. narratives obscure its own role in the region.
Don’t Overestimate the Autocratic Alliance: (Foreign Affairs) – A counterpoint: authoritarian states may not be as cohesive as advertised.
The Four Humours: Our 2,500-Year-Old Mania for Personality Types: (BBC Future) – Why these frameworks endure and what that says about how societies interpret character.
Can We Hear God? (Bahá’í Teachings) – A reflection on divine communication and perception.
The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society: (James Marriott, Substack) – On how screens and AI are reshaping reading and writing itself. Thanks Kabir for the suggestion.

Reflections

On the Ummah: Muslims have often failed to concede ground in internal debates, which has left them politically boxed in. One reform across all denominations would be to return directly to the Quran as the primary authority. That alone would dissolve many cultural accretions, halal (animals should be stunned before slaughter), hijab (a Sassanian trait), and other practices, into something more adaptive.

And here’s a more speculative question: if the “Satanic Verses” were reconsidered if Al-Lat, Al-Uzzah, and Al-Manat were understood as sacred divinities at the threshold of the Lote Tree, would that make Islam more fluid, especially for minority-majority dynamics?

On Kabir: I’m not moderating him out, but readers should be aware that he frames everything through Muslim-rights activism. Engage, but don’t get gaslit into endless provocations. Everyone is entitled to their nationalisms — but they can’t claim liberalism at the same time. That tension makes it worth examining how plurality is treated within the Hindu fold itself. Dharma, unlike the Abrahamic Faiths, tends to all for multiple truths co-existing with each other (Buddhism and indigenous East Asian religions).

👉 Over to you. I’m retreating from heavy moderation — I see BP’s strength in letting the commentariat lead. Biases are fine. Gratuitous abuse is not.

“In March 1998 the Indian PM Gujral, told … “Pakistan was not capable of making atomic bombs.” he had been convinced by Indian Intelligence and Dr Raja Raman, the head of Indian Atomic Energy Commission, who had publicly claimed that nuclear weapon were beyond Pakistan’s reach.”

Pakistan as India’s Ukraine?

The chart above lays out “strategic partners” for 2025. Pakistan lists China, Türkiye, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and assorted others. India, by contrast, shows Israel. But the real issue isn’t who collects more flags; it’s whether any of Pakistan’s patrons will ever raise its HDI, improve infrastructure, or embed long-term stability.

I’m interested to hear what the commentariat thinks of this moment. India’s foreign policy is already locking it into superpower status. Pakistan remains reactive, borrowing survival from whoever will lend it.

The analogy that strikes me: India–Pakistan resembles Russia–Ukraine, except if Ukraine had kept nuclear weapons. The parallels are strong:

Ukraine, like Pakistan, is a breakaway sibling — the “other half” of a civilizational whole.
Ukraine, like Pakistan, survives by appealing to larger patrons.
And interestingly, the GDP ratio gap between Russia and Ukraine is almost exactly the same as between India and Pakistan (please fact check me).

Just as Ukraine is considered the homeland of the Russian Empire (Kievan Rus’), Pakistan carries the legacy of Partition as the “Indus homeland.” That symmetry makes the analogy more than superficial.

On Kabir: I understand his consistent emphasis on Muslim rights and Muslim nationalism. Readers should be aware of that lens. I’m not moderating him out, but I would caution the commentariat against being gaslit into endless provocations by Kabir. The question here is not identity politics, but the direction of Indian and Pakistani foreign policy in a critical moment in global history (decades are happening in weeks).

🗓️ One Year Ago Today: The Taj Mahal, Sacred Lands, and the Power of Timing

Friends,

The spirit of Brown Pundits has always been dialogue — open, searching, and at times, fierce. But dialogue only flourishes when it is consistent and principled.

Recently, a contradiction has emerged in Kabir’s contributions: applying one set of standards to India and Pakistan, and a different set to Israel. This has led to repeated cycles of disruption, rather than genuine exchange.

To preserve the integrity of our space, Kabir’s participation will be paused until this inconsistency is clarified (we will remove any of his comments that do not address and acknowledge the contradiction; we will also remove any replies to his comments). This is not censorship, but stewardship. Free speech here is not about endless repetition; it is about coherence, accountability, and respect for the whole.

🕊️ On Confirmation, Coincidence, and the Return of Brown Pundits

Exactly one year ago today, 17 September 2024, I published a piece titled “The Battle for the Taj Mahal: India’s Sacred Lands & Waqf Boards Under Fire”.

At the time, Brown Pundits was stirring from hibernation. Readership had dwindled to near-zero, the commentariat was dormant, and the site, once lively and interrogative in its heyday, felt like a forgotten archive. That post, like so many others before it, was written in solitude. There was no traction, no expectation. Just thought, laid down with care.

And yet here we are, one year to the day, and the blog has roared back to life.

📿 What the Baháʼí Tradition Calls “Confirmation”

In the Baháʼí tradition, we don’t reduce these moments to mere coincidence. Instead, we speak of confirmation; divine endorsement coupled with meaningful alignment. A subtle assurance that what was offered in silence may still echo in relevance.

Sometimes, truth takes time. It must be planted, and it must ripen. And then, if the conditions are right, it re-emerges at the very moment it’s needed again.

🏛️ Revisiting the Taj & the Sacredness of Land

That post, exploring Waqf Boards, sacred lands, and the Taj Mahal’s place in India’s civilizational memory, was written in a moment of saturation. Too many headlines, too little context. My intention wasn’t to settle the argument, but to recast it: What makes land sacred? Who has the right to remember? Who gets to reclaim?

Reading it now, what’s striking is not just how relevant it remains, but how the same debate has reassembled; not just thematically, but almost ritually, with new voices circling back in familiar orbits.

🌀 Same Debate, Same Deflection

And so we arrive back, with uncanny symmetry, to Kabir. He’s long argued that nations must be judged by their own internal frameworks: Continue reading 🗓️ One Year Ago Today: The Taj Mahal, Sacred Lands, and the Power of Timing

Threads, Carpets, and PM Modi’s 75th

Happy Birthday Pradhan Mantri:

I watched several videos — four or five, maybe more — of public figures sending their wishes. Among them: Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Mohammed Siraj, and Mukesh Ambani.

Mukesh Ambani, of course, remains closely aligned with the establishment, and Aamir Khan seemed to lean heavily into his Hindu heritage — adorned with Rakhis on his wrist, even a Bindi. He’s presenting himself now in a distinctly Hindu cultural idiom, though he comes from a very prominent Indian Muslim family.

By contrast, Shah Rukh Khan stood out. His message was subtly sardonic — he remarked that the recipient was “outrunning young people like me.” It was light, but just subversive enough to feel intentional. Interestingly, both Shah Rukh and Aamir spoke in shuddh Hindi, which added a certain performative weight to their gestures.

Hindu Art

I’ve been fairly busy the past few days, mostly focused on BRAHM Collections; writing about carpets, curating Trimurti sculptures, and exploring Ardhanarishvara iconography. It’s been a deep dive into the civilizational grammar of India and by extension, the porous boundary between sacred art and civil religion.

In the background, I’ve also been chipping away at longer-form reflections; trying to crack the formula for my newsletter (believe it or not the readership is neck to neck with BP but different demographics). It’s all a bit scattered, but the writing has become its own brown paper trail.

On the Commentariat (and Why I’m Stepping Back)

I still follow the commentariat but I’m slowly easing off. There’s a rhythm to it, sure, but too often it turns into exhaustion. I’ve removed all of Honey Singh’s abusive posts. Abuse is now a hard red line for me, but beyond that, I’m stepping back from constant moderation or sparring. Continue reading Threads, Carpets, and PM Modi’s 75th

The Honey Trap of the Ummah:

🕌 Reflections on Kabir, Afridi, and the Compact of Coexistence

The recent incident involving Kabir / Bombay Badshah / Honey Singh, and the orchestrated drama around his entrapment has, quite unexpectedly, become a catalyst for deeper discussion on Brown Pundits. While none have chosen to focus on analytics (“2,000 daily visitors”—thank you very much:-), the real story lies in how this drama has exposed, yet again, the deep ideological fissures within South Asian identity; especially in the India-Pakistan-Muslim triad.

Let’s begin by being honest: Brown Pundits, for all its digressions into Sri Lanka, Nepal, or Bangladesh, is still primarily a blog about India and Pakistan, and more crucially, about Indian and Pakistani Muslims. This is a feature, not a bug. The origins of the blog lie in the Sepia Mutiny, a scattered band of intellectually independent thinkers questioning dogma from every direction (which started in 2004 and if we are a “daughter blog” that we means have 20+yrs of intellectual antecedents on the Brownet), and it has now matured into one of the few platforms willing to wrestle with the ideological ambiguities at the heart of the subcontinent.

🧕 Kabir’s Point: Brotherhood, Boundaries, and the Big Choice

Kabir made an astute, if difficult, observation: that he views Indian Muslims as “brothers”, but does not feel the same about Pakistani non-Muslims.

This sounds contradictory until one understands the emotional exhaustion of watching Muslims oscillate between claiming ummah-hood when convenient, and weaponizing liberal values when needed. It’s a cognitive dissonance that creates what I can only call the moral coexistence trap: the idea that Muslims, especially in India, demand maximum accommodation, of their food (their nauseating right to murder Gau Mata on Bharat’s sacred soil itself), Faith, festivals, and foreign affiliations, while rarely extending the same pluralistic courtesy in return.

And then there’s that infamous Shahid Afridi clip, the one where he smashed his television after watching an Aarti, being performed. To many of us, that wasn’t just a cringe-inducing moment of bigotry; it begged a real question: Why do Indian cricketers continue to shake hands with Hinduphobes Hindu-hating men like Afridi and his ilk (the Pakistan cricket team)? At what point does tolerance become indulgence?

🚩 The Compact of Indian Minorities: Understand It or Leave It

Continue reading The Honey Trap of the Ummah:

When the Commentariat lies

I’ve updated this post (Brown Pundits is not an echo chamber) after realising something important.

What began as a spirited disagreement veered into something darker. It turns out that bombay_badshah, a voice I initially assumed to be new, may not be who he claims to be (I had a hunch but so did Kabir, that BB was HS reincarnated). The posting style, the fixations, the timing; all too familiar. My suspicion is that BB may be a derivative or proxy of HS, previously banned. If true, this was not a genuine disagreement; it was entrapment, bait-and-switch.

In that light, I owe Kabir an apology. He was provoked in bad faith by someone who may be operating behind a mask. And that matters, because here on Brown Pundits, identity isn’t incidental; it shapes perspective, and we respect that. We excavate worldviews, not just opinions.

While I cannot definitively prove that BB is HS, the circumstantial evidence is strong. I will allow BB to remain but if the commentary returns obsessively to Kabir or Pakistan, I will intervene. Everyone is welcome to engage on substance. But this space will not be hijacked.

The original post remains below the jump, unedited but its context has now changed.

Continue reading When the Commentariat lies

The Aryan Cleft: Pakistan as the Cradle and Cusp of Indo-Iranian Civilisation

The traditional Mercator worldview slices our imagination. It distorts the unity of the Indo-Iranian zone; a civilizational belt that has resisted rupture, even across millennia of empire, religion, and state.

And yet, if you look again, linguistically, genetically, geographically, the facts are harder to ignore. Pakistan sits at the inflection point. Continue reading The Aryan Cleft: Pakistan as the Cradle and Cusp of Indo-Iranian Civilisation

The Long Defeat: How Hinduphobia Hollowed Out Pakistan

I lost an entire post earlier, but perhaps it’s for the best. I’ve had the time now to clarify my thoughts and this is better to make clear the new policy of just junking comments that don’t “smell right.”

What prompted me to write again was a small but telling excerpt from a recent Dawn article. It wasn’t just that they misspelled “Brahman”; they wrote “Barhaman,” a word that doesn’t exist in any linguistic tradition. It was also the order in which they listed religions. They wrote:

“…revered for not only the followers of the world’s three major religions — Buddhism, Sikhism and Hinduism…”

Hinduism, the oldest and most foundational of the three, was placed last. This is not trivial. Both Buddhism and Sikhism evolved from Hinduism. Yet in Pakistani discourse, so marked by dislocation and disavowal, Hinduism is routinely treated as a junior or fringe faith. This is what endemic Hinduphobia looks like: not explicit violence, but civilizational misordering, semantic erasure, and the subtle, continuous downgrading of Hindu memory.

It’s barely recognized. And that’s the point. Continue reading The Long Defeat: How Hinduphobia Hollowed Out Pakistan

Hinduphobia Exists, But Pakistan Was Not Born from It

I was riffling through the comments and my jaw dropped when Kabir claimed Hinduphobia doesn’t exist. It struck me as both historically and emotionally tone-deaf. I didn’t respond at the time, but I’ve been reflecting on it since.

Let me say upfront: Hinduphobia does exist. It may not always manifest in overt violence or systemic persecution (at least not today, and not in most places globally), but it does appear in more insidious, ideological forms; especially in academic and diasporic discourse.

Take, for instance, the backlash against H1B visa recipients. Much of that criticism is coded; targeting upper-caste Indians, especially Hindus, who are the primary beneficiaries of this brain-drain dynamic. It’s not just about class or meritocracy; there’s an unspoken discomfort with their presence and success, often couched in progressive rhetoric.

On the intellectual front, academics like Audrey Truschke and others within the left-liberal Western consensus have regularly challenged or dismissed Hindu identity altogether; reducing it to political nationalism or caste oppression. This refusal to acknowledge Hinduism as a living, plural, and spiritual tradition creates an environment where Hindu self-articulation is delegitimized. That too is a form of Hinduphobia.

Now, is this Hinduphobia the same as the systemic anti-Muslim, anti-Black, or anti-immigrant hatred we see elsewhere? No. Hinduphobia today is more dismissive than violent, more erasure than exclusion, but it is real and it needs to be acknowledged.

Pakistan Was Not Born from Hinduphobia Continue reading Hinduphobia Exists, But Pakistan Was Not Born from It

Open Thread: Rasam, Stray Dogs, and the Battle Over India’s Story

Life in Chennai has been calm. For breakfast I have rasam. It is a superfood: light, hot, and full of spice. Indian food is the only cuisine where I could be vegetarian. I know Persians who try. I feel sorry for them. No meat, no masala, no spice. There is only so much hummus one can eat.

But calm at the table contrasts with what I read in the news. The Delhi order to remove stray dogs is disturbing. I cannot look at the pictures of the removals.

Across the Trans-Wagah line, another current runs. The Pakistan Cricket Board may change its revenue-sharing with players. A small story, yet it speaks of a larger one: Pakistan may gain small tactical wins by tying its path as the flexible adversary to India. But for the top ten percent of its economy, the block is clear. They cannot flow into India’s success. They remain tied to Western patrons.

Meanwhile, old arguments are stirred again. Audrey Truschke has been active with fresh claims on Aurangzeb. The same week, Kabir wrote that Western philosophy outweighs Dharmic wisdom, and that Greek thought shaped Buddhism (I can’t remember if it was him). I wonder who first wrote this propaganda. It is damaging, and it lingers.

India’s stories stretch from the taste of rasam to the fate of stray dogs, from cricket boards to Aurangzeb’s ghost, from Kabir to the Greeks. Each is part of the same struggle: who owns the narrative of Bharat, and how it is told.

Links:

To the Dutch, a German Shepherd holds more worth: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNYEoQForz2/?igsh=MTVrZW1kZW94NHdieQ==

Serial Killing at a Famous Karnataka Temple: https://youtube.com/shorts/YexL_ASaGqE?si=mQ-Kdj6jSMzNPrAx

Could be Social Media Frenzy: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/dharmasthala-burial-case-political-temperature-soars-as-no-major-recovery-after-digging-17-spots/article69937387.ece

Not one Football: https://youtube.com/shorts/DR8SFCTCaoQ?si=tut2ymQB3EcDHTY6