Pakistan – Page 7 – Brown Pundits

Why Pakistan Won’t Go the Way of Iran

X.T.M · August 1, 2025 · 105 comments

I’ve been enjoying the new direction Brown Pundits has taken since the recent shake-up. Posts are now generating 100+ comments, and that kind of engagement creates a virtuous cycle. You want to write more, think more, respond more. I’m leaning into that.

For now, a lot of the content burden rests on me and that’s okay. It’s been encouraging to see older names return: Girmit, for instance. It feels like a slow reconsolidation of the original readership. Letting people return on their own terms.

Meanwhile, BRAHM, my newsletter, has taken on a different role; a home for more composed writing, life pieces, and the slow launchpad for my business. I just posted something there recently, which I’ll link to for now and follow up on soon. But here, on BP, is where I let myself think in public. Where I go long. Where thoughts breathe.

Continue reading Why Pakistan Won’t Go the Way of Iran

Dead Poets of Pakistan

X.T.M · July 27, 2025 · 21 comments

After Kabir exited the WhatsApp group, the conversation between the Manavs and Furqan (who I have made Editor to encourage more DPPs) drifted, inevitably, to poetry and Punjabi. Furqan has already made two excellent contributions, A flying peacock and Lord Ganesh in a confectionary mill. Kabir did a great job in diversifying the Authorial voices on BP.

As we shape the future of Brown Pundits, I keep returning to one submerged voice in the Persianate world, particularly in Pakistan. A voice that is Westernised, undercapitalised, and culturally adrift. These are not the clerics, generals, or capitalists. These are the middle-gentry, the in-betweeners; fluent in English, wired to the internet, but uncoupled from patronage and power.

Like much of the Muslim world, Pakistan remains profoundly hierarchical. And I suspect its creative pulse, its latent genius, lies in that Westernised fringe of the lower elite: the zone between the bourgeoisie and the establishment. The boundary class. Half-in, half-out.

In a strange way, Pakistan’s obscurity may be its shield. Unlike India, an excavated society with every civilizational layer being rapidly monetised (Saiyaara is breaking records), Pakistan is a half-formed splinter. It doesn’t face the same pressures of internal reckoning. That may be a blessing.

Across the Persianate world, from Anatolia to Delhi, we are witnessing a civilizational scatter. The old cosmopolis of the Gunpowder Empires (Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal) has collapsed, leaving behind cultural debris. The Persianate polity, once a unified Empire of the Mind, is now a broken archipelago.

India, by contrast, benefits from its post-colonial majority. Like Israel, it is 80% one faith; with all the confidence and coherence that brings. It has the numbers, the market, and a dominant civilizational script. The Sanskrit world, if not unified, is at least centrally anchored.

In this context, Kabir represents one pole of the Pakistani elite: articulate, English-speaking, confidently liberal but also capable of drowning out the marginal voices he’s adjacent to. And yet sadly, I don’t think Pakistan is headed for any Hindufication. The trajectory is different.

Pakistan is not returning to India. It is, perhaps, becoming the lowlands of the Iranian plateau; a bridge nation once again, neither fully Arab nor Indic. Suspended between worlds, it may rediscover itself in that liminality.

Because sometimes, the dead poets are not gone. They’re just waiting for the right silence.

Brown Pundits: Broad Church or Narrow Canon?

X.T.M · July 25, 2025 · 11 comments

Brown Pundits Must Stay a Broad Church

Reading Kabir’s thoughtful post on the “soft Hindutva” bias at Brown Pundits, I found myself both agreeing with parts of his argument and diverging from its framing. My own journey with BP goes back to its inception. The blog was born in Twixmas December 2010; 10 days after I had met Dr. Lalchand, whose presence has profoundly shaped my civilizational views.

I say this not as a biographical aside but because BP, at its best, is where the personal and civilizational collide. We bring who we are; our marriages, our migrations, our contradictions, into this messy, brilliant conversation.

At the time, like many Pakistanis, I held a deep-seated assumption: that Hindus were fundamentally “other.” It wasn’t overt hatred; just a civilizational distance, internalized from birth. But Dr. V & Brown Pundits challenged that.

A Forum With Bias? Yes. But Which One?

The heart of BP is not neutrality; it’s the willingness to host contradiction. That is its genius, and it must be protected.

Continue reading Brown Pundits: Broad Church or Narrow Canon?

Bharat Needs No Validation

X.T.M · July 21, 2025 · 15 comments

I’ve been following the usual commentary, the BP quadrant: Indosauras, Nivedita, Kabir. And I read Kabir’s offhand remark that the Ramayana “didn’t resonate” the way the Iliad or Odyssey did. That casual dismissal is telling.

The Ramayana is not just literature, it is scripture, memory, and civilization encoded in verse. It has shaped the moral and cultural landscape of over a billion people for millennia. To compare it, then downplay it and to do so so glibly reveals less about the text and more about one’s own civilizational estrangement.

Let’s be honest: that kind of language would never be used for the Quran or Islamic texts. And the fact that it is used for Hindu epics by brown intellectuals raised in the shadows of colonial categories says everything about how deeply colonized the Pakistani mind remains. Pakistan is, in truth, an Urdufied Punjab insufficiently imagined, a fragment that lost its civilizational compass in the act of imagining itself apart. The fact that the Ramayan being Pakistani heritage is such a novelty speaks volumes.

Today I sat at Stratford Westfield, eating Dubai Hot Chocolate ice cream, and the man next to me clearly Pakistani asked me, in Urdu, “if I was in the queue?” His wife spoke Punjabi-inflected Urdu. It struck me how London has become the real unifying Punjab. Ten percent of Britain is now Desi. And outside of the subcontinent, the fractures of 1947 heal in ways that remain impossible back home.

We speak of South Asia. But the term is bureaucratic; no one identifies with it. India is real. Bharat is civilizational. Aryavarta stretches from the Hindu Kush to the Indian Ocean — just as France is the Hexagon, Bharat is the Triangle. Partition clipped its wings, but its soul remains intact.

And look at the reality today: Indian Muslims are thriving in the mainstream. The title song of the upcoming film Sarai — written, composed, and directed by three Muslims: Ishaq, Fahim, and Arsalan. The leading lyricist is Javed Akhtar. This is a country that refused bitterness. A country whose largest minority chose Partition, and yet was never cast out, a unique precedent and testament the pluralism of Dharma.

Bharat needs no validation. It doesn’t need the approval of its neighbours or the heirs of partitioned imagination. It only needs to walk — and it is flying. Toward its own authenticity, on its own terms. And the world is watching.

Pakistaniat & Urdu from Qasim to Quaid

X.T.M · July 16, 2025 · 2 comments

UP’s very long shadow:

As I board my flight back to the UK after a brief but productive trip, I find myself reflecting on a language that continues to haunt and inspire me: Urdu.

It is a tongue caught between paradoxes. The language of courtesans and qawwals, of sacred supplication and sly seduction. It carries within it the scent of jasmine and blood, of Delhi’s dusk and Lahore’s lingering grief.

The Beloved Guardian of the Baha’i Faith once noted that while most Baha’i texts should be translated from English, Urdu alone is trusted for direct translation from Persian and Arabic. That proximity, that spiritual siblinghood with Persian, the language of kings, and Arabic, the language of God, renders Urdu magical.

Sanskrit, of course, is the language of gods, but Urdu, its stepdaughter of sorts, captures the longing of poet to partisan.

There’s a reason the Bahá’í prayer I share below is so piercing in Urdu. So here, before I cross back into another timezone, I offer this prayer—without commentary, without translation. Just Urdu, as it was meant to be heard.

And I wonder: perhaps this is what Pakistan truly is—a project in transcending the local. Not rooted in soil, but in sentiment. A place where Punjabis, Pathans, and Muhajirs are asked to shed skin and commune in Urdu. Where Pakistaniyat, for all its fractures, has succeeded in producing a common idiom: of piety, pride, and pain. Continue reading Pakistaniat & Urdu from Qasim to Quaid

Was Partition Good for Muslims?

X.T.M · July 12, 2025 · 216 comments

Kabir:I will remind you of the Sachar Committee Report which stated that the condition of Indian Muslims was worse than that of Dalits. This was a report commissioned by the Congress government not by Pakistanis. India has never had a Muslim Prime Minister. I would be willing to bet that this is not going to happen in my lifetime. The Muslim League succeeded in getting the Muslim majority provinces a country of our own. This is a huge achievement.

Partition was sold as deliverance. In hindsight, it may have been the most sophisticated act of self-disinheritance in modern Muslim history. A century ago, Muslims on the subcontinent were a political force — deeply embedded, numerically significant, and intellectually diverse. Today, they are divided, disenfranchised, and disoriented. Three nations. No unity. No power. No clear path forward. Let’s take stock:

1. Divided into Three

Pakistan. Bangladesh. India. Three fractured expressions of one civilizational legacy — none of which fully represents or protects the totality of South Asia’s Muslims.

2. No Electorate Leverage

In India, Muslims lost their negotiating bloc overnight. From being a decisive vote in undivided India, they became a permanent minority — politically cautious, rhetorically silenced, and often viewed with suspicion. In Pakistan, Muslim identity became so hegemonic it erased internal plurality. In Bangladesh, it became suspect altogether.

3. Psychological Cleft

Two-thirds of Muslims had to unlearn India. Partition forced them to disown their history. The other third had to choose between being Muslim or becoming more Indian. This psychic wound — of being here, but not quite belonging — has never healed.

4. Urdu: From Bridge to Burden

Urdu, once the cultural glue of the Muslim elite, is now:

Enforced in Pakistan (to the resentment of Sindhis, Baloch, and Pashtuns)
Marginalized in India
Extinct in Bangladesh

A shared language was replaced by suspicion and statecraft.

5. Islam as a Spent Force

Partition Islam was meant to be political. It became performative. There is no robust Muslim political expression in the subcontinent today — only tokenism, sectarianism, or silence. It resembles post-revolution Iran: Islam was not discredited by the West, but by what its stewards did in its name. Partition didn’t solve the “Muslim Question.” It just made it unspeakable — in three different politicised idioms.

Why Pakistan Is a Colonial Project & India a Civilizational One

X.T.M · July 11, 2025 · 27 comments

Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a marked improvement in the quality of conversation on BP. A large part of this, I suspect, is due to eliminating trigger-response dynamics; as seen when I barred Q on a technicality. It created space: suddenly, the commentariat was thinking, not reacting. In that quiet, something became obvious.

Whenever Kabir invokes “neutral experts,” they always seem to be Western, usually venerably white, often from institutions directly involved in the colonial rape of India. And yet these same voices are elevated as if they were impartial or above it all. They aren’t. They are the architects, not the observers. This is the paradox at the heart of Pakistan. Continue reading Why Pakistan Is a Colonial Project & India a Civilizational One

Borders, Blind Spots, and the Mirror Game of South Asia

X.T.M · July 10, 2025 · 20 comments

A recurring tension in South Asian discourse is the question of consistency: how states interpret borders, secession, and sovereignty; not in principle, but in practice.

Liberalstan’s case is that India acted selectively in 1947: Junagadh saw a plebiscite, Hyderabad faced military action, and Kashmir was referred to the UN. From this perspective, India chose whichever method suited its interests in each case. To Liberalstan, this isn’t pragmatism, it’s hypocrisy. The charge: if self-determination wasn’t good for Kashmir, why should it be for Balochistan? And what of Sikkim, Goa, Pondicherry, Khalistan, Nagaland, or the Naxalites?

Hindustan’s reply is rooted in realpolitik: decisions were shaped by demography, geography, and threats; not abstract norms. Q.E.A. Jinnah’s attempt to absorb Junagadh and court Jodhpur are seen as deliberate provocations, since Junagadh was Hindu-majority, non-contiguous, and largely symbolic (home to Somnath). After that, New Delhi abandoned any illusions of standard rules. From Hindustan’s view, Liberalstan’s moral framing is not only naïve but deeply asymmetrical; ignoring 1947, 1965, Kargil, Mumbai, and the long shadow of Pakistan’s own interventions.

When it comes to Balochistan, Hindustan notes its accession was closer to annexation, comparable to Nepal or Bhutan vanishing into India. Three major insurgencies since the 1960s complicate the narrative of “finality.” But here, Liberalstanflips the script: what is labeled a disputed territory in Kashmir is declared settled in Balochistan. This inversion doesn’t go unnoticed.

In truth, both sides are mirrors. Each demands flexibility for itself and finality for the other. Each invokes “consent”selectively; whether that of a prince, a people, or a state. The tragedy, perhaps, isn’t inconsistency but the absence of a shared regional framework for self-determination. One not held hostage by grievance, revenge, or exception.

Until then, accusations of hypocrisy will persist, each side fluent in the other’s blind spots.

The Myth of the “Average Pakistani”

X.T.M · July 8, 2025 · 36 comments

Dave’s comment:

“I have in fact met some. In person. Ran into a lovely couple while on vacay in Guatemala. Excellent conversation along a 2 hour shared shuttle ride. Shia muslims from Baltistan – he took great pains to indicate that his community is not like the average Pakistani, and that in his biradari they are proud to educate their daughters and wives, have them take the lead in public lives. Both his daughters were young med students.

The tragedy for Pakistan is that such actual liberals with modern outlooks wisely avoid taking public positions. They don’t want to get lynched. Hence the domination by the nutters and fringe on the right continues. Leading to mis-categorization of the right-wing as “the center”.”

The above praises a “liberal” Shia couple from Baltistan for educating their daughters and living modern lives, contrasting them with “the average Pakistani,” portrayed as a backward, anti-education fanatic. This framing is not just lazy; it’s offensive.

It reflects a deeply colonial hangover: the idea that modernity is rare in Pakistan, that deviation from presumed fanaticism is a revelation. But let’s be clear, Pakistanis, like people anywhere else, are ambitious, aspirational, and complex. Medical colleges are oversubscribed. Education is highly prized. And many people, devout or not, are navigating life with dignity, values, and a deep desire to move forward; not just materially, but spiritually and ethically.

Politics of Projection

Just because a population is not obsessed with hyper-capitalism doesn’t mean it is “backward.” It may simply mean it has not surrendered entirely to the logic that everything must be monetized. That’s not regression; it might be restraint. In a world where the only metric that seems to matter is money, resisting that tide is itself a kind of wisdom.

This kind of patronizing liberalism, one that exoticizes progressive Muslims as rare exceptions, isn’t harmless. It feeds into a narrative that justifies erasure: of language, culture, self-rule, and civilizational continuity. South Asians speaking in English, debating one another with colonial grammars, is not a mark of modernity, it is a symptom of displacement. The Global South doesn’t need to be saved. We need to be seen, on our own terms.

If You Have a Side, You Don’t Care for the Other Side

X.T.M · July 8, 2025 · 7 comments

In a world increasingly defined by sides, partisanship often masquerades as empathy. Whether it’s Pakistanis performing concern for Indian liberalism, or Indians invoking the plight of Muslim minorities to score points against their ideological rivals, the truth is simple: if you already have a side, you’re not truly invested in the fate of the other.

This isn’t cynicism; it’s structure. Sides, by their nature, demand loyalty. And loyalty comes at the expense of dispassion. You can mourn injustice selectively, but don’t pretend it’s universalism. More often than not, tribalism puts on the mask of principle.

As a Bahá’í, I’ve been shaped by a millenarian vision that urges global unity; yet I’m also deeply influenced by Hindu pluralism and pagan elasticity. Nicholas Nassim Taleb once said the more pagan a mind, the more brilliant it might be (excellent article) because it can hold many contradictions without demanding resolution. That capaciousness allows one to see that not every question needs a single answer. Hinduism, with its deep pluralism, contrasts radically with Islam’s (and Judaism’s) uncompromising monotheism. And yet, these two traditions are bound together—enmeshed across centuries of history, thought, and blood. Their tension is real, but so is their shared life.

That’s the point: opposites don’t just coexist, they form a whole. But when we prescribe change for the “other side,” we ignore our own capacity for reform. It’s always easier to critique outward than to renovate inward. Especially in a world run by oligarchic elites and managed emotions, where empathy is choreographed and outrage monetized.

So no, the Dalit Muslims of Dharavi aren’t the problem. Nor are the marginalized Hindus of East UP and Biharis. The problem is that a single family can build a private skyscraper in Mumbai while the city gasps beneath it. It’s the system that rewards power accumulation, not its occasional victims, that should concern us.

I don’t offer neat solutions. Maybe it’s taxation. Maybe it’s redistribution. Maybe it’s noblesse oblige. But the first step is this: stop pretending your critique of the other side is altruism. It’s not. It’s strategy. And perhaps the more honest work begins at home—with your own side, your own people, your own self.