Over the last month, in order not to be Islamophobic, a line was surreptiously moved. The proposition that women should be confined to the home and kept out of higher education stopped being an outrage to be dismantled in public and became a “perspective” to be weighed.

Silence on the right of a woman to leave her own house, and called the silence respect. A space loud for one liberty and mute on another has not been even-handed; it has been captured. That is the moment the emperor lost his clothes and the courtiers agreed not to mention it.

How a country starts eating halal

RNJ consistently brings up Nassim Taleb’s seminal piece on “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority.”

A society does not turn to halal or kosher food because the majority converts. It turns because a small, inflexible minority will eat only one way, the flexible majority does not greatly mind, and it is cheaper for the caterer to feed everyone the strict diet than to run two kitchens. The intolerant minority sets the menu for all. Taleb called it the dictatorship of the small minority, and he was right that the most intolerant party, not the most numerous, decides the rule.

This is what happened to our comment section, and it is the smaller copy of what happened to Pakistan. A vocal faction that will not bend establishes the terms and to object to it is to be rude to your hosts.

Restricting a woman’s right to pursue higher education

Are we are tarring a nation with one man’s words? Q did not call for banning women from education. He called for severely restricting it, through quotas and the withdrawal of public funding, on the reasoning that most women in lecture halls are squandering a fertility they owe to children.

It is the drawing-room translation of an arrangement already in force across much of Pakistan. His opinion is the polite, exportable form of a structure that tens of millions of women already live inside.

Elites will continue educating their womenfolk

The Ashraf families would never accept for their own daughters what they prescribe for everyone else’s.

We sat beside one such table a moment ago. The Pakistani elite, in Karachi and in London alike, has done something that earns a cold sort of admiration: it has persuaded a population to feel the confiscation of its women’s liberty as devotion, and to hear the naming of that confiscation as blasphemy.

The men defending the arrangement here are not defending a constraint they themselves endure. They are defending a culture, upheld by women, whom they will never meet.

Patheticstan?

Barely half of Pakistani women can read and write. In the tribal areas the figure for women falls below ten percent. Pakistan carries the second largest population of out-of-school children on earth, after Nigeria, and keeps its girls out at a higher rate than its boys.

Across much of the country a woman cannot move from one place to another without a male relative to transport her, not as a courtesy but as a condition of her safety and her name.

None of this is a slander against Pakistani women. It is the footprint of a structure pressed onto them. We are describing what is done to people, not what they are.

Islam?

Then comes the defence that absorbs all the others: this is simply Islam, and a Muslim society is bound to arrive here.

Take Iran. It is more clerical than Pakistan, governed by jurists, and it enforces a veil Pakistan has never imposed. By the Islam theory it should sit at or below Pakistan on every measure of a woman’s life. It does the reverse. Iranian women are the majority of the country’s university students and outscore the men on entry and in the hall, and female youth literacy runs near ninety-nine percent against Pakistan’s barely-half.

The detail that closes the case is this. The Iranian clergy grew so alarmed at women out-graduating men that they imposed quotas and barred women from whole faculties to hold them back, and the women stayed the majority regardless.

Hold the religion constant and vary only the policy, and the outcomes part completely. The variable was never piety. It is whether the state and the family will let a woman build a self they cannot later repossess. Iran spent decades trying to cap a rising tide of educated women and could not reverse it. Pakistan arranged matters so the tide never came in.

The verdict

We will use the word K warned us was colonial. A structure that confiscates the liberty of half its members at birth, by choice and not by necessity, and trains them to call the theft holiness, is primitive. The word falls on the arrangement, not on the people held inside it, and the arrangement has earned it. Conservative, traditional, devout: these are the camouflage the structure wears, and we decline to hand it the camouflage.

Kabir’s closing defence is that a country cannot be so backward if a woman may run it, and he offers Benazir Bhutto and Maryam Nawaz. They prove the reverse. They are daughters of dynasties, and a structure that crowns a Bhutto’s daughter while leaving half its women unlettered has not raised women. It has raised a handful of surnames, which purchase their own women an exemption from the rule that still binds the rest. That is the engine of our last essay restated, the few ruling the many, in a sari this time.

Mera Jism, Meri Marzi

One slogan gathers the rest. The Aurat March marches under “mera jism, meri marzi,” my body, my choice, and K clarified, that the Urdu jism carries a sexual charge the English “body” lacks, so the country hears a demand for licence where the marchers make a claim to selfhood. Grant the mistranslation entire.

It changes nothing, because even were a woman demanding the right to sleep with whomever she chooses, she is owed it. An adult answers for their sexual life to herself and to her maker, to no committee, absent a marriage or a contract they entered freely of their own accord.

A culture is not weighed by its skyline or its arsenal. It is weighed by whether it lets its adults govern their own destinies & bodies.

How to deal with an Ugly Idea

We let Q’s argument stand in the thread, because a space that cannot look an ugly idea in the face cannot defeat it, and the Commentariat took it apart far more thoroughly than deletion would have. But letting an argument stand is not the same as letting it set the tone.

We spent two months so careful not to wound the faith that we forgot to defend the women, and the Female Admin Team now holds the gender threads for exactly that reason: so that the next time the intolerant minority reaches for the menu, the pen is in the hand of someone with skin in the question.

The patriarchy survives empires. We said so ourselves. Let us at least make certain it does not survive on our good manners.

The parent post set out why the house speaks in the plural and why pruning widens the room. This post sets out the harder discipline. A plural voice that cannot bind itself is not a voice. It is a whip. And a forum that cannot bind its Founders is not a forum. It is their salon.

The Crescent anchor.

When Brown Pundits was revived, two commentators returned before anyone else. Kabir was one of them. sbarrkum was the other. That mattered more than any traffic number. A forum lives by the return of people willing to argue in public, under their own names or their settled masks, on a schedule that does not flinch.

Kabir matters for a second reason. The Centre gathers quietly and often overlaps with the Saffron bench in instinct or historical frame. The Crescent bloc on this site is essentially held together by Kabir. Remove him and the others do not regroup under a new flag. They drift.

Without Kabir, Brown Pundits will become a site where Muslims are written about more than they are written by.

That is a failure mode we refuse. A South Asian forum without a sustained Crescent voice is a drawing room pretending to be a commons.

The 1940s in low resolution.

Stakes reduced to pixels and pride. Thankfully Nobody dies here. Which is precisely why the argument is worth preserving, and why the moderator’s hand should be lighter than the arguers sometimes deserve.

A century ago the same arguments produced two states and a million dead. A decade of this blog has produced two states of mind and zero dead. That is progress, even when it does not feel like it.

The value of the difficult voice.

Kabir is not valuable because he agrees with us. He rarely does. He is valuable because he returns, contests, and denies the Saffron bench the luxury of rhetorical walkovers. He is the gadfly this site earned, and the loyal opposition it did not know it needed.

Opposition is not a flaw in a public square. It is a load-bearing wall.

Three rulings.

One. Precedents do not apply to Author Threads. An Author manages their thread in its entirety. Our Precedents bind ours. They do not bind theirs. Admin reserves only the narrow right to intervene on racism, illegality, or conduct beyond common decency, and in egregious cases without notice. Short of that, the Author runs the room.

Two. Authors may set aside BP Precedents on their own posts. We moderate ours by Precedent. They moderate theirs both by choice and conscience. Readers will judge accordingly.

Three. Authors may exclude commenters from an open thread, provided the thread is named accordingly. “Kabir’s Open Thread on Iran.” The naming is the price of exclusion. No ambushes.

The cost to the admin.

Kabir has deleted our comments on his own threads. On the same threads, he has quoted our beta noire (all pun intended) approvingly, the one figure this site has formally placed under Precedent for bad faith.

The Founder goes to Trash. The persona non grata gets citation. Under the rulings above, both are his to make. We wrote the rule that protects them. That is not a flaw in the rule. That is the rule working. Freedom of expression is only real when it hurts the people who wrote it. This one hurts us. It will keep hurting us. Good.

A Founder who cannot be told no on another Author’s thread is not a Founder. He is a rentier landlord collecting rent on an argument he no longer owns.

The Indic centre, and its ceiling.

Our centre of gravity is Indic. Bharat Mata ki Jai (the very same slogan BB threatened Kabir with). We said so in the parent post and we will not pretend otherwise. But a centre heavy enough to hold must be light enough to let a Crescent Author run his own room without looking over his shoulder at us. Otherwise the centre is not a centre.

What Kabir gives us.

He gives us the argument. He gives the Saffron bench an opponent it must answer rather than caricature. He gives the Centre a reminder that neutrality is not absence. He gives readers the oldest democratic pleasure, which is watching strong disagreement conducted in words rather than force.

He gives Brown Pundits the thing that separates a living forum from a fan club. Someone who will not agree, will not leave, and will not be silenced by the people who own the keys.

The long game.

We will keep arguing with Kabir. He will keep deleting us. He will keep quoting people this site has disavowed. The rulings above are how we make all of that sustainable for another decade.

Kabir did not ask for this Precedent. He earned it the hard way.

This is not nostalgia. It is observation.

A Different Social Reflex

In much of the world shaped by late-stage capitalism, interaction is transactional by default. Help is conditional. Suspicion precedes generosity. Risk is individualised. In Chennai, the reflex is still different. People intervene without being asked. Strangers stop when something is wrong. Assistance is offered before motives are assessed. Money is often refused. This is not charity. It is social instinct. That instinct survives even in moments that theory says it should not: late nights, urban settings, infrastructural failure, ambiguity. The absence of alcohol matters. The presence of peer groups matters.

But more than anything, the cultural baseline matters.

Why Tamil Nadu Resists Homogenisation

Tamil Nadu’s resistance is not accidental, and it is not recent.

1. Language as a wall

   Tamil is not ornamental. It is enforced socially. This slows cultural flattening. It resists pan-Indian and global monocultures. It keeps local meaning dense.

2. Dravidian political memory

   Tamil society internalised an early suspicion of centralisation; religious, linguistic, or political. That suspicion created buffers long before the current political moment.

3. Pluralism without performance

   Religious difference is normalised rather than staged. Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism exist as lived traditions, not symbols in a culture war. This reduces siege psychology.

4. Weak penetration of chains

   Unlike Mumbai or Bengaluru, Chennai never fully surrendered its retail and social space to global chains. Local commerce still dominates daily life. That preserves face-to-face norms.

5. Family and neighbourhood density

   Gated isolation exists, but it is not total. Multi-generational presence and informal accountability remain strong.

Together, these factors produce something rare: modernity without total alienation.

The Dravidian Exception

Across South Asia, regions most exposed to imperial circuits, tourism corridors, financial hubs, Anglophone enclaves, develop a subtle sorting mechanism. Attention becomes differential. Westoxication, proximity to capital, or symbolic globality acquire value. Tamil Nadu largely escapes this logic. The reason is not moral superiority. It is insulation. Empire does not fully enter Chennai’s interior life. Compare this with places overwhelmed by external valuation; where service becomes calibrated, where the gaze changes, where people learn to distinguish between bodies. Tamil Nadu has been spared that training.

For now.

Capitalism Without Total Capture

Tamil Nadu is not anti-capitalist. It is industrial. It exports. It builds. But it has not fully internalised the idea that value must be proven through dominance, speed, or self-assertion. Accommodation still carries status. Adjusting to others is not read as weakness.

This is the opposite of the imperial ethic, where friction is resolved through power.

A Warning, Not a Celebration

None of this is permanent. The post-1990s generation shows strain. Gated living grows. English replaces intimacy. Phones replace neighbourhoods. Hyper-individualism seeps in. Capital does not destroy cultures all at once. It corrodes reflexes. Tamil Nadu’s strength lies in the fact that many people still remember another way of being, and can model it unconsciously. Once that memory fades, no policy can restore it.

Why This Matters Beyond India

What survives in Chennai is not “Indian culture” in the abstract. It is a pre-imperial social grammar: presence, mutual recognition, non-transactional help, emotional attunement. These traits exist wherever Empire has not fully won; whether in parts of the Global South, or in marginal spaces within the West itself. They are not backward. They are not inefficient. They are not sentimental. They are human.

And once lost, they are almost impossible to rebuild.

I don’t think I’ve ever read such a succinct diagnosis trying to get to the root of India’s issues, much less such a novel one (at least to me). For these reasons, if nothing else, I think X.T.M’s idea merits a deeper look.

I am largely in agreement with the author that diversity in and of itself is not at the heart of India’s troubles if only because it seems to have always been a factor in Indian society for as far back as we have history. Indeed, “diversity” and differentiation seem to me to be a mark of the continuity of Indian civilization from the earliest days of our forefathers. If this, our patrimonial diversity, has become a bane to India, it is to the India that plays at being a modern nation-state, democracy, and republic — not to the India of uncountable Gods, saints, and heroes, each at the heart of their world, ruling over the innumerable hamlets that dot the country and the uncountable kindreds that dwell within them. As Diana Eck (2012) puts it: “The profusion of divine manifestation is played in multiple keys as the natural counterpart of divine infinity, incapable of being limited to any name or form, and therefore expressible only through multiplication and plurality.” (India: A Sacred Geography, p. 48).

It is the second half of the author’s initial hypothesis that I think is the most important bit to dissect. Something about this diagnosis does not strike me as entirely accurate.

It is true that Partition split the Indian folk, namely, Hindus and Muslims, but the shape that this split took is a rather curious and, at least for me, unexpected one. According to the Pew Research Center’s June 29, 2021 report titled Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation (Sahgal et al.), when asked whether Partition was a good or a bad thing for Hindu-Muslim relations in a 2019 survey, 43% of Indian Hindus saw it as good while 37% of them saw it as bad. Indian Muslims? Quite the opposite. Only a third (30%) of them saw it as helping communal relations while almost half (48%) saw it as actually harmful.

While Partition may have been the bloody birth pangs of the Indian State and been a very real source of deep pain to the actual humans affected by it, what ails the folks of India is, I think, altogether something else. As to what exactly this is, I will come back to it towards the end of this essay.

X.T.M’s second hypothesis is something I actually agree with. such as the idea that the “two peoples” (Hindus and Muslims) could have lived together. We have seen time and time again that incomers to India have, over time, flowed into the great folksea that ebbs and flows upon our lands like trickles of glacial melt joining with the ocean, at once both one and sundry.

There is data to support this as well. In the same Pew report I cited above (Sehgal et al., 2021), the researchers found that while both Hindus and Muslims wish for segregation in their personal lives, as can be seen in the high percentage (over two-thirds) of both groups who want to stop intermarriage, the fact that most Indians’ friends tend to be from their own religious communities, and 45% of Hindus would not want a neighbour from at least one of the other major religions (Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, Muslim, & Christian) — a figure matched by 36% of Muslims, when it comes to what folks believe, there seems to be a surprising degree of similarity that crosses religious lines. The report revealed that an equal percentage of Indian Muslims believed in karma as did Indian Hindus (77%), along with over half of Indian Christians (54%), two-thirds of Buddhists and Sikhs, and 75% of Jains. Around one-third of Muslims and Christians said they believed in reincarnation as opposed to (and I found this very weird) only 40% of Hindus, 18% of Buddhists and Sikhs, and 23% of Jains). A similar level of belief in the purifying power of the Ganga was found among the two Abrahamic faiths. Needless to say that none of these ideas could be considered orthodox doctrine in any tradition of Islam or Christianity, and any adherence to them by followers of those religions in India immediately opens up a flood of questions one could ask.

Could it be the result of a superimposition of a Muslim or Christian layer onto a Hindu-Buddhist base such as happens when a linguistic superstrate is built atop a conquered population leading to the adoption of vocabulary and grammatical features from the linguistic substrate? Or, could it be like the speculated spread of retroflex consonants, which, while found in languages in many parts of the world, are particularly concentrated in India? Perhaps it’s a consequence of Hindu demographic domination over the last several decades causing it to serve as a sort of ‘prestige dialect’ among Indian religions? In any case, I don’t think we can discount the probability that a generally convivial attitude between Hindus and Muslims could have been maintained prior to Partition.

As such, I am generally in agreement with X.T.M’s argument that what happened was largely because of the will of the political elite. What I do take issue with is the rather ludicrous oversimplification of the so-called ‘Hindu’ side as the “Brahminical–Congress elite”, not only because it is patently untrue in terms of the actual people who led the Congress. Let’s take a look at some of the founding and early members. There are:

Bengali Brahmins

• S. Banerjee (Rarhi Kulin)
• W.C. Bonnerjee (Rarhi Kulin)

Bengali Kayasthas

• A.M. Bose
• B.C. Pal
• R.C. Dutt
• Sri Aurobindo

Western Indian Brahmins

• B.G. Tilak (Chitpavan)
• G.K. Gokhale (Chitpavan)
• K.T. Telang (Gaud Saraswat)
• M.G. Ranade (Chitpavan)

Muslims

• B. Tyabji (Sulaimani Bohra, of Arab descent),

Parsis

• D. Naoroji
• D.E. Wacha
• P. Mehta

Southern Indian Brahmins

• C. Vijayaraghavachariar (Iyengar)
• G.D.S Iyer
• P. Anandacharlu (Telugu, adopted by a Tamil Brahmin in Madras)
• S.S. Iyer

Others

• L.L. Rai (Agrawal Jain, Punjab)
• S.R. Mudaliar (Sengunthar, Chola vassals & merchant guilders, Tamil)
• V.O.C. Pillai (Vellalar, powerful tribe in society & politics, Tamil)

By focusing on the ‘Brahminical’ nature of the Indian National Congress, X.T.M papers over the very real internal differences between these Brahmins — for example, the fact that Gaud Saraswat Brahmins have historically had their status contested by their neighbors to the north in Marathi lands and to the south in Malayali ones, or the sectarian distinctions between Iyers and Iyengars. This sort of ‘unionism’ is as pernicious when applied by outsiders as it is by insiders to the Hindu fold because it flattens out the differences given to us by the Gods and our Fathers. Worse, such oneness only makes us easier to be understood, governed, and thus, captured.

Elites often do whatever they can to stay in power, even if comes at the cost of honour, legacy, or tradition, a phenomenon we can see at work in the way that the Godrej India Culture Lab, which has, among other things, become “one of the most LGBTQIA+ inclusive companies”, helping to produce A Manifesto for Trans Inclusion at Workplace, and hosted a ‘transgender’ dance performance in 2015 which just so “happens to fall within Transgender Awareness Week in the US”.

In the words of Mencius Moldbug (2007),“A nation is genuinely independent of America if its domestic politics are not correlated at all with American domestic politics.”

The Godrej Group was founded by a Bombay Parsi, Ardeshir Godrej, who was influenced by Naoroji’s ‘drain theory’, or the idea that British rule was but a system of economic exploitation enriching England at the cost of India. In response, he built a major industrial powerhouse at the dawn of India’s ‘independence’. It’s quite sad, then, when we see what has become of the name he built.

What’s more, Godrej is just one example of a Parsi success story in post-British India. Indeed, one could just as easily paint a picture of the foundation of the Indian National Congress as a scheme engineered by wealthy and powerful Bombayites, Parsis, and Bengalis with the aid of southern Indians to maintain their supremacy — were one inclined to such speculation. Oddly enough, it is these same regions (the old Bombay and Madras Presidencies) and communities that seem to have maintained much of an economic advantage down to the present day. The Tata Group, for example, was founded in 1868 by Jamsetji Tata, a Gujurati Parsi born into a Zoroastrian ‘Brahmin’ family who took up business instead. We regularly see Tamil and Malayali sophists online crowing about how great and advanced their states are, especially compared to those in the North, and Bengali chauvinists sneer at their ‘BIMARU’ neighbours. Maybe they all have good reason to. I can’t say for sure. But what I can say is that from a certain point of view, it looks like northern Indians have consistently been on the lower rungs of the Indian social ladder since even before Partition.

Instead of intangible and shaky concepts like ‘caste identity’ perhaps we can find observable material factors that underscore possible similarities between the founding members of the INC. What, if anything, united the 72 (and isn’t that a curious number?) founding members of the Congress? Perhaps it was the fact that most of them were lawyers, and of the remaining, several were journalists. Pretty much all of them were British-educated and conversant in English, as well as many being polyglots and highly skilled in other areas of life, suggesting high intelligence and capability. Of course, these factors were not merely coincidental, but a feature of the founding. Naturally, when forming any institution, you would want the best and the brightest — and probably the wealthiest too. These would all have been factors that drew them to Allan Octavian Hume, a key member in the foundation of the INC and of whom I think we all should learn more. He seems to be a singularly fascinating figure from that period, both for his seemingly genuine pro-Indian feelings and occultist leanings. Perhaps I will write more about him later.

In any case, laying the blame at the feet of the “Brahminical–Congress elite” as though they, for whatever faults they did have, are equally as responsible for what followed in 1947 as their Pakistani counterparts is simply slander.

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

Here’s the hard truth: India is becoming a Hindu nation; not in the theocratic sense of Saudi Arabia, but in the civilizational, cultural, and aesthetic sense. The train has left the station. And everyone; Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs, Parsis, even Christians and some liberal Bollywood Muslims, has understood the compact: accept the saffronization of the public sphere, live your private truth, and be part of the greater whole.

There is no shame in adapting to that compact. I have done it myself. As a non-Muslim, I realized that I could either spend my life as a second-class citizen in the Ummah or evolve, Hindu-fy, Dharma-fy, de-Islamize, and embrace the broader civilizational arc that India represents (Aurangzeb and the Mughals are not a hill I will die on but Biryani maybe).

And let’s be blunt: in India, everyone is number one except the Muslims—not because of oppression, but because Muslims have failed to negotiate the terms of being a minority in a non-Islamic state. The Sikhs have managed it. The Jains have managed it. The Christians have found their way. But Muslims still demand parity on their terms; aashiq-e-Rasool one day, secular warrior the next.

🗺 Kashmir, Identity, and Moral Consistency

And this brings us to Kashmir. If the Ummah is so sacred, if the brotherhood of Islam is paramount, then by all means, let India relinquish Kashmir. But then the burden of choice falls squarely on Indian Muslims: choose Hindu India or Muslim Pakistan and let it be a final choice. There can and should be no space for Islam in the public space of India; this was Nehru & Gandhi’s fatal mistake, they didn’t demand a complete Partition (like Greece-Turkey). Either one separates completely or not at all. One cannot wave the flag of pan-Islamism and then expect Indian secularism to shield that flag from scrutiny.

The hypocrisy here is no longer tolerable to anyone—left, right, or centre. Muslims are not being asked to give up Islam. But they are being asked to give up the illusion that Islam can demand liberal tolerance while offering none in return.

🌅 Partition 2.0? Or Integration 2.0?

What we need, perhaps, is a Partition of the Mind. Let’s stop pretending that everyone has equal emotional stakes in every narrative. Let Muslims who are committed to India fully integrate, do Aarti, eat prasad, learn Sanskrit, embrace the Vedas if they want to, and let those who feel emotionally tied to Pakistan or pan-Islamism leave, or at least admit their divided loyalties.

And for non-Muslim Pakistanis, the choice is even clearer. Learn from what Sindhi Hindus did in 1947: migrate, adapt, and embrace the civilization that accepts you, even if imperfectly. Stop pretending Pakistan will ever love you back. It won’t. It can’t. It was never designed to.

🎭 Final Thought: On Blogs, Battles, and Betrayals

Ironically, it’s Kabir’s betrayal, his “entrapped” moment, his nearly forced exit, that may have revitalized Brown Pundits. In rejecting him, we were perhaps reacting not just to his views, but to the mirror he held up to all of us. A mirror that asked uncomfortable questions: What does it mean to be Indian? To be Muslim? To be post-Muslim? To be culturally Hindu? These are questions no one wants to ask, because the answers force us into binary truths we’d rather avoid.

But we must ask them. And we must ask them on the blog, in the open, without fear or favour.

After all, if Brown Pundits is to continue being the premier site for South Asian ideological discourse, we must earn that title; not just through analytics, but through moral clarity. Kabir may have almost left (for the 10th time), but the questions he raised remain.

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.

Kabir’s critique isn’t without merit. BP has long been skeptical of PakNationalism, a term coined and critiqued by Omar. That skepticism often bleeds into a preference for India’s civilizational continuity; even when it comes wrapped in saffron. But is that “soft Hindutva”? Or just what happens when a mostly Indian diaspora grows tired of liberal self-flagellation, yet remains far from the RSS?

We must be honest: all forums have a bias. BP’s is not Hindutva; soft or hard. Its bias is civilizational engagement, often from the Hindu side, because Hinduism is undergoing the most intense process of public introspection in South Asia today. That doesn’t make the forum exclusionary. It just means the emotional energy of the moment is Hindu.

As someone born Pakistani, this hasn’t always been easy to witness. I, too, was raised to see Hindus as alien. But Dr. V & BP helped me unlearn that. It forced me to hear Hindus speak for themselves; not as flat caricatures from Pakistani textbooks, but in flawed, fervent, polyphonic voices. That transformation matters.

Muslims, Merchants, and Modernity

Muslim societies across the Ummah often reproduce a mullah–merchant axis; ordinary bazaaris who are devout, disciplined, and wary of pluralism. This has less to do with theology than with social structure. Even Muslim liberals, those who’ve left the fold intellectually, often retain a deep emotional orthodoxy. They want the dignity of Islam without the obligations. That’s their right. But it also makes reform elusive.

This is why discussions with Muslim intellectuals on BP sometimes stall. There is a core, a resolve, a refusal to bend, even in secular critique. Islam’s strength is also its challenge: its clarity. Hinduism, by contrast, is maddeningly vague but that vagueness allows for evolution. It allows for critique from Ambedkarites, feminists, even atheists. And it survives.

This isn’t a moral hierarchy but it is a cultural asymmetry. One that defines much of public discourse today.

A Prayer Room in a Mall

A few days ago, I needed to say my long obligatory prayer and found myself in a mall. The prayer room was entirely Islamic in orientation. As a Bahá’í, whose obligatory prayer shares Islamic roots but is meant to be done in solitude, I felt alienated. In the end, I found the Christian meditation room, empty, quiet, and prayed there.

I don’t say this as an attack. But it illustrates something deeper. The Islamic world often has a powerful, immovable core. But cores can calcify. Without reform or flexibility, they struggle to respond to social complexity.

Liberating Hinduism to become like Islam

I remember reading a striking line once: that secularism in India was not about restraining Hinduism, but about liberating it from the Indian state. When the courts intervened in Sabarimala, or when temple boards were pressured to democratize, it wasn’t to marginalize the religion; it was to hold it accountable to the values it professed. That’s a far cry from how the Indian state treats its minorities, often with exaggerated deference. There’s a paradox there worth acknowledging.

This nuance is often missing when people critique “Hindu rage.” Yes, there is a rising assertiveness, sometimes aggressive and poorly articulated. But we must ask: what is the emotional wound behind the anger? What is the history being remembered, or misremembered?

What strikes me most, especially among Muslim intellectuals, is the tendency to distance themselves from the faith while still speaking on its behalf. There’s a kind of cultural half-step: not quite inside, not quite outside. But Islam, unlike Hinduism, is not nebulous. It’s a faith built on clarity; of law, of creed, of practice. And that clarity often hardens into rigidity. It becomes difficult to integrate with a pluralistic society when the core feels non-negotiable.

Akhand Bharat: Triggering, Yes. But Why

Kabir is right: maps of “Akhand Bharat” can be deeply offensive to some (would Pakistanis really be offended to be included in a map of the Persianate world?). But let us separate political intent from civilizational nostalgia. When Zionists say “Eretz Yisrael,” it doesn’t mean they’re marching on Jordan. When Chinese textbooks depict all of Asia as tributaries, it doesn’t mean they’re invading Mongolia. Civilizations remember expansively. That’s what they do.

Does “Akhand Bharat” imply irredentism? Not necessarily. But it reflects a longing for coherence in a region shattered by Partition; an event that scarred both India and Pakistan. For Pakistanis, Partition was foundational. For Indians, it was a trauma. These are not symmetrical truths but they are coexisting ones. BP must hold space for both.

The Future of This Forum

Kabir wants more Pakistanis on BP. So do I. He wants voices from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Indian Left. So do I. But that expansion must come without constraining the organic Hindu self-expression that drives much of the current commentary. Kabir’s call for more Pakistani and left voices is valid. But that pluralism must add, not amputate, the Hindu core.

We don’t need quotas or silos. What we need is plural presence. If BP becomes a Hindutva or Islamist or secularist safe space, then so be it.

This forum is not perfect. But it is rare. And in a region still grieving its partitions; cultural, political, and spiritual, that rarity is its power. Let it widen, not fracture.

But I don’t think that’s where we are. What we are is a messy, multilingual, cross-border, intermarried, occasionally inappropriate, always intense, half-diasporic, half-continental civilizational salon. There is no other forum like this.

Let’s not neuter it in the name of neutrality.

Let it be what it already is; a place where someone like me, a half-Persian, half-Pakistani Bahá’í who just did a Shiv puja during Shravan, can say all this without apology.

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.

As my life passed, I would see so many of the stories from the Mahābhārat play out in my life and in the world around me. The blind love of a long-gone Dhritarāshtra came alive with my parents, who showed me love, despite my bad behavior, my failures, and my unending ingratitude, one of my greatest flaws. Their love was uncompromisingly unequivocal, and I was an unworthy Duryodhan. I saw the struggles and rise of “low-born” Karna with my own family, as we grew from a family who couldn’t even afford to spare money to buy a popsicle from the ice cream truck that taunted me every day as it passed by my house to slavishly building a motel business in the middle of nowhere to selling it and owning a nice single-family “American Dream” home with many fewer worries than we grew up with. And perhaps most importantly, I saw the devotion or bhakti of Rādhā through my family’s Hindu faith and regular attendance to our local temple – a tradition that grounded us through tough times and brought a sense of community, fellow “gopis” perhaps to share our lives and love with.

Those evenings watching the words of Vyāsa transform into images will forever be special to me. For those nights would fuel the dreams of my days as I grew up connected to a timeless culture and values. And they would doubly serve me when I learned of the nightmarish state of my fellow Hindu diaspora with regards to their views on Hinduism and Hindus.

In The Battlefield

To find the answer to the titular question, I did a bit of “field reporting” one weekend with my fellow Hindu-American friends starting off with a simple question:

The most common responses were along the lines of:

• • “What injustices faced by Hindus are you talking about?”
  • “I honestly don’t know what type of issues we face, besides normal ‘brown’ discrimination here.”
  • “I’ve never seen any from the media I consume” A general theme of genuine innocent unawareness was what I saw.

So I prodded further and mentioned the atrocities Hindus face in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and even parts of India. Yet Still, the answer was “I literally never heard this before.”

Then came a visible sense of discomfort, and I know why. My question then silently morphed to “Why don’t you stand up for your own people” in their minds. I didn’t need to spell it out, but it turned into those very cutting words – why don’t you stand up for your own…

The rapes, the forcible conversions, the killings, the discrimination, the demographic collapse all signaling horrors that didn’t have any similar magnitude of rivals in India. The initial response was denial or wishing away the numbers I gave them: “Oh how do you know all that happened to them?!” “Maybe they converted willingly!”

I mentioned CAA and the refugees begging to return to the land of Dharma. Denial then became equivalating.

“Well, this all probably happens in India too!”

I kept unpacking this. I ask them, “why do you think this way?” Note – I tried to avoid a confrontational tone as much as possible, just neutral questioning so as to not pry open any vitriolic reaction. They talked about their parents’ hysteria over Pakistan, their WhatsApp forward fueled hatred, etc… I tried to explain to them that the equivalence wasn’t there. That the magnitude of what happens to Hindu minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh is much worse presently and historically than what happens to non-Hindu minorities in India.

But they just weren’t having it.

“I don’t believe you. India is just as bad”

Now, India is of course not perfect, now or historically. But it is a work in progress. It is diversity in action in a way very few countries (The United States and Brazil are the only ones that come to mind) can compete with. India is pluralism, both its virtues and flaws.

By this point, we linked up with a few other friends and the conversation dropped. But let’s continue this theme with a few other independent observations and anecdotes.

Misinformation Warfare

Modi equals Trump – this fantastically false idea is an atomic bomb on one’s perception of India. A very simple notion that has a number of externalities. Hindu-Americans are fairly “woke” from my personal experience, and Indian-Americans heavily lean Democrat. Standard diatribes against “45” are common when talking politics with my Hindu-American friends. I don’t really care as I don’t support him, but the Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) gets tiring after a while.

Policy-wise (you know, the actual actionable impact that changes people’s lives and futures), Modi has done more socialism in one term than Bernie Sanders will ever do in his lifetime. The comparison fails at almost every metric:

• • Modi has enacted a litany of “socialist” measures and welfare schemes including:
    • Swacch Bharat – an initiative to rid India of open defecation by building toilets as well as raising menstrual health awareness for women.
    • Ayushman Bharat – Extending healthcare to India’s poorest 500 million people and continuously expanding.
    • Ujjwala Yojana – Providing 60+ million poor households with free liquid petroleum gas connections that are safer and more healthy than traditional wood-fired methods.
    • Jal Jeevan Mission – Along with a frenetic infrastructure push to integrate India’s rural and poor, an integral piece has been Jal Jeevan, where households are connected to give every Indian rural household a tap water connection by 2024; luckily something that is well on its way to being achieved.
    • A massive push for renewable energy as India integrates solar energy at an unseen scale amongst the world in order to meet international climate goals and combat local pollution.
  • Modi, who hails from a poor and lower caste background, possesses a total net worth hovering under $400,000 currently, while the main opposition party’s leaders, the Gandhis, stand in the billions.
  • He has continuously and consistently reached out to all Indians and is pushing common law for all Indians through Universal Civil Code.
  • And many others…

Right Wing, Left Wing, “nationalism”, “conservative” and other meaningless labels are even more irrelevant when thrown into the ocean of Indian politics. They sink into nothingness. They’re pointless.

But to many Hindu-Americans, “Right-Wing”, “Nationalist”, “conservative” are terms that immediately make them see red, and “RACIST” pops into their mind in big white letters. I don’t care about your 14 syllable ideology. People see things through simple lenses. It doesn’t matter what Modi and Trump actually do to a lot of people; it matters how they are characterized.

Fuck your nuance. Damn it to hell.

Hassan Minhaj told me what I need to know in a 12-minute 37-second segment on a now-canceled Netflix show. I trust the consistently wrong coverage of the New York Times – yes the same one that complained why more Indian people aren’t dying of coronavirus. Additionally, it’s quite clear that “South Asian” organizations in the US have explicitly blacked out mentioning these atrocities as it would hurt their respective lobbies.

With community organizations, media, and celebrities silent – how can Hindu-Americans be aware?

American Dharma

Now let’s talk about religiousness.

Hindu-Americans have some of the highest retention rates of religious identification in the US.

I can’t judge others’ religiosity, but from what I’ve anecdotally seen. Hinduism is many times a more aesthetic/background thing than practice for Hindu-Americans. Sometimes it seems samosa and chicken tikka masala have more weight in their culture than pujas and scripture. Now token ritual involvement happens every time Diwali rolls around, but to me, Hindu-Americans really just aren’t “self-aware.” Funny as Hinduism places so much emphasis on self-discovery and reflection.

Another thing – explicit politics is pretty far removed at American Hindu temples versus other diaspora places of worship. Political rhetoric that’s common at other religious places isn’t a mainstay in mandirs; and honestly, I am glad this is the case. Religion to me is more about immediate community and individual practice rather than political machinations across the Atlantic. I’ve seen firsthand how the ugliness of politics warps American religious communities where identity realpolitik replaces spirituality for many of these “religious adherents.” Where insulting the “Other” is more important than praising the Omniscient.

Ideally, religion would be separate from politics. But we can’t deny a battlefield once we’re on it. Hopefully, temples stay out of the fray of such rhetoric, but Hindu-Americans outside of it strengthen.

So in conclusion, the answer to the question:

1. Genuine unawareness of Hindu injustices driven by media, community, and political organizational blackout. 2. Right-wing and left-wing notions don’t translate well across Indian and American politics. Many Hindu-Americans see red once “right-wing” is mentioned. 3. Religion and politics don’t mix at Hindu temples unlike other religions.

The Craven

Now while we’ve answered our query, I want to add an addendum to a vile specimen I’ve seen recently amongst the diaspora. Aping their equally contemptible cousins back in the subcontinent, this emergence of Indian-Americans who speak in the poisonous tongues of India’s elites is now slowly seeping into mainstream American culture.

They seek to transplant American history and dynamics onto India just as blindly as India’s elites have over the decades. Equating Hinduism itself to white supremacy and fascism and defining it solely by casteism are standard affairs for this type. They have no ingenuity in their discourse. The blueprint of their commentary is amateur oppression Olympics. Their foundations are self-loathing. Their walls are an echo-chamber blocked off by the soulless skyscrapers of coastal elites on one side and the great blue filter of social media on the other. Their roofs are paid for by verbal prostitution. Their material is so common, yet they have a profound disdain for commoners. They are copy + paste. Many are essentially white progressives with a sprinkling of turmeric and cumin for empty color and scant flavor.

They are from South Asia, not the Indian Subcontinent. Their culture can be summed up into samosas, chicken tikka masala, a few “South Asian” outfits, and henna. Depth is an allergy to them so their roots are forever undiscovered but much-maligned. They will go out of their way to pin every misfortune and misery inflicted upon other minorities as purely due to economics or European imperialism, but will not hesitate to blame the downfalls of India solely on Hinduism and its indigenous culture. On the off chance that they navigate blame to the British, they will remain mum on the equally or even worse atrocities of the Mughals and their hate-filled predecessors. Their silence screams at the scars and ruins of their ancestors’ temples, all to preserve this mythic “solidarity” amongst fellow “South Asians.”

As they watch their fellow Indian-Americans break all barriers, their reflex is dismissal. When our minority becomes model, they relentlessly attack their own people instead of appreciating and applauding. Excuses for success rather than attributing it to hustle and immigrant sweat. They write paragraphs lamenting how every Indian-American has come to America with a silicon laced gold brick in their mouths, a silver stethoscope around their necks, or a platinum high caste thread over their shoulder. They wash away the struggles of immigrants with haughty commentary and exhibit a saffron-tinged white guilt. They seek to be the oppressed lamenting at the impending “fascism” that is perpetually 1 Republican representative away from arriving and simultaneously the oppressor as they claim Hinduism itself is oppression. They cloak their jibes in a mythic and undefined “Brahminism” where they attribute normal Hindu practices like vegetarianism, innocent rituals, and practices performed by all castes and communities as part of a grand conspiracy of “Brahminical supremacy;” the irony being that many of these commentators are Brahmins or high caste themselves! Due to their skin color and last name, they believe they are the chosen voice for over a billion other Indians and millennia-old civilization.

Essentially, they care about what India looks like, not what it is. They seek approval at any cost. But either way and in the end, why should they expose their necks in courage when they can swallow their pride, forever remaining craven?

Reposted from The Emissary. Follow me on Twitter!

Most Hindu believers don’t have problems with bowing down before the next idol/guru in addition to their existing ones. One only has to visit Goan Churches to see devout and traditional Hindus praying to Jesus with all their devotion without any dichotomy. There appears to be no conflict between going back to their traditional lives while asking favors/ paying respects to the supposed Son of God. The violent history of how Christianity got into Goa has very little bearing on how Hindus interact with Christian pockets of Goa in contrast with the case with Islam. (This may not be the case in other areas where there is more active proselytization). While this pluralism which is a salient part of Hinduism is often traced to the Rgvedic “एकम सत विप्रा बहुधा वदन्ति” form the First Mandala. However, as Michael Witzel points out in his analysis of Rgveda, pluralism can be found even in the Rgvedic family books (mandala 2-7 which is often to be earlier texts, with scholars putting them as at least 1500BCE), especially the 7th Mandala attributed to Vashishta. Thus it’s safe to argue that Plurality is a quintessential attribute of Hinduism.

From ages 22-25 I was hooked with the New Atheism worldview – which rarely had the representation of Ex-Hindus or Hindu-Atheists. Even then I could not fully agree with New Atheist criticism of Eastern Faith systems (I found the chapter in Hitchens book to be a strawman). More reading of history and politics since then has meant that I have come out of what Razib Khan calls the Nerd understanding of Religion. While the number of Ex-Muslims in the New-Atheist movement was low in the early 2010s, by 2020 the Ex-Muslim movement has gained a lot of momentum with many names becoming popular. I had avoided the whole Ex-Muslim internet sphere which seems to have exploded these last few years as I did not want to enforce my own confirmation bias about the ills of Islam. However, this Armin- KaliMaa fracas has meant that I have followed the works of these Ex-Muslims a lot over the last week.

Having read and listened to these guys, I can’t ignore the glaring differences between Hindu Atheists like myself and Ex-Muslim or Ex-Christian atheists. While surveys point to less than 1% of Indians self designating as atheists, I really doubt the number as most Hindu atheists continue to identify as Hindu unlike atheists coming from other faiths. In my experience, Hindu atheists spend less time arguing in the abstract about belief in the supernatural or the validity of scriptures and are more focused on concrete problems – viz rituals/traditions which they find illogical or abhorrent. This may be a function of Hinduism, which is less scriptural and much more ritualistic (at least this is true for the Brahminism which I am most familiar with). Over these particular issues, there is only a minor difference between the positions of the Reformist yet believing Hindus and Hindu Atheists. On the other hand, the New-Atheist position is glaringly similar to the Monotheistic position – with all the certainty and condescension but no coercion and violence.

This difference could be for two reasons:

• For most Hindus being atheist is not a big deal. There is very little penalty on being non-conformist as long as atheism isn’t confrontational. As a result, Hindu atheists don’t feel like aggravated victims and are reciprocally less confrontational. This neutral feedback cycle keeps most Atheists in the larger Hindu fold.
• Being exposed to numerous faiths and worship systems since childhood, Hindu atheists like Hindus don’t find it tough to respect the behaviors of other believers (however ridiculous) which New Atheists condescend at much more polemically.

That being said, a lot of unnecessary condescension at Hindu practices does exist in India – particularly on the left. But even that doesn’t necessarily overlap with Atheism but with the Indian “Secular” framework. I don’t mean to imply that all Hindu atheists are plural or even liberal. But for most Hindus, atheism is an epistemological position and not an absolutist belief system. Finding a Hindu atheist being as confrontational as an atheist from Monotheism is rare thought there must be numerically significant exceptions.

I personally would rather spend most of my energies fighting Homeopathy than religion. IMO both are demonstrably false but only one of them pretends to be scientific.

And then the undercurrents of differences burst forth, breaking the dams of reason, tearing asunder the fabric of Indian society.

Read more about a Dharmic take on identity politics here: https://lincogle.wordpress.com/2019/07/08/a-struggle-for-true-liberation/. #Solidarity