South Asian politics – Brown Pundits

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:

Come Fly with me to Far Bombay

I. Bombay: Between Beauty and Brutality
I’m writing from Bombay, where the monsoon floods are overwhelming; visually and viscerally. The rain hammers the city with a kind of sublime fury. From certain vantage points, it’s breathtaking. But it’s also undeniably brutal for those without scenic surroundings or structural shelter. It’s a reminder that Indian beauty is often doubled with burden.

II. Burden Burst: The Commentariat Awakens
Lately on Brown Pundits, I’ve noticed a revival. Old voices returning, new ones emerging, and many ideas worth engaging. But some themes have worn thin; for instance I’m in broad agreement with Indosaurus & I don’t want to waste too much breath on Audrey Truschke. And frankly, Aurangzeb is not a hill I want to die on. In fact, perhaps one of the key misreadings by Muslims in the subcontinent was turning every ideological disagreement into a hill to die on. Maybe it began with QeA-Jinnah and the Great Allama but it ossified into a pattern. Everything became a matter of principle, rather than pragmatism.

III. Concession Is Not Compromise
Compromise is seen as weakness, but I’m more interested in the capacity to concede especially when history clearly shows you’re wrong. The Mughals installed a two-tier system, subordinating Hindus and even native Muslims. Contrast that with the Suri dynasty, particularly Sher Shah Suri, who in just two decades built the Grand Trunk Road and reshaped governance without the alienation that marked the Mughals. If Hindutva attacked the Suri legacy, I’d call it pure bigotry. Sher Shah ruled with the land, not over it. Continue reading Come Fly with me to Far Bombay

🧵 Open Thread: Hate Speech, Travel Notes, and Diplomatic Surprises

I just saw a comment that genuinely crossed the line; not just a misstep, but something hateful, dehumanizing, and deeply communal. It invoked Partition violence in a way that glorified massacre. That’s not just a dogwhistle, that’s a foghorn.

As most of you know, I’m a light-touch moderator. I tolerate a lot. I believe in messy dialogue. I’ve been fair on my WhatsApp groups, fair on BP, and generally try to err on the side of letting things play out. But this? This wasn’t a close call. It was a clear failure of moral language.

Even if the commenter didn’t “mean it,” this kind of rhetoric has consequences. When you’re speaking about events like 1947, where entire families were destroyed, you need to speak with care, not contempt. There’s no room for casual violence, coded language, or historical gloating. None. Zero.

Before this commenter contributes further to the blog, he will need to fully retract and apologise for the communal language he used. Criticism is fair game. But hate speech is not. Kabir can be theatrical, yes but he does not traffic in dehumanization. The standards must be consistent, and that comment clearly crossed the line.

Please observe this on the thread. I’m traveling, and this is an open post. I’ll be back with more soon. I’ve written a bit in my newsletter but I will expand on those.

In the meantime:

➡️ Yes, it appears Pakistan is running smart diplomacy — both with Iran and the U.S.

➡️ I don’t have time to share the links (plane about to take off); they’re all Google-able.

➡️ But credit where it’s due. There is no infallibility in foreign affairs. But when someone cannot stand to see Pakistan get anything right, it reveals more about their own biases than about geopolitics.

This isn’t about defending states or “sides”; it’s about defending basic decency in discourse.

Bharat Needs No Validation

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.

What Is Brown Pundits For?

Brown Pundits has always been an open tent—not a monolith, not a movement, and certainly not a megaphone. A forum. A space where ideas, arguments, and identities from across the Brown world are aired, examined, and sometimes clashed over—with the hope that we all leave a little sharper than we arrived. But with that openness comes tension. How do we balance quality and quantity? Principle and pluralism? Coherence and contradiction?

It’s something I’ve reflected on often in other matters of my life (like party-planning for instance). When I’m in the UK, time is tight. When I’m in the US, there’s more room for Brown Pundits. In that ebb, others—like Kabir—have stepped in, contributing with energy and range. And I’m grateful.

Some of Kabir’s posts may align politically with The Wire. That’s fine. Other Pundits lean toward a down-low Hindu Right. Also fine. This was never a place for orthodoxy. We aren’t here to gatekeep belief—we’re here to grow through encounter. The real question isn’t what side are you on? It’s why are you here?

If you’re here to dunk, to declare, to dominate—maybe this isn’t the right space. But if you’re here to engage, to learn, to argue in good faith—welcome. As authors, we don’t always agree. We shouldn’t. But how we disagree matters. To that end, I’d like to lay out four standing principles—not as commandments, but as shared norms that keep our house in order:

Continue reading What Is Brown Pundits For?