We want to say something about what this image makes possible, and where.

Indians & Pakistanis cannot meet any longer

The hard fact first. There is no longer any practical way for an ordinary Indian and an ordinary Pakistani to sit in the same room inside either of their own countries. Visa regimes have hardened to the point of farce. The land border is sealed in spirit if not in law. What remains are the smaller states of the subcontinent and the wider diaspora. Of the smaller states, Sri Lanka is the one that handles the meeting most gracefully: visa-on-arrival to both passports, no overland complication, no political theatre, and a civic culture that does not ask either side to perform a position.

Which brings us to the older question, whether Sri Lanka belongs to our civilisational space at all. Some friends north of the Palk Strait still treat the island as adjacent rather than constitutive. We think this is wrong, and the reasons are not sentimental.

Sri Lanka is Dharmic?

Sri Lanka is Dharmic in the strict sense. Theravāda Buddhism is its public religion and its constitutional cornerstone, and Buddhism is one of the four Dharmic traditions, alongside Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism. The Mahāvaṃsa narrates the island’s history inside a cosmology that any reader of the Purāṇas will recognise on first contact. The northern and eastern provinces carry an unbroken Tamil Saiva inheritance, with temples invoked in the Tevaram hymns of the seventh to ninth centuries. Sri Pada, the peak in the central highlands, is climbed by Buddhists for the Buddha’s footprint, by Hindus for Shiva’s, by Muslims for Adam’s, and by Christians for the same. Anurādhapura and Polonnaruwa are not adjacent to the Indic civilisational core. They are inside it. And the island sits at the heart of the Rāmāyaṇa itself, whatever one makes of that text’s geography.

Theravāda

We anticipate the strongest objection, since we have heard it again this week in our own comment thread. Theravāda Sri Lanka, the argument runs, is defined precisely by what it rejected of Indic-Hindu tradition: the Brahminical priesthood, the Manusmṛti, the institutionalisation of caste. To call the island Dharmic, on this view, is to drag it back into a fold it left at the foot of the Bodhi tree. We understand the force of this and do not think it succeeds. Dharmic is a family, not a unanimity, and reform inside the family is not exit from it. Buddhism’s repudiation of caste, Jainism’s radicalisation of ahiṃsā, and Sikhism’s rejection of idol worship are constitutive moves within the Dharmic tradition, not departures from it. The Triple Refuge that every Theravāda Buddhist recites is itself the proof. Buddhaṃ saraṇaṃ gacchāmi, Dhammaṃ saraṇaṃ gacchāmi, Saṅghaṃ saraṇaṃ gacchāmi.

One does not take refuge in the Dhamma having walked out of the Dharmic tree. Dhamma is the Pali cognate of Dharma, and the cognate is not an accident of translation. It is the family resemblance speaking.

Kandyan Customary Law

The Manusmṛti objection in fact runs in our favour. Kandyan customary law in the upcountry permitted married women to hold and inherit property in their own right, the binna form of marriage preserving this most clearly, and the British codifying regime progressively narrowed those entitlements over the nineteenth century. That is a Dharmic achievement, not an exit from Dharma. It shows what the family produces when its reformist streams are ascendant. The Manusmṛti is one ancient text among many in a tradition that also contains the egalitarian Buddha, the property-rights Theravāda of Sinhala custom, the radical Sikh gurus, and the Jain refusal of hierarchy. The tradition is plural and self-critical. That plurality is its strength, not its disqualification.

So when we speak of the subcontinent as the Crown Jewel of the planet, from the Hindu Kush to the Indian Ocean, from the great rivers to the Burmese Highlands, we mean Sri Lanka emphatically. It is not the periphery. On the present visa map it is the centre, the one room in the house where the family can still gather.

Oneness of Humanity

That brings us back to the photograph. The Bahá’í Faith teaches the oneness of humankind not as a slogan but as a structural principle. Bahá’u’lláh wrote that the earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens. An Institutional Gathering, in which appointed Counsellors and elected Spiritual Assemblies consult together, is one of the most concrete expressions of that principle the community has. To hold one that brings Pakistani, Indian, and Sri Lankan friends into the same consultation, on Sri Lankan soil, in May 2026, is not a small thing. It is a working enactment of what the subcontinent’s politicians have not yet found a way to perform.

N disagrees that contact ameliorates ties. EK suggests the only Islamicate voices the Indian RW respects are those who have “debased their own civilizational integrity.” We do not know who he is shadow-tweeting. It could be us, the Founders of this blog, who are Islamicate by heritage and recognisably friendly to Hindu right-wing readings. Either way, the framing is off. And then there is Q, on the thread as we write, claiming Pakistanis “will eventually take over the Islamicate world.“

The cost of distance

The dominant idea of the last decade is that less contact means more security. Fewer visas. Less trade. No cricket. No artistic exchange. Reduced diplomatic warmth. This is sold as realism. It is, in large part, self-harm.

Distance does not produce clarity. It produces mythology. When people stop meeting one another, they begin imagining one another. The imagined neighbour is always simpler, darker, and easier to hate than the real one.

He is also, as Dhurandhar showed, sexier. Hatred and desire run on the same current. The more villainous the Pakistani on screen, the more the Indian audience leans in.

Civility is built by proximity. Not sainthood. Habituation. When people share space, study, trade, marriage, and culture, the room for fantasy narrows. One can still dislike the other side. But one dislikes actual people, not cartoons.

N’s response to this is that contact theory is “akin to blaming a victim for not engaging with the perpetrator.” That feels like the Israeli security story applied to the Indian Sub-continent. It assumes Pakistanis are a permanent terror-source requiring permanent counter-violence.

Pakistan obliges the narrative by behaving badly enough often enough to keep it alive. India obliges the frame by treating every bad actor as the median Pakistani. Both governments are now invested in the loop.

Pakistanis no longer defend hybrid Islamicate culture

They defend an Islam that has no Hindu in it. That is a different project, and a smaller one.

We are relearning Urdu from a Persian base. The asymmetry is immediate. Persian has no grammatical gender. Urdu has gender everywhere. The days of the week in Urdu come from Hindu names. The signs of the zodiac come from Hindu names. Khariboli, the substrate of modern Urdu, emerged around Delhi. Urdu is an Indian language with a Persian-Arabic vocabulary overlay. To pretend otherwise is to deny the body while praising the clothing.

Pakistani Islamicate culture is hybrid by construction. The denial of that hybridity does not strengthen it. It hollows it out. This is Pakistan’s error, and it is self-inflicted.

Q’s leadership thesis is fiction

The Persians were called fire-worshippers when Islam arrived. They became the cardinal subject race of the religion, and they did not Arabise. They went a different way and adopted Shiism. Shiism is roughly 30 to 42 per cent of the population of the Middle East. Iranians are roughly 30 to 42 per cent of all Shias. The Persian Gulf is historically Shia with Sunni emirates layered on top. A consolidated Shia state of the Gulf, were it ever to exist, would be the richest country on the planet (stay tuned).

Pakistan is not in this story. Pakistan is a Sunni state on the eastern margin of the Muslim world, with no claim on the religion’s classical metropoles, no claim on its theological centres, and a hybrid Indian substrate it has chosen to resent rather than mobilise. It is also not coded as a first-rate Islamicate people from the ME perspective. Urdu is read there as an Indian tongue. Biryani is Indian. The whole Islamicate inheritance is Indian. The Taj Mahal looks Muslim from inside India and unmistakeably Indian from outside it.

The leadership claim, on the data, is a bedtime story.

Indians and Pakistanis do not know each other

When BB writes about Pakistan, it is the work of someone who reads about Pakistan from the outside. The analytic frame is wrong, and that mistake reproduces itself at the level of the Indian state. India has made strategic missteps because it does not understand Pakistani psychology.

This is what makes BP interesting. The Islamicate founders of this blog understand Muslim psychology from the inside and have crossed into a different civilisational matrix, Western or Hindu or some hybrid. That dual standpoint is rare. It is why the comment thread occasionally generates more light than the average op-ed page.

The lost public sphere

Bollywood once functioned as a common emotional market. Pakistani households watched Indian films, quoted the songs, followed the stars, and treated Bombay’s output as partly theirs. Indian popular culture travelled west not as foreign export but as shared inheritance.

Soft power is strongest when the audience feels ownership. It is weakest when it feels patronised. That shared sphere has narrowed. Pakistanis still watch Bollywood. They no longer own it. Had new Khans (Mahira or a Fawad) risen through Bombay over the last fifteen years, the Aam Aadmi in Lahore would by now treat any cut-off from Indian culture as a personal affront. That option is closed. No missile system replaces cultural intimacy.

Pakistan is Prussia, not Wilhelmine Germany

India is the natural hegemon of South Asia. India borders every SAARC nation except Afghanistan. Every neighbour, by virtue of geography, ends up in some posture of adjustment toward Delhi.

Pakistan’s structural advantage is the inverse. It cannot dominate anybody, so it becomes the friend of everybody who feels crowded by India. Sri Lanka. Bangladesh. The Maldives. Nepal at moments. Iran at moments. Pakistan is in its Bismarckian Prussia phase: tightly defined, master of its narrow neighbourhood, no further. The Wilhelmine phase, the grandiose imperial overreach, was 1971, and that ended badly.

A Bismarckian Pakistan is more dangerous to India than a Wilhelmine one. The Wilhelmine version invites coalitional response. The Bismarckian version quietly aggregates the discontent of every smaller state India has ever pressured. India is not winning that competition. It does not seem to have noticed it is happening.

Both wings have left

Both wings of the old India have psychologically departed. Pakistan obviously. Bangladesh more interestingly. The 1971 revolution sits in Indian memory as a victory over Pakistan. In Bangladeshi memory, the threat that has organised national identity since the 1990s is India, not Pakistan. The Sinhalese feel similarly. So do significant constituencies in Nepal, the Maldives, and now Bhutan. Pakistan does not have to do anything to benefit from this. The structure does the work.

India is now larger and stronger than ever, and emotionally smaller than the civilisation from which it emerged.

A note on the diaspora-elite distortion

The Pakistani commentators on this blog are, almost without exception, diaspora or domestic elite. They will cheerfully make their own masses eat dust for the sake of their own civilisational grandiosity. The Pakistani peasant is not on this comment thread, and he is not particularly interested in leading the Muslim world. Hold this in mind when reading any sentence that begins “Pakistanis believe.“

India has the inverse problem in a useful form. The argument there is constant, public, reflective, occasionally brilliant. The argument is the system working. Pakistan does not have this. That is not a sign of unity. It is a sign of an elite that sings the tune of a Pied Piper.

The way out is the way in

There is no glamorous solution. No grand treaty. No sudden fraternity. More visas. More students. More trade. More artists. More flights. More cricket. More Urdu studied honestly. More Sanskrit in her Home River. More Pakistanis in Mumbai. More Indians in Lahore. Proximity before harmony. That is how normality is built.

The close

India risks mistaking size for strategy. Pakistan risks mistaking negation for identity. Both mistakes are expensive. N is wrong about contact. EK is fishing. Q’s leadership claim is a bedtime story. The subcontinent was not made to live as two sealed camps glaring across a fence. Until both states relearn that, they will keep doing what they have been doing for decades: injuring each other, limiting themselves, and calling it victory.