Open Threads now follow the festivals

Kabir suggested a new thread every 100 comments. I’ve gone one better: a new Open Thread will open on each major festival of the subcontinent. Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Sindhi, Persian and Bahá’í days all count. That makes 18 threads a year, from one Gandhi Jayanti to the next. No thread ever closes, so you can keep talking in any of them.

The year ahead:

Then Gandhi Jayanti comes round again and the cycle repeats. If I’ve missed a festival you think belongs on the list, say so below.

First, I made a full backup of the site. Every post (about 3.4 million words, the length of 35–40 medium-sized books) and all 93,281 comments now sit safely off the server.

Next, I switched off eight plugins BP no longer used. Our homepage took 20 seconds to load from scratch. Now it takes under 2. If you write for BP, the editor should feel quicker too.

I also fixed 507 older posts that loaded their images over an insecure link. Images now load as you scroll, so long posts open faster on a phone.

fb spotted posts from 2018 in the recent comments. The image fix created those links automatically. Nothing was lost, and they no longer appear in the list.

The new design went live this morning. It is built around what makes BP different: the argument. The latest comments now sit beside the newest post and update every minute. The Open Thread has its own line under the menu. A “Most discussed” row shows where the debate has been hottest over the last 30 days.

Further down, the archive opens by subject, with a search box, so older posts are easy to find. The writers have a section of their own. The look stays plain and text-first.

Our new line: The Indian Subcontinent Argues with Itself. A lot of thought went into each specific word of that tagline.

If something looks broken, or you miss something from the old site, please tell me in the comments or by email.

— X.T.M

Four days

Kargil, 1999, ran two months, and India kept its aircraft on its own side of the Line of Control the whole time. Balakot, 2019, was a day and a dogfight. Sindoor, May 2025, was four days, and on the fourth Washington and Riyadh were on the phone to both capitals. Each side claims it stopped when it chose to, and each side stopped.

The stopgaps are nuclear, then American, then Gulf: Washington does not want a nuclear crisis, and the Gulf pays Pakistan’s bills and buys Desi labour. Q’s model of the next war, days of strikes and then a ceasefire, is also how India’s deputy army chief described Sindoor afterwards: staying ahead on the escalation ladder while preventing a full-scale war.

Q claims the alliances shone through in Sindoor, that Turkey and China stood up and accordingly there was pressure to deescalate? Nobody needs an ally for four days however one seems to need them for the fifth.

1971: the ally that turned up and the one that didn’t

Did Pakistan have no real allies in 1971? What about the US carrier group (the Seventh Fleet), Jordan’s Starfighters, Iran’s help, SEATO, CENTO and well the most allied ally?

A US carrier group built around the Enterprise entered the Bay of Bengal in the war’s second week. Nine Jordanian F-104s reached Karachi’s Masroor base, and an Indian MiG-21 shot one down. Iran’s help was conditional. On 8 December the Shah told the Americans he would not send Iranian aircraft or pilots, because of the treaty India had signed with Moscow; he would not risk the Soviets.

He offered instead to cover Jordan with two Iranian squadrons so that Jordan could lend Pakistan its Starfighters, and Nixon and Kissinger agreed, one step away. China did nothing.

Did any of this save Pakistan from dismemberment? The war lasted thirteen days, and Dacca fell before any of it could matter. The Enterprise arrived and did not fire. The 1965 embargo had hit both sides, and it hurt the side flying American aircraft more.

India had one treaty, signed with Moscow in August 1971, four months before the war. It bought three Soviet vetoes in the Security Council, on 4, 5 and 13 December, a shadow on the Enterprise, and the Shah’s aircraft staying at home. That is the whole case for allies in a short war: they buy time at the UN and keep the other side’s friends at sea.

Pakistan’s partners sent aircraft and a fleet that changed nothing; India’s one treaty changed the Security Council and kept Iran out. Only one kind mattered, and it mattered for thirteen days.

The proof is in the (Pakistani) pudding

Q’s strongest case is the year Pakistan has had. In February the United States and Israel went to war with Iran. Pakistan stayed neutral, condemned the strikes and the Iranian answer alike, and by April Iran’s ambassador was saying Tehran would talk in Pakistan and nowhere else. The ceasefire of 8 April was Islamabad’s. The talks of 11 and 12 April were in Islamabad’s Serena Hotel, ran twenty-one hours and failed; the memorandum that came out of them is, this week, back on the table. Trump called Munir and Sharif extraordinary men.

The Saudi agreement of September 2025 said aggression against one is aggression against both. In August, in Mecca, Turkey signed on: attack on one, attack on all. The text has not been published, no mechanism for a military response has been announced, and neither the Turkish nor the Pakistani parliament has ratified it.

Then the Houthis, who now hold Mokha and islands in the Red Sea, began hitting Saudi Arabia. On 10 September Islamabad said no immediate response was under consideration. On 26 September the three countries’ military chiefs met in Riyadh. On 29 September, in Rome, Asif said Pakistan would defend Saudi Arabia by whatever means were available, that any enemy of Saudi Arabia is an enemy of Pakistan, that a secretariat is being set up, and he would not say whether Pakistani jets had already flown. Behind the words there are already several thousand Pakistani troops, a fighter squadron, drones and an air-defence system on Saudi soil, sent by mid-year, and Riyadh put three billion dollars into Pakistan’s reserves in April. Pakistan reinforced Saudi Arabia and did not cross into the war against Iran. That is the line the pact is now being asked to move.

And Pakistan is already fighting a war, with a neighbour barely mentioned in the earlier BP thread. Kabul was bombed on 27 February and the defence minister said open war; Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar brokered an Eid truce; Khost was struck again on 24 September. There are two exceptions to Pakistan’s good neighbourhood, the two states that essentially border it. One of them is a live front with a 2,640-kilometre border.

India’s shelves

Is it true that in a long war nobody would sell India anything, not even Russia? SIPRI’s March report says India bought 40 per cent of its arms from Russia over 2021 to 2025, down from 72 per cent a decade earlier, with France at 29 per cent and Israel at 15. Imports fell 4 per cent; domestic output reached ₹1.78 lakh crore in the year to March, and the defence minister said most of what flew in Sindoor was Indian-made. Pakistan, by the same report, is the fifth-largest importer in the world, and 80 per cent of what it imports is Chinese. “Nobody sells” cuts both ways. One side has three suppliers who answer to nobody in common. The other has one.

The Indian army is short about 1.8 lakh soldiers, the first Agnipath batch walks out this winter, and the services are asking to keep half of them instead of a quarter. The air force flies about thirty fighter squadrons against a sanctioned forty-two. SIPRI itself lists India’s pending orders, up to 140 combat aircraft from France and six submarines from Germany, and calls that a probably increasing reliance on foreign suppliers.

And on the northern border India has, in its own deputy chief’s phrase, two adversaries on one border: during the DGMO calls in May, he said, Pakistan was getting live inputs on Indian deployments from China. Beijing’s foreign ministry said it did not know how that allegation came about. Beijing also reopened three trade passes with India in August after six years, and Indian politicians said the same month that the PLA had walked into Arunachal. Both are true. China would rather use Pakistan to cause pain, the general said, than fight on its own frontier. Which is Q’s point in an Indian uniform. China has no need to mobilise while it can inform.

The broader Global Contours

Can the Gulf roll Pakistan’s loans forever? Has China gone quiet on CPEC, and might it hand Gwadar back? India’s equivalent, possibly, is a trade deal with Washington that has been a framework since February and is still unsigned, with Goyal in Milwaukee this week calling it almost done; an EU agreement concluded in January and now before the Council for signature; a BRICS presidency; and a border trade with Beijing that reopened while Beijing’s soldiers moved.

In a sense Pakistan remains the region’s Israel: an ideological nation, an outlier among neighbours whose borders imperial powers drew. However, Israel and Pakistan drew, and demanded, their own borders.

P’s Kitchen, describes itself as “Pakistani Hindu Food” with Fifty-five posts & 8,356 followers. The bio says “Vegetarian Pakistani & Sindhi-inspired recipes” and “One bite of home“, then “DM for Collaboration“. The recipes are Sindhi vegetarian.

Rarity is value on the feed. A Hindu in Pakistan is rare, and a Jew in Iran is rarer. People want to see how they live and what they cook, because they cannot see it anywhere else. Nearly all of Pakistan’s Hindus live in Sindh, most of them rural, many of them Dalit, and they are not on the feed. However the Marathi Karachi family with a five-foot Ganpati is. Pakistani Hindus seem to present as Pakistanis in accent and appearance, a Marathi in Karachi codes very differently to a Marathi in Bombay.

The exotic Persian Jew

About 9,000 Jews remain in Iran. They keep synagogues in Tehran and a reserved seat in the Majles, and they carry an identity in permanent tension with the state, which is why they are so fascinating? More than 200,000 Israelis are of Iranian Jewish descent, most of them born in Israel. There they are counted as Mizrahim, a word that also covers the Iraqi Jew and the Moroccan Jew.

Leave the Motherland (Iran) and you become an assimilated category in the Fatherland (Israel) or across the Ocean (US). Stay back in Fars and you remain a story that people will be compelled to watch.

The Hindus of Indus

The same rule holds in the Subcontinent. The Sindhi Hindu who crosses to India becomes a Sindhi; India wrote a citizenship law in 2019 partly for them. In Karachi they stay a Pakistani Hindu, and the feed delicately teases out the difference. The tension in the identity is what draws eyeballs in this attention economy.

What is the tension? Pakistani Hindus are likely Sindhi before they are anything else. Their language is the one the state kept provincial while it made Urdu national (presumably Pakistani Hindus are now the most Urdu-fluent Hindus in the world).

The constitution gives the state a religion, and it is not theirs, in the same document that promises them equal rights. They go to Sehwan for Lal Shahbaz Qalandar and to Hinglaj for the goddess, and their Muslim neighbours call her Nani Pir and the walk to her Nani ka Hajj. They live inside a contradiction that a camera can see. Cross the border and the contradiction becomes a fossilised heritage.

In a globalised world

The whole world is buying one Western product. Everyone uses the same app and writes the same captions (which is why BP, a blog, is a holdover from a very different age of the Internet). The feed is free without limit, and freedom without limit ends in sameness, because everyone on it wants the exact same thing. They want to feel something, and they want to be loved (from living creatures not artificial). The technology runs on that and on nothing else. When anyone can be an author, the only scarce good is what is genuinely novel.

Maslow put need at the bottom of his pyramid and left the top drawer open for status acquisition. The viewer scrolling a Karachi Ganpati at midnight has climbed past need. What rules them now is want, and the paradox of the human condition is that want is never met. Modernity promised that freedom began where need ended. It found deep appetite and hunger there instead (will we find God through technology?). The Pakistani Hindu, for as long as they stay a troubling paradox, is one of the things the internet wants to consume, package and present to a hungry audience (a half Jamaican half Sri Lankan presents Jamaican curry goat biryani).

Editor’s Note — Between the lines, Ghalib and more

September Eleven — The pivotal event of the 21st century by Anjum Altaf

Legends of a Guru — A memoir of Dr. K. M. Ashraf by Harbans Mukhia

Peshawar Diary — A visit to the city recalled by Sohail Kizilbash

Giving Voice to Silence — A human tragedy on the Pak-Afghan border compiled by Saba Gul Khattak and Noreen Naseer

A few interesting issues that have come up in the last few days:

The drama with Tata Sons and Tata Trusts. Such a tragedy that after Ratan Tata, not a single titan left to steer the ship.

The political drama surrounding the unfortunate suicide of the IITB student has now brought RaGa in.

The never ending US Iran conflict is putting more pressure on India. This will have a domino effect on Indian energy needs. How much worse is this going to get? Will only the mid-term elections bring relief to the US and the rest of the world from the crazy dictator called Trump?

What’s cooking between Trump and Xi?

Why Apple picked Google over OpenAI? The law shows up everywhere! And a counterpoint: AI will not kill us…

Bezos Earth fund is committing 25 Million USD more towards ocean conservation. Step in the right direction.

The next generation of pilgrims that have set foot in America, the Hindu Americans. How is an increasingly xenophobic United States dealing with its newest immigrants?

For instance, there is an oft repeated theme about – why Arab armies tend to lose wars. It is true that Arabs have either lost or stalemated every modern battle they have been involved in (post say 1918) with a non Arab power.

Given the truism, there is a little hop skip and jump to be had trying to explain it using Arab culture.

It gives the impression of being very learned about international affairs, a revelatory observational expose for your edification.

There is this famous article…

https://americandiplomacy.web.unc.edu/2000/12/why-arabs-lose-wars-fighting-as-you-train-and-the-impact-of-culture-on-arab-military-effectiveness/

And recently I saw this, which feels to be a bit of a rehash of the first one, but possibly has arrived at the same conclusions independently.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-216723035

However, all the so called -ve qualities attributed to Arab culture, which I am sure most western readers would nod their heads and sing along to, can be found in a Japanese corporate office.

Saving face, extreme subordination, overriding authority of the boss, innovation discouragement, information hoarding for fear of speaking out. It is all there. Even the rote memorisation is a key aspect of Japanese education. Anyone who has tried to learn Kanji will understand the sheer mindless tedium involved.

And yet, this seems completely absurd, because the Japanese achieved a spectacular degree of modern military success, punching well above their weight class until the Atomic bomb knockout.

Conversely the Houthis are very Arab, and socially identical to the Saudis, (except for the Shia/Sunni variance). And yet, despite heavy international sanctions and no viable extractive exports, this militia on a shoestring budget repeatedly humbles the worlds largest arms importer.

It has come to the point where the Saudis are desperate and the US & Nato allies are now quite visibly gearing up to engage in a kinetic campaign against the Houthis.

So given the bias of western analysts, and my own inability to find reasons why the Arabs fare so badly in general vs non Arab states, I wanted to pose the question here.

I will observe that the most successful outfits have been Hezbollah and Houthis, both Shia militia, punching well above their weight, and did so before linking up closely with the Iranians.

* This sort of curve fitting analysis is often at the heart of many articles, like why Asians are good at math, and why the Indian economy underperformed for so long. They feel true because they are often tautological.

The iPhone. A Dalit with an iPhone 16 has purchasing power. That is not nothing; it is also not the end of caste. Capitalism welcomes the customer long before the marriage column or the rental listing does, because selling to someone costs the seller no status. On Monday I wrote about the tragic death of Sahil Wakode at IIT Bombay. I had chosen a picture that cropped in his iPhone 16; unintentional, as I simply try to put a header picture on every post. It did not protect him, and whether caste followed him into that exam hall is now a question for the Crime Branch. Caste did not end with urbanisation; it transformed from the visible to the invisible.

Babur. RNJ shared an interesting tweet by a Pakistani girl who was asked by her Uzbek and Central Asian friends why Pakistanis are so Hinduphobic. The question was sincere. Babur was one of their own, they love him, and they are totally in line with India.

The claim that Arabs, Turks, or whoever can read Persian may speak for Indo-Muslim culture dies on one fact: Babur’s descendants are not in the old world. They are in South Asia. The centre of that civilisation is Lahore and Lucknow, not Ferghana.

As the Commentariat know, I’m in my own hyper-Hindufication stage, but I can clearly see that I have swapped the Islamicate for the Persianate.

The Indo-Persian Twinning. The Indo-Islamic experience was not built by the Turkic invasions alone; it is also the synthesis of native converts. Urdu is the proof: not Turkish or Arabic parked on Indian soil, but converts taking Hindi and making it their own, Perso-Arabic ornament on an Indian frame. What Noor Jehan shows is the same machinery in music: the gharana, synthesis organised into a family line. And Bhakti would not stay on one side of the line. Kabir the weaver was claimed by Hindus and Muslims at his death, and his namesake in our comments keeps the musical habit alive.

Omar’s caveat. Omar put it plainly in his Shahab Ahmed review: the zone from the Balkans to Bengal did not change religion by magic; it was conquered. There is a settler-colonial strand in the Indo-Muslim experience, and I understand why he names it. But conquest is the first chapter, not the book. The rest is synthesis, and conquerors cannot do synthesis alone; only converts who buy in wholeheartedly can (as Shawkat mentions, even his grandpapa, who was a Haji, essentially ran the town).

English, in real time. The same process is running now, in the open, between English and every South Asian language. The difference between the post-colonial and the neo-colonial is that the hegemon still radiates its culture, asymmetrically.

I have not been following the Middle East, but Indo has written a clever piece, Dune or Doom, on the Saudis. Every time I go to write about it here, I think of Sereno, who had very strong opinions of the Middle East. It is just one of those things.

memento mori

Addendum

Sons Are Not Sold in Shops

My Urdu teacher turned this week’s class into a Noor Jehan seminar, and the seminar kept turning into caste.

Two voices carry Pakistan abroad, he said: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Noor Jehan. People like that are born once in a long while. But to understand where the second one came from, he took me to a Punjabi community called the Mirasi, from miras, inheritance. Their old work was to be other families’ memory. They kept your genealogy when you yourself had forgotten it, your father’s name, his father’s, his father’s, and they entertained: song, dance, recitation, comic verse. After the British, the other functions withered and the singing stayed, because weddings had spread to every town and every house in Punjab, and weddings need singers. Every city and village had its Mirasis.

Naseebo Lal comes from a Mirasi family; Noor Jehan rose out of that world, though her life ran its own course. The gossip that still trails her came caste-flavoured, he said: such people are not khandani, show them money and they will do anything. The caste that kept everyone else’s lineage was told it had none.

And yet all Punjab carries her songs, young and old alike; remixed, resung, a world-record songbook nobody has managed to forget.

Then 1965. The fighting was on the border and Radio Pakistan needed morale. The story as he told it: word went about that India would simply buy Pakistan’s soldiers; the country was new, and some wanted to go back. Sufi Tabassum wrote her the answer and she sang it. Ae puttar hattan te nahin vikde: sons are not sold in shops; you are searching the wrong bazaar.

Sufi and Noor asked theirs sons and soldiers if they did not give our lives for Pakistan then, then when? The despised rememberers ended up holding a nation’s memory. Miras, doing its work.

The accounts split. The institute says the invigilator, Prof Suryanarayana Doolla, followed Senate-approved procedure, that no disciplinary action was begun, and that the instructor and head of department counselled the boy and assured him his career would not suffer. Students and the family say he was threatened with suspension, and the father’s police complaint alleges three months of casteist remarks. An FIR now names Doolla and other senior officials for abetment of suicide and under the SC/ST Act, whose Section 18A lets police register the FIR without a preliminary enquiry. The Faculty Forum has expressed solidarity with him. About 700 students blocked the main gate.

Take IIT Bombay’s own version at face value: procedure was followed, counsel was given, assurance was offered, and hours later the student was dead. That sequence settles nothing about cause; the Crime Branch must establish what was actually said in that hall. Either the assurance was never given, or it was given and did not land.

FlyDie on South India

The three pillars of caste. Privilege never converged on one varna. Brahmins hold the social pillar, Vaishyas the economic, Shudras the political, and a jati’s rank follows its proximity to each: close to all three makes a Kshatriya, far from all three a Dalit. The Kshatriya is the mediator everyone wants and nobody needs; the Mughals played that part best, and the empire came apart when they stopped.

Varna was always negotiable. The lawbooks rejected one direction of mixed marriage and tolerated the other. Bengal’s Kulin Brahmins wrote jati origin myths to secure their own land grants, and “pure” Kshatriya lineages were invented as needed. The grey areas, he argues, are why caste survived 3,000 years.

Manchus are to China what Mughals are to India. A follow-up to his India-and-China comment. “Han” was a set of practices before it became an ethnicity; Sun Yat-sen, arch Han nationalist, was Hakka. The Yuan never assimilated and lasted barely a century, while the Qing sinicized and endured.

The Deccan blunder. Urban Muslim nobles could be killed and replaced; rural Maratha sardars could not. Aurangzeb’s destruction of the sultanates left the vacuum the Marathas filled. In his verdict, a great general and a bad politician.

What the Mughals took from the land. North India is Vaishnav, he argues, largely through Mughal patronage; even Adityanath’s Nath sect spread on Mughal-era networks. Mughal architecture began at Bayana in Rajasthan, where the chhatri was born from the Nagara mandapa and the Persian canopy.

The environment, not the man. Akbar’s tolerance was no outlier; Ibrahim II of Bijapur ran the same experiment. The conservative turn began in mid-Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb rode the wave rather than made it. Dara was always going to lose.

Quick Review: Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam

Against apologetics. Defending a faith from the outsider’s picture accepts the outsider’s frame; the prior question is whether culture reflects religion or religion reflects culture. Sarmad Kashani, an Armenian-descent Jewish convert who became a fakir, then a yogi, then nothing at all, fits no category the book allows. A Balkans-to-Bengal “Islamic world” cuts non-Muslims off from their own past while making Muslims the foreign other at home.

Parsis, DNA and steppe incursions

How the Rig Veda got written. A king named Sudas, a head priest swapped mid-composition (Vishwamitra out, Vasistha in), and a Battle of Ten Kings won by breaking a dyke; the victory, in his telling, forged the Kuru super-tribe. The fire Agni absorbs from a lake may preserve the memory of a burning Central Asian gas leak.

The Sarasvati was still flowing. The Haryana stretch of the Ghaggar-Hakra kept its Sutlej connection until about 1500 BCE (his source: River and Goddess Worship in India), so the Vedic poets watched a living river decay rather than recalling a dead one. The Indus-side channel had failed a thousand years earlier.

Failing to reject the null. On an Indus-Vedic connection, the evidence keeps failing to reject the null hypothesis. He wanted the link and, as he puts it, learned the hard way that there is little to work with.

Why India will not lose her soul to missionaries

Christianity’s expired advantages. The school-and-hospital edge died when the post-90s economy built better ones, the tribal frontier has closed, and the cult market now belongs to the biggest cult of all, ethnoreligious nationalism. His verdict: a marginal community, useful as a boogeyman.

Mappila means son-in-law. The name once covered Muslim, Jewish and Christian trading communities alike, born of merchants marrying in. The Jewish grandee Joseph Rabban received palaces and a Nair wife from the Chera king.

Kerala’s three-cornered trade. Muslim, Jewish and Christian Mappilas ran the ports of Malabar, Kochi and Travancore while Hindu castes held the politics. Today’s Muslim-Christian friction is Malabar money moving south into Christian territory, class and caste rather than communalism, and he expects migration to break the stalemate as Kerala’s fertility falls.

Religions built for feudalism. The major faiths were designed for a feudal agrarian world, and modern states no longer need to compromise with them. Disillusionment now sorts believers into atheists, the vaguely spiritual, and traditionalists who care more about how religion is practiced than what it believes.

Hinduism was never mostly Brahmanical. Naga cults grew out of monsoon ecology, and Skanda began as a child-devouring Graha. Tantra spread as far as Japan. Bhakti, when it came, was a mercantile movement: merchants financed the sects, and warrior ascetics cleared the highways for them.

How Pakistan Became South Asia’s Reference Muslims

Sanskrit as Medieval Latin. Proto-Indo-Aryan is archaic Latin, Vedic Sanskrit is Classical Latin, Classical Sanskrit is Medieval Latin, and Prakrit is the Vulgar Latin people actually spoke. Classical Sanskrit owed its rise to the Indo-Saka Western Satraps; the Satavahanas preferred Prakrit. His family’s own Ayurvedic lineage ended when a grandaunt fell into a well and his great-grandfather read it as a curse.

Pakistan Punches Above Its Weight. Blame Aligarh.

Appearance is not piety. A third of Indian Muslims told Pew they keep no meat restrictions at all, and Urdu is mother tongue to 4 percent of the country against a 14 percent Muslim share. What reads as rising religiosity is urbanization dissolving caste communities, with religious institutions filling the gap.

Bollywood is Sanskrit theatre. Hindi cinema keeps the Natya Shastra plot shape, tragic middle and dance numbers included: Sanskrit drama in vernacular speech, European camera technique, Indo-Persian costume. Its troubles are inherited forms without the theory behind them, and a Hindi belt too plural to give it a core region.

The hijab as a compromise. Purdah once meant a woman could not sit on the veranda or ride a bicycle; the veil was the conservatives’ bargain that let women out of the house without surrendering authority over them. Banning it turned a fading practice into a symbol of resistance.