Satire or history

“Who funded” and “this needs investigation” are phrases used online to question activists and protests. Pattanaik applied them to Brahmin diet and ended: “So it cannot be Baniya funded.” The post can be read as satire of that method. Whether or not it was meant as satire, its historical claims can be checked.

Two claims that hold

Brahmin diet varies by region

Members of several Brahmin communities eat fish, and some eat meat: Bengali, Odia, Maithil, Kashmiri, Saraswat and Konkani traditions all include fish-eating groups. Vedic ritual included animal sacrifice. Vegetarian norms are prominent among Brahmin communities in Gujarat, Rajasthan, the Tamil and Kannada regions and parts of the Hindi belt. Current practice shows variation; it does not by itself show how old any of these diets are.

Jain accounts describe a royal ban on killing in Gujarat

Jain accounts record that in the twelfth century the Chaulukya king Kumarapala, advised by the Jain scholar Hemachandra, proclaimed amari, a ban on killing animals, across his kingdom. The accounts come from the Jain side. How far the ban was enforced is not known.

Arguments against eating meat long before 1000 AD

Pattanaik’s dating concerns texts that promote a fully vegetarian life. The sources below are of different kinds. None shows all Brahmins changing diet at one moment. Together they show that the argument for abstaining from meat is far older than medieval Gujarat.

The disputed Jain passage

Pattanaik’s reading that early Jain texts allowed meat rests in part on the Bhagavati Sutra (Viyahapannatti 15), in the account of Mahavira’s illness. Revati prepares food described with words that can mean pigeon and rooster. The Indologist Ludwig Alsdorf defended the literal meat reading. Jain commentators since the medieval period have read the words as plant names, a gourd and a citron. The passage is disputed and has been for more than a century. It does not settle Mahavira’s diet, and it does not date the origin of Brahmin vegetarianism either way.

Purity rules and the lion before Islam

Dharmashastra texts classified substances, animals and people as pure or impure centuries before Islam reached Gujarat. Lions are native to Gujarat, where the Gir forest and the surrounding Saurashtra landscape hold the surviving wild Asiatic lions, and the lion is Mahavira’s emblem in Jain iconography. None of this rules out later borrowing in particular cases. It does mean that a Muslim import is not needed to explain the purity rules or the lion.

What the evidence explains, and what it does not

Sanskritisation explains spread, not origin

M. N. Srinivas described Sanskritisation in the 1950s: castes seeking higher status adopt the practices of higher castes, often including vegetarianism. This explains how a prestigious diet spreads, and why diet still marks caste boundaries in everyday life. It does not explain why Brahmins in some regions adopted it first.

Competition with Buddhism and Jainism

Brahmanical traditions competed with Buddhism and Jainism for royal and merchant patronage over many centuries, and both of those religions made non-violence central. That is a plausible pressure on Brahmin practice. The sources used here do not establish whether it explains the regional pattern, and the ancient texts above do not measure it.

What the sources establish

Diet is now argued over as a marker of national identity: meat called foreign by one side, vegetarianism called an import by the other. Indian arguments for abstaining from meat predate Islam and Hemachandra. The sources do not identify one moment when all Brahmins changed diet, or one sponsor. Regional practice, religious teaching, patronage and status imitation are separate mechanisms, and each needs its own evidence.

Since then: the goddess and the flies

Pattanaik has stayed on the subject. Three posts since the one I answered above:

The goddess column makes the same argument as the Brahmin post, with the goddess in place of the priest. In Konkan, Gauri comes home after Ganesh and is fed fish or mutton by Koli, Agari and Maratha households. In Bengal, Uma comes home for four days, goats were once killed before her in the old houses, and on Dashami she is sent off with fish and rice. A daughter eats what the house eats. Against this he sets Vaishno Devi of the Trikuta hills, a maiden who hates meat and liquor; both belong to her enemy Bhairon Nath, the disciple of Gorakhnath. He then gives two Jain stories: in Jinasena’s Harivamsa Purana of 783 CE, Durga’s blood cult begins when hunters find a tiger has eaten a Jain nun and conclude that the goddess wants blood; at Osian in Rajasthan, the monk Ratnaprabhasuri gives Chamunda a heap of sweets, she gives up the buffalo and becomes Sachiya Mata, the vegetarian clan goddess of the Oswal Jains. His explanation is the purse. Marwari and Gujarati families, Jain and Vaishnava, paid for the marble, the feeding halls and the trusts; “once the purse comes into their hands, the goat is taken away.” His text is the Devi Bhagavata Purana, 3.26, where verses 30 and 31 prescribe fruit for Navaratri and verses 32 to 34 open a second path: animals offered to the goddess go to heaven, and the killing counts as non-violence. A popular modern Hindi translation, he says, folds those verses into one line about fruit.

I checked what I could. Swami Vijnanananda’s translation of 3.26 reads as he says: “Those who eat meat, they can sacrifice animals in this worship of the Devi; and, for this purpose, goat and wild boars are the best”, the animals “attain to unending heavens”, and “in all the Sastras … this killing of animals in a sacrifice is considered as non-killing.” Chapter 27 adds that “payasa and fresh fish are to be specially offered”. Two menus, both lawful, as he says. One correction: the chapter names goat and wild boar; the buffalo is his addition. The Harivamsa story, the Osian story and the 956 CE inscription at Osian are as he gives them, though I read the Harivamsa in summary, not in the original. The Shrine Board’s own account of the Vaishno Devi legend names Bhairon as “a disciple of Guru Gorakhnath”, so that outline is the shrine’s own. The fish sent off with Durga on Dashami is well attested in Bengal; for Konkan his source is his own 2015 column on the Kolis of Mumbai.

The flies post holds too. All six verses he cites read as he says in Griffith’s translation: the fly that eats the raw flesh of the sacrificed horse, whose share goes to the gods (1.162.9); the men who wait for their portion of the cooked horse (1.162.12); the honey-bee that sang to the Ashvins (1.119.9); worshippers “like flies on honey” around Indra (7.32.2); the fifteen or twenty bullocks cooked for Indra (10.86.14); the horses, bulls, oxen and rams offered to Agni (10.91.14).

What is not shown is the same as before: a date and a sponsor. He dates the spread of the Vaishno Devi story to the twentieth century, through the Arya Samaj, BAPS, calendar art and cassettes, and gives no source; he concedes that the age of the written legend is unknown. The Hindi translation that drops the three verses is not named, so I could not check it. The purse mechanism is documented at Osian and plausible elsewhere, but he gives no second case with dates and accounts. The texts show two traditions side by side for a very long time, and the richer one setting the menu wherever it paid for the temple. That is the finding of the Brahmin post as well.

What the letter says

The statement makes five points. Indian democracy has held for seven decades with working institutions and peaceful transfers of power. Election denial, attacks on constitutional bodies and a preference for “street over Sansad” now threaten it. The armed forces have been pulled into partisan debate. Doubt about democracy has been sown by “weaponizing sub-judice matters” and amplified on the streets by “anarchist forces”. Dissent is essential, but differences should be resolved “through debate, discussion, dialogue and dissent under the roof of constitutional institutions.”

It names no authors and no organisation. It lists no demands.

Who is asked to sign

The form asks for a name, a university email, the university attended and the year of graduation. The intended signatory is a graduate living outside India. Most of them do not vote in Indian elections; overseas Indians can register but must be physically present in their constituency to cast a ballot.

What Ambedkar said in 1949

The letter’s authority is Ambedkar’s closing speech to the Constituent Assembly on 25 November 1949, the source of the phrase “grammar of anarchy”. The passage is worth reading whole, because it is aimed at a specific target.

The grammar of anarchy

Ambedkar said that once constitutional methods for achieving social and economic ends exist, “there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods.” He then named them: “the bloody methods of revolution”, and “the method of civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha.” Those, he said, “are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.”

Civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha were Gandhi’s methods. Ambedkar was asking the new republic to retire the Congress movement’s own toolkit. A letter that quotes the phrase against protesters is quoting a man who meant it against the founding party as much as against anyone else.

The second warning: hero-worship

The same speech carries a second warning, less often quoted. Ambedkar said that in politics “bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship”, and that Indians were more prone to it than any other people. He warned a third time that political democracy would not last without social democracy: liberty, equality and fraternity as “a way of life”. The letter quotes the first warning and not the other two.

The street has written Indian law before

The letter treats “street” and “Sansad” as rivals. The record shows them working in sequence: a movement outside, a law or a verdict inside.

Each of these began outside Parliament. Each ended inside an institution. The Emergency is the exception that proves the sequence: it was the institutions, not the street, that suspended the Constitution.

What the letter gets right

Three things. Peaceful transfers of power have held since 1977, including in 2004 and 2014 when the losing side had reason to contest. Institutions do erode when every result is called stolen; that is the lesson of other democracies this decade. And a movement that lives on social media has to show it can also live inside a legislature, a point the July posts on the Cockroach movement made before the Delhi lockdown.

What it does not settle

“Sub-judice matters.” The protests concern the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls. The scale of deletions is contested, and the letter does not give a number. It calls raising the dispute “weaponizing” it. Whether the deletions were lawful is the question in dispute, not a premise the letter can assume.

Who speaks. A graduate abroad asking voters at home to stay off the street is making a request that costs the signatory nothing. The letter does not address that asymmetry.

The armed forces. The letter says the forces have been drawn into partisan debate but does not say by whom. Without that, the sentence can be read either way.

Sansad itself. The letter asks for debate in Parliament. It does not say what happens when Parliament does not sit on the question, or passes a law in minutes, as it did when it repealed the farm laws in 2021 without discussion.

Where this leaves the argument

Ambedkar’s speech supports the letter on one point and undercuts it on two. It does condemn unconstitutional methods once constitutional ones exist. It also condemns hero-worship and warns that a constitution without social democracy will not hold. Indian practice since 1949 has not followed his advice on the first point, and the laws listed above are the result. The question the letter raises is real: where does a constitutional method end and an unconstitutional one begin? The answer in Indian history has been settled case by case, usually by a court, after the street had already moved.

The statement in full

The text below is “Spare India from Anarchy” as it appeared on the signature form, which has since closed. The form opened with: “We, Indian-origin academics, students, and alumni of universities outside India offer this statement out of deep concern for the troubling developments in India. If you wish to express your support for this statement, please complete this form to add your name as a signatory.”

In the seven decades since independence, Indian democracy has proved its resilience repeatedly. Institutions have flourished, checks and balances have functioned admirably, and peaceful transition of power has remained an enduring hallmark. Unfortunately, a frenzy of election denial, relentless questioning of constitutional institutions, and a preference for ‘street over Sansad’ has gripped certain quarters. Unfavourable election outcomes have led to questions of procedural integrity. Adverse judgements have provoked unfortunate commentary on judicial independence. Even the most apolitical institution in the country – the Armed Forces – has been gratuitously and unjustly entangled in partisan discourse.

An unconscionable and devious plan of sowing seeds of doubt in Indian democracy has been hatched by weaponizing sub-judice matters, which is then amplified on the streets by leaning on anarchist forces, which have historically and philosophically never believed in constitutional form of governance. All in the name of saving democracy. We remain amazed at the irony of all. But more importantly, as informed people who have stakes in the future of this country and travel the world identifying as ‘Indians,’ we are deeply anguished at this state of affairs.

Dr. BR Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian constitution, warned posterity of this scenario. He exhorted that for India to survive as a constitutional republic, we must ‘hold fast to constitutional methods… abandon the bloody methods of revolution [which are] the grammar of anarchy.’ Increasingly, anarchy is becoming an expression of choice – ready to supplant the spirit and wisdom of fraternité.

As concerned global citizens, we express our solidarity with democratic forces globally and reject perverse, regressive means to achieve narrow, self-serving ends. We understand dissent is an essential ingredient of democracy, but we refuse to be silent spectators to the subversion of democratic apparatus in its guise.

We urge all social and political forces to take cognizance of our distress and desires and resolve differences through debate, discussion, dialogue and dissent under the roof of constitutional institutions that our venerable founding fathers created for us. India needs to set an example for the democratic world, for all the right reasons. We hope wisdom will prevail.

Gandhi built the nation, not the state

From lawyers’ club to mass movement

Before 1915 the Indian National Congress was a debating society for lawyers. By 1920 it was a mass movement of peasants who had learned to resist together. That is Gandhi’s work more than anyone else’s.

It is the Hindu belief that a mind with supreme self control attains the capability of changing reality. Gandhiji is the physical embodiment of that. The metaphor made real.

Indosaurus, on the Gandhi Jayanti thread

Nehru’s design, Patel’s map, Ambedkar’s constitution

The state is somebody else’s. Modern India is a centralised parliamentary republic, run in English, with a standing army, a civil service and a district collector. It is Nehru’s design, Patel’s map and Ambedkar’s constitution.

Village republics, reduced to Article 40

Gandhi wanted village republics and a minimal state. The Constituent Assembly gave the panchayat one line among the directive principles, Article 40, and built everything else on the opposite plan. Then it put his face on the money.

Why no party can hold Gandhi

• The BJP cannot claim the man whose last fast, in January 1948, was for the safety of Delhi’s Muslims.
• Congress cannot claim him, because it built Nehru’s state, not his.
• The left cannot, because he defended varna.
• The Ambedkarites cannot, because of the 1932 Poona Pact, where his fast against separate electorates forced Ambedkar’s hand.

That last objection is the serious one. It says moral coercion is still coercion, and the Depressed Classes paid for it. The opposite view holds that no party has dropped Gandhi, his portraits stay up whoever governs, he is simply no longer the only god in the state’s pantheon.

The colonial state was inherited, not overthrown

What was never settled

France and America settled their internal balance of power through real conflict. India put moral pressure in its place, so the colonial state’s machinery passed intact to native elites. Partition was a different kind of rupture. The question is whose interests nationalism never touched.

That is right about the inheritance. The republic of 1950 kept the Police Act of 1861, sedition, preventive detention and the collector. None of it was discarded. It was debated, kept and transferred. The redistribution never happened.

Would a revolution have done better?

Revolutions usually hand the machinery to whoever wins them, sharpened. What Gandhi did redistribute was the habit of refusal: peasants, women and the poor learned they could say no to a government and be counted.

A hard state in Gandhian cover

That habit did not settle the balance of power. It made the state feel it had to pretend to be good. Shekhar Gupta calls India a hard state in Gandhian cover.

The masses follow the earnest reading of gandhism and the state runs it’s own playbook with the earned legitimacy from that narrative.

girmit, on the Gandhi Jayanti thread

Pakistan bombs Afghanistan: the Raj’s frontier policy

Kunar and Helmand, 30 September

Pakistani jets hit Kunar and Helmand on the night of 30 September, another round in a conflict both sides have called open war since February. The Taliban say nine civilians died; the UN mission says at least ten, most of them children. Islamabad says it hit 22 militants; the UN mission counts over 1,100 civilian deaths and injuries in Afghanistan from cross-border violence this year. Pakistan’s foreign minister warned Kabul on 3 October not to let its territory be used for attacks, and took the dispute to the Moscow-format meeting on 5 October. No talks between the two governments are scheduled. Naam de Guerre asked what the strategy is; 0M-3 answered that it is the British one.

The same playbook since 1919

When the ground war failed in 1919, the British bombed the tribes, and few Pashtuns have accepted the Durand Line since. Pakistan inherited the line, the method and the problem. It is now fighting, in slow motion, a government it spent decades helping into power. What is the exit?

Governor’s rule in the Frontier, 11 October

On 11 October President Zardari, on the prime minister’s advice, declared a state of emergency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and imposed governor’s rule, citing the provincial government’s failure to ensure security. Chief Minister Sohail Afridi, the assembly speaker and several ministers were taken into what the interior ministry calls preventive custody, a week into PTI’s long march. Governor Faisal Karim Kundi now runs the province with an eleven-member advisory council. Direct rule over the Frontier from the centre is older than Pakistan.

Delhi bans protest in the capital

The Cockroach rally and the lockdown, 10 to 13 October

The Cockroach Janta Party called a rally in Delhi for 10 October to demand that the chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, resign over the Special Intensive Revision of the voter rolls, which has removed more than 130 million names. The government sealed the capital with thousands of police, suspended travel and telecom links, detained the party’s founder at the airport and, by the party’s count, thousands of supporters. Some 600 were arrested in Mumbai. Former chief ministers Mamata Banerjee, Arvind Kejriwal and Pinarayi Vijayan were detained for a time. The leaders were released on 11 October and on 12 October the opposition marched to the Supreme Court with a petition against the Election Commission. On 13 October the prime minister called India the mother of democracy; the UN human rights office raised the mass detentions, and Germany’s finance minister cancelled the India leg of his Asia trip, citing current developments. The rule now is the one Islamabad has long kept: protest all you like in the provinces, but not in the capital.

The Raj’s machinery against the Mahatma’s method

Here the two halves meet. Dharna is Gandhi’s own method. Its critics say it has become a way to hold the country to ransom.

…dharnabaazi has become a playbook for those wanting to cause mischief.

Agni, on the Gandhi Jayanti thread

A country whose characteristic political excess is sitting down and refusing to eat has been lucky in its founder. A government that bans the sitting down in its capital is afraid of something. However, a party built on mocking the prime minister is not yet a party.

The flydubai FZ1073 attack: vetting, not suspicion

What happened on the flight

On 30 September the Omani co-pilot of flydubai FZ1073, Dubai to Tel Aviv, attacked the Indian captain, Smit Machchhar, with the crash axe. Investigators say he tried to bring the aircraft down. The captain, with crew and passengers, stopped him, and the flight landed at Tabuk. The UAE attorney general now says it was a premeditated plot to fly the aircraft into the passenger terminal at Ben Gurion. Oman had reportedly barred the co-pilot, Hamam Al-Hammami, from flying over extremist views; flydubai’s own checks showed nothing. The captain is recovering in hospital in Abu Dhabi. Trump has suggested an Iranian link without giving details, Iran calls the incident staged, and the UAE has not linked Iran to it.

Should passengers know a pilot’s religion?

Archer raised the question on the thread after friends began ringing airlines to ask. Disclosure would put every Muslim pilot on trial to catch one man the system should have caught.

The RBI raises rates: paying for other people’s wars

On 7 October the Reserve Bank of India raised the repo rate by 25 basis points, to 5.50%, its first rise since 2023, and changed its stance to calibrated tightening. It points to tighter money in the US and to food and fuel prices pushed up by the war in West Asia. On 12 October the September figures came in: inflation 5.54%, the highest since October 2024, with food at 7.74%. Core inflation was 4.2% in August. ICRA expects another rise in December.

Most of this is imported inflation, not overheating, though the core number says some of it is home-grown. India is paying for other people’s wars at the petrol pump, and the RBI has chosen to pay early.

Will India’s engineers come home?

US visa limits, led by the $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions, have revived the old question; formerly brown asked it on the thread. India needs deep tech; what it will get first is what pays, and what pays in India is still logistics and payments. Deep tech follows capital, and capital follows the first exits.

The state can build the roads, the ports and the digital rails. It cannot decree a Bell Labs.

Smaller items

Why Gandhi is still worth having

Kabir made the case on the thread: whatever his faults, Gandhi led the non-cooperation movement, went to jail for it, and much of the goodwill India had abroad came from him; Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela claimed him as an inspiration. Nobody governs by the Sermon on the Mount either. The point of Gandhi is not that South Asia follows him. It is that its states still feel they have to pretend to, and the pretence is the only check some of them have.

Judge him as a man of Dharma, not a man of state.

A note from the back end. Since the new look went up, I have been wrestling with the machinery behind the site:

• Speed for writers. Pages are fast for readers, who get a saved copy, but slow for anyone logged in, and some writers have hit 502 errors while posting. I am giving the server more memory and a bigger cache. The rest needs the host.
• The login link. Writers could not find it. It is now at the foot of every page.
• Bots. Thousands of fake accounts had signed up over the years. Registration is closed and the security plugin now does less busywork.
• The archive. Over 4,000 posts, back to the Blogger years, refiled with subjects, places, tags and short summaries, so old essays can be found again.
• Counting. A small reader counter of my own, so I can see what people actually read and click, without handing the data to anyone else.

One thing the counter has already shown me: the readers and the commenters want completely different things. Most readers arrive from search for the old genetics and ancestry posts. The commenters, fewer than one in a hundred readers, hunt for the esoteric: Gandhi’s fasts, whether Pakistan is more than “not India”, the long arc of history. I find that fascinating, and I am not sure yet what to do with this cleft. As I mentioned to Agni, do I write for the Readership, or the Commentariat or myself?

The last thread, Open Thread: Gandhi Jayanti, stays open.

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.

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?