We do not think the two are equivalent in cruelty. We think they are equivalent in structure.

No Hindu Equivalent to Zia.

There is no Hindu-nationalist equivalent of Zia ul-Haq’s Hudood Ordinances of 1979, which for decades made a raped woman’s complaint the raw material of a charge against her. There is no Hindu-nationalist equivalent of the Qanun-e-Shahadat of 1984, under which, in certain documentary and financial matters, two women’s testimony is required to equal one man’s. Pakistan partially repaired the first in 2006. The second stands.

That is statutory. It is one-sided. Anyone who tells you the two flags are the same is lying to you, and we are not going to.

What follows is about something else.

I. Two Patriarchies.

By the Crescent we mean the political and clerical claim to speak for Muslims. By the Trident we mean the political project that claims to speak for Hindus, which is to say the RSS and the organisations of its family, together with the mobs and the caste panchayats that act in its idiom. We use the trishul as shorthand and we do so with a warning label, because Shiva’s weapon became a party symbol only when the VHP handed it out, and lifting a god’s iconography to name a political movement is precisely the trick this essay exists to expose. The same warning attaches to Kinder, Küche, Kirche, which we take from Wilhelmine Germany to describe the Crescent’s position and which fits it too well to be safe.

The Crescent states its position plainly. A woman’s sphere is the home, and her titles are daughter, wife, mother. Because it is stated, it can be argued with.

The Trident never states its position, and so it passes for progress. Saffron discourse does not seclude women. It claims them. In September 2013 the mahapanchayats of Muzaffarnagar mobilised under bahu-beti bachao, save our daughters-in-law and our daughters, and sixty people died and fifty thousand were displaced. The slogan is not decoration on that violence. It is the engine. Once a woman is our daughter, an injury to her is an injury to us, and the remedy belongs to us.

Consider what this produced. Bilkis Bano was twenty-one and pregnant when a Hindu mob gang-raped her and killed fourteen of her family, among them her three-year-old daughter. Eleven men were convicted. On 15 August 2022 the Gujarat government released them under its remission policy, they were met with sweets, their feet were touched, and a BJP legislator who sat on the panel that approved the release observed that some of the men were Brahmins of good sanskaar. India’s Supreme Court quashed the remission in January 2024 and sent them back.

Bano’s statement, issued through her lawyer, made one observation before it made any other. Nobody had asked her. No one had inquired about her safety or her wellbeing before the decision was taken. Then: “how can justice for any woman end like this?”

II. The Hazrat Khadija test.

The Crescent’s defenders have a list, and we will produce it ourselves rather than let it be produced against us.

Khadija was a merchant who employed the Prophet before she married him. Razia ruled Delhi from 1236. Nur Jahan’s name was struck on imperial coin. Four Begums governed Bhopal in succession for more than a century. In 1905 a Bengali Muslim woman, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, wrote Sultana’s Dream, in which the men are shut in the mardanaand the women run the state, and she wrote it in English, in Bhagalpur, while her husband was alive.

Khadija was a trader in Mecca and she died around 619, before the hijra, before there was an Islamic polity of any kind. The strongest evidence for Islam’s regard for women is a woman formed entirely by the commercial pagan society that Islam replaced.

III. The map does not match the faith.

World Bank figures put female labour force participation across North Africa and the Middle East at 18.7 percent, the lowest of any region on earth, against 28.1 percent for South Asia. That gap is real, it is enormous.

Deniz Kandiyoti’s 1988 paper on the patriarchal bargain drew the belt of what she called classic patriarchy, and it runs from North Africa through the Middle East, across North India, and into China. It does not halt at the Khyber. It crosses the Hindi heartland without slowing. It excludes Muslim Indonesia and Muslim Malaysia. If you want a map of where women in Asia are least free, religion will not draw it. Land tenure, patrilocal marriage, and the clan economics of honour will.

Then there is Bangladesh, ninety percent Muslim, whose female participation reached 44.15 percent in 2024, up from 24.08 percent in 1990. It got there through garments. Export industrialisation put women in factories and paid them.

IV. The female favour.

In 1985 the Supreme Court awarded Shah Bano maintenance from the husband who had divorced her. In 1986 Rajiv Gandhi’s government legislated the judgment away, because the clergy demanded it and Congress wanted the votes. In 2019 the BJP criminalised instant triple talaq, and Muslim women gained a protection they had not held the year before.

Read the two together and something ugly stands up. A secular party sold Muslim women to buy Muslim men. A Hindu-nationalist party defended Muslim women in order to prosecute Muslim men. In neither case was the woman the client. In both she was the instrument.

The 2019 Act was not worthless. It was real. But a right delivered as a weapon can be withdrawn as a weapon, and the woman holding it should know whose hand it is in.

V. The invisible kind.

Now the point on which we part company with almost everyone who writes about this.

Visible patriarchy has an address. Purdah, guardianship, the rule against travelling alone: these are rules, and rules can be struck out. Pakistan’s Aurat March knows exactly what it is marching at, and its placards are legislative documents. Mera jism meri marzi. Khana khud garam kar lo. Lo baith gayi sahi se. Ghar ka kaam, sab ka kaam. Every one of those names a specific man doing a specific thing, and can be answered. The clergy called the march immoral, a National Assembly panel called it the same, and two High Courts declined to ban it. That is what an argument looks like. The Crescent’s patriarchy is the ugly kind, and precisely because it declares itself, it is the kind that can be repealed.

Invisible patriarchy has no address. It lives in the second shift and the marriage market and the unpaid field. You cannot repeal a father-in-law.

Watch it operate inside a statistic. India’s female participation rate has climbed steeply, and this has been reported as an achievement. Meanwhile the share of rural women working in agriculture rose from 71.1 percent in 2018-19 to 76.9 percent in 2023-24, and the new work is largely unpaid or self-employed. The women did not enter the economy. They went back to the family plot. The number counts her. Nobody pays her.

That is why bahu-beti bachao is the more dangerous of the two slogans. Seclusion tells a woman she may not leave the house. Protection tells her there is nothing to leave it for, that the street belongs to men who will avenge her and the home belongs to men who will keep her, and it says this while calling itself her defence. There is no clause to strike down. There is no cleric to name. There is a flag, and it is held by her brother.

VI. Back to Bilks

After the eleven men walked free, Bilkis Bano said she had exhausted her reservoir of courage. She had not. She went back to the court that had freed them and she won.

A red line around misogyny is worth nothing if it is drawn only around the other side’s territory.

The Crescent tells a woman what she may not do. The Trident tells her what she is for. Both are in writing. Only one of them can be repealed.

Neither has ever asked her.

What we heard there over the weekend was a single proposition, stated with varying degrees of anger. The subcontinent is held down by two post-imperial states, each of which inherited the Raj’s administrative logic and neither of which has any intention of loosening it. The languages, the peoples, the small nations inside the big ones are being quietly extinguished. The activists who said this were Baloch, Sindhi, Kashmiri and Punjabi.

We should also say at the outset that this essay is about Pakistan. The two-hegemon frame is the activists’ frame, and we have not necessarily adopted it.

I. Ethnicity versus the Pakistani state.

It is acute in Pakistan, and the reason is not that Pakistan is crueller. It is that Pakistan is more religiously homogeneous, and homogeneity does something specific to identity.

Consider what a Baloch nationalist can now say that he could not have said in 1947. He can say that Balochistan is Muslim. Overwhelmingly, unarguably, to a degree the Pakistani state itself cannot dispute. Religion has been settled. It has been taken off the table. And once religion is off the table it can no longer do any distinguishing work, which means it can no longer do any binding work either.

Ethnicity is not resurgent in Pakistan despite Islam. It is resurgent because Islam has become the floor rather than the ceiling. When everyone is Muslim, being Muslim explains nothing about who governs whom, or who takes the gas revenues out of Sui.

II. The racial contention.

The activists say that ethnicity is a foreign import into Islam, a colonial residue, a European infection. Pakistani officialdom says the same thing from the opposite direction. Ethnic feeling is fitna, divisive, un-Islamic.

The argument is thirteen centuries old and has already been had.

Islam never abolished ethnicity. It repeatedly subordinated it without ever eliminating it, which is a different achievement and a more fragile one. The Umayyad state ran an explicit ethnic hierarchy in which non-Arab converts, the mawali, paid taxes their Arab co-religionists did not. The revolution that destroyed the Umayyads was raised in Khurasan and carried by Persians who had had enough of Arab precedence. The shu’ubiyya of the following century was a literary and political movement of Persians asserting cultural parity, conducted entirely inside Islam, in Arabic, by devout men. The Delhi Sultanate reserved its high offices for a Turkish and Persian slave elite and kept Indian Muslim converts out of them.

The Ottomans came closest to a genuinely supra-ethnic Muslim political identity, and they sustained it for centuries. But their subjects were sorted into millets by confession rather than by blood, which is to say that even the great supra-ethnic empire needed a religious cleavage to organise around, and when that cleavage stopped distinguishing anyone; the Arabs went their own way.

Ethnicity survived contact with the profession of faith every time it was tested. Transcending ethnicity was an aspiration about Muslim politics.

III. What India conceded and Pakistan refused.

Potti Sriramulu starved to death in December 1952 demanding an Andhra state. Nehru gave way. Andhra was created the following year, and the States Reorganisation Act of 1956 redrew the country along linguistic lines. This was widely called a capitulation and a threat to national unity. It was in fact the single most successful act of Indian statecraft after independence. It converted linguistic pride from a secessionist force into a routine mechanism of provincial politics.

Pakistan did the reverse. Jinnah told Dhaka in March 1948 that the state language would be Urdu and only Urdu, in a province where almost nobody spoke it. Students were shot in Dhaka in February 1952 for saying otherwise. In 1955 the western provinces were merged into a single unit, precisely to neutralise Bengali demographic weight.

One state decided that language was administrative. The other decided that language was anti-national. Only one of them still has all its provinces.

IV. Bangladesh.

Bangladesh exists. It is the proof that an ethno-linguistic nation can secede from a post-imperial Muslim hegemon and be recognised, and it is the fact that has quickened residual Pakistani nationalism. Bengal was not lost to Hindu conspiracy. It was lost because the state insisted that Muslimness answered a question that Bengalis (proto-Bangladeshis) were no longer asking.

V. Post-Muslim ethnic activists

The activists believe their identities are being snuffed out. We would put it differently. Their identities are what remain after the state has succeeded at everything it set out to do.

It did not make everyone Muslim. That was never the project, and the state’s most famous religious act was a subtraction rather than an addition. The Second Amendment of 1974 legally unmade the Ahmadis as Muslims, and the ordinance of 1984 criminalised their calling themselves so. What the state pursued was not conversion but the policing of a boundary, and it policed that boundary until Islam became the only politically legible identity in the country.

The pattern is not Pakistani. It is what happens whenever an ideology neutralises one axis of identity and mistakes that for having abolished identity. The Soviet Union manufactured a supra-ethnic Soviet man with more force and more success than any state in history, and then dissolved precisely along the borders of the ethnic republics it had drawn to administer him. Arab nationalism unified the Arabs and left behind Iraqis, Syrians, and Egyptians. In each case the ideology did not fail. It won, and the victory removed the thing that had been holding the next question down.

Ethnicity is not the rival of the ideological state. It is its residue.

The shape of that traffic is more interesting than its size:

• Five readers in six arrive on a phone.
• Close to six in ten come directly, by bookmark, habit or feed: they already meant to be here.
• Organic search brings a further third.
• Social accounts for one visit in fifteen, all of it from Quora.
• Four in a thousand now arrive through the AI answer engines.
• The typical visit lasts a minute and a half and covers just over two pages.

Our most-visited page in search is our notice on Dhurandhar, which sits on the first page of Google for a term several thousand people look up every month. As well as a 2015 piece on Patricia Crone, an old conversation with Edward Luttwak, a note on Rajaji.

Our geographic breakdown is:

🇨🇦 CANADA ████████████████████████ 42%

🇮🇳 INDIA █████████████ 25%

🇺🇸 UNITED STATES ██████ 11%

🇦🇺 AUSTRALIA ████ 8%

🇬🇧 BRITAIN ███ 6%

🌍 OTHER ██ 8%

The numbers say that reader is loyal, numerous, and scattered across continents, which is no small thing to have built.

Part I of this essay took Anuradha Bhasin’s blueprint, cross-border journalism, a shared archive, the arts as empathy machines, and held it against the graveyard of prior attempts: Aman ki Asha, decapitated after 2014; Himal Southasian, strangled in 2016 by withheld paperwork. The open question it ended on was survivability; who funds the structure, and where does it live, such that no single ministry can starve it?

The woman who followed Bhasin to the podium is, conveniently, the field test. Beena Sarwar, Boston-based journalist, documentary filmmaker, journalism teacher, helped run Aman ki Asha from the Jang side through its best years; the campaign’s achievements are credited in large part to her stewardship. She watched it stall. And in March 2021 she co-founded Sapan, the Southasia Peace Action Network, explicitly on the lessons learned, followed in August 2021 by Sapan News, a syndicated features service. The arc from mega-campaign backed by two media conglomerates to volunteer-driven network is not a decline; it is an adaptation to the kill mechanism. Her talk, “Think like a Journalist, Build Peace,” was the day’s answer to its own hardest question.

The minimum common agenda

She opened by walking the room through Sapan’s founding charter, pointedly not, she said, a mass signature campaign but an exercise in building a community, whose “minimum common agenda” runs: soft borders and economic cooperation; visas on arrival, or at least something like them; a commitment to human rights and dignity for all within one’s own borders before pointing fingers across them; and collaboration in every field where it is possible. That third plank is the quietly radical one; a structural ban on whataboutery, written into the founding document. Around 150 organisations across the region and diaspora have endorsed the charter, along with some 800 individuals; academics, journalists, students, artists. Among the endorsing organisations, she noted with a smile, is Mela Nordic itself: the host had signed the guest’s charter before inviting her.

Think like a journalist

The heart of the talk was a catechism, what it actually means to think like a journalist. Know your own position, where you are coming from. Be curious and open. Be observational, not judgmental. Provide facts, not opinion. Verify before sharing. Give the Ws and the H, who, what, when, why, how, with context, not as a laundry list of what happened and what was said. Hear all sides and represent them fairly. Go beyond binaries.

Look for the process behind the event; this conference, she pointed out, was itself months of process wearing the costume of a single day. Look for the nuance. And take the long view. She was candid that this describes the craft’s ideals, not its current practice: “that’s not what we are seeing journalists doing.”

She has carried one slogan with her for years, from the Video Journalism Movement; a Netherlands-based outfit, now defunct, for which she once made a film on Kashmir: there is more than one truth. And she immediately fenced it against relativism with a vernacular example: ek aadmi ka terrorist, doosre aadmi ka hero. Those, she said, are opinions. The fact is the act: this person killed that person; this action was or was not lawful. More than one truth does not mean no facts.

From there, her most useful coinage. In the age of social media, everyone who posts is functioning as a kind of para-journalist, para as in paralegal, paramedic: performing the function without the training, the editorial oversight, or the accountability. She told the story on herself of the Karachi journalist who bristled at the term, the hardworking stringer in a small town, he objected, is a journalist, full stop. She conceded the man and kept the category: it is precisely the absence of institutional scaffolding, not of effort or courage, that the prefix marks.

The ledger she then drew up was scrupulously double-entry. On the credit side, the para-journalist bears witness, surfaces what mainstream media ignores, gives voice to the underrepresented, and holds power to account; Palestine, she noted, being the defining case of a story the legacy press could not have buried in the social-media era. On the debit side: no verification, no context, personal attacks, and above all fuel for the ambient outrage culture in which everyone now lives.

That outrage economy got her sharpest political diagnosis. What do the followings of Imran Khan, Modi, Trump, and Bolsonaro have in common? Each strongman went direct; straight to his constituents, bypassing the filter of editorial oversight, the tiresome discipline of both-sides-and-all-sides. Publics hungry for overnight change meet men promising exactly that, and the tiresome truth, that the wheels of change move slowly, that there is process behind every event, gets no engagement metrics at all.

The brain, amended

Sarwar reached for neuroscience to explain the machinery, and here a friendly amendment is in order. Her framing ran through the “reptilian brain” and the left-right hemispheres; reactivity at the brainstem, reason in the cortex. The folk anatomy is shaky (the triune-brain model has been retired by the neuroscientists, and the hemispheres do not divide labour so tidily), but her behavioural point survives the correction entirely, and is better carried by Kahneman’s two speeds of thought: the fast, reactive system that social media is engineered to capture, and the slow, deliberative one that journalism’s disciplines exist to protect. Strip the anatomy, keep the truth: outrage is fast; verification is slow; the feed is optimised for the former.

And her strongest citation was the one she offered most tentatively. Research on political extremists, she noted, finds that the brains of people with extreme views, left or right, resemble each other more than either resembles the centrist’s. This is real and robust: Leor Zmigrod’s work at Cambridge found that intensity of partisan attachment, to either American party, predicted cognitive rigidity on objective neuropsychological tests, with self-described independents the most flexible of all; an inverted-U in which the far left and far right meet at the rigid end. (A phrase from the conference corridors earlier in the weekend, “leftist mullahs”, is, it turns out, peer-reviewed.) The shared traits Sarwar named, certainty in the righteousness of one’s cause, refusal to hear another point of view, are almost a lay translation of the findings.

The mirror against the wall

Her prescriptions came at two scales. For the individual: pause, breathe, reflect; refuse to be swept along by the tide; regulate, verify, and then post. For the region: Sapan News’s newest initiative, born of an ugly new fact. Since last May’s war, India and Pakistan have banned each other’s press outright; a dozen Pakistani news sites, Dawn among them, blocked in India; thirty-two Indian sites, the major mastheads among them, dark in Pakistan; reciprocal blocks the Editors Guild of India was still pleading against this January. Sapan’s response is Media Mirror: republishing, with permission, journalism from across the wall, so that readers on each side can still encounter the other’s reporting. It is not a manifesto. It is a workaround; which is exactly what makes it the operational answer to Bhasin’s blueprint. Where the states have built a wall in the information space, a volunteer network is quietly propping a mirror against it.

She closed with her most speculative idea, offered with disarming honesty. Sapan News and the Southasia Peace site both carry a code of ethics and responsibility; a Hippocratic oath, as she put it, for anyone engaging on social and digital media. She would like everyone who endorses it to carry a badge on their profiles, “I have signed the social media pledge, have you?”, to make others pause and think.

The open questions

Taken together, the two talks bracket the problem, Bhasin the institutional scale, Sarwar the individual conscience, and together they expose the three questions neither fully answers.

The first is the tension inside Sarwar’s own coinage, and it is the honest heart of the whole subject. The unmediated channel she credits with carrying Palestine past the gatekeepers is the same channel that carries the demagogue past the editors. Structurally, the citizen bearing witness and the troll manufacturing outrage are indistinguishable: both bypass the filter. What separates para-journalism’s credit column from its debit column is nothing architectural; it is precisely the list of disciplines her talk enumerates, adopted voluntarily, one poster at a time. An uncomfortable conclusion, because voluntary discipline is the one thing that does not scale on demand.

The second follows: can a pledge do any real work? On the enforcement reading, plainly not; adverse selection guts it, since those who would sign a civility oath are those who least need one, and a name on a website rewards signalling over conduct. The accountability with teeth is institutional, newsroom- and platform-level; which the para-journalist lacks by definition. But Sarwar had already supplied the better reading an hour earlier, describing her own charter: not a signature drive but the building of a community. Professional norms have never spread primarily by policing; they spread by modelling; by enough visible practitioners behaving a certain way that the behaviour reads as the mark of belonging to something. Eight hundred names on a founding charter is not an enforcement mechanism. It is a nucleus. On that reading her pledge is not naive at all; it is a slow instrument, consistent with everything else she said about the long view.

The third is the one Part I pressed: money and domicile. Bhasin’s proposals need funding at scale; the graveyard shows funding at scale is exactly where the strangler’s hands go. Sapan’s volunteer model is, in one sense, the perfect counter-design, you cannot freeze the grants of an outfit that runs on none, but volunteerism caps out well below the scale Bhasin rightly demanded. Somewhere between the conglomerate-backed campaign that was decapitated and the volunteer network that cannot be, there is a design waiting to be specified: endowed rather than grant-dependent, diaspora-anchored, multi-jurisdictional, digitally domiciled, with no single ministry holding a lever. That design document is the real homework this conference set its region.

Coda: the unbroken raag

The day did not end with journalism. It ended, as perhaps it had to, with Ali Sher’s The Unbroken Raag, two hours of music, memory, and the echoes of Partition, the arts doing, in the event’s final act, exactly what Bhasin said journalism cannot: creating the empathy on which everything else depends. A raag, unbroken across a border that broke everything else, is as good a closing argument as any speaker managed.

One last detail, typographic and therefore easy to miss. Himal always wrote Southasia as one word; a house style that was really a thesis, the copy desk’s quiet insistence that the region precedes its partitions. Sarwar’s network carries the convention in its very name: the Southasia Peace Action Network. It is a small thing, a missing space. But a region that has learned to write itself as one word may yet learn to read itself as one story; Pakistan’s floods, India’s heatwaves, Nepal’s vanishing glaciers, one Himalaya, one meltwater, one story. The alternative, as Bhasin said in closing, is to keep fracturing along lines that will eventually become impossible to hold.

(Quotes are drawn from a rough live transcript and lightly edited for clarity; read them as close paraphrase rather than verbatim.)

There was something quietly apt about the calendar. On the Fourth of July, the day one republic celebrates the border it drew for itself, a room in Stockholm spent ten hours mourning a border drawn for someone else. Mela Nordic’s day-long commemoration of the 1947 Partition, Divergent Voices of South Asia: Rethinking Partition, Reimagining Peace, earned its title honestly. The programme ran from Sarah Gilley questioning the manufacture of “normalcy” in Kashmir, through Farooq Sulehria’s provocation “India as Media Subimperialism!”, to the launch of Amrita Ghosh’s India’s Imperial Formations: Race in South Asia, to Shaukat Ali Kashmiri of the United Kashmir Peoples National Party; a man whose politics manage the rare feat of being equally inconvenient to Islamabad and to Delhi. Divergent voices in the strict sense: nobody in that room agreed on everything, and the organisers plainly did not want them to.

The late afternoon saw two back-to-back talks by two of the subcontinent’s most stubborn journalists. Anuradha Bhasin, executive editor of the Kashmir Times, joined by video link for “Bridging the Noise: Media and the Art of Solidarity in South Asia.” Hers is the name on the Supreme Court petition that forced the January 2020 ruling that indefinite internet shutdowns are impermissible and that any shutdown must answer to proportionality and be published; a judgment that wrote the rules without lifting the blackout, which tells you most of what you need to know about the terrain she works. She was followed, in person, by Beena Sarwar, journalist, filmmaker, teacher, co-founder of the Southasia Peace Action Network, whose talk is the subject of Part II.

Heard in sequence, the two talks assembled themselves into something neither quite was alone: Bhasin supplied the blueprint, Sarwar the working prototype. This first part takes the blueprint, and holds it up against the graveyard of everyone who has tried to build it before.

The one story

Bhasin’s talk built to a set of concrete proposals, and the sharpest of them was a reframing so simple it is astonishing how rarely one hears it. The single most important story in South Asia right now, she argued, is the melting of the Himalayan glaciers; and it is being covered entirely through national lenses. Pakistan’s floods. India’s heatwaves. Nepal’s vanishing ice. The poisoned politics of the Indus Waters Treaty. Four national stories, four national blame games. “These are not separate stories,” she said. “They are one story“; the story of a shared ecosystem under shared threat. The meltwater, after all, does not stop to have its papers checked at Wagah.

From that reframing flowed her first proposal: well-funded, editorially independent cross-border journalism collaborations; joint investigations, joint reporting on shared rivers and shared climate data, joint coverage of health crises, literacy, and what is actually happening inside each country’s universities and laboratories. Not from the nationalist angle, not from the blame angle, but from the angle of what is actually happening.

Her second was a collaborative digital archive of the subcontinent’s shared history, culture, and artistic heritage; pre-Partition history, the region as a single civilisational space, open not just to scholars but to journalists, artists, and ordinary citizens. She was blunt about why it is needed now: every country in the region writes its history with a thumb on the scale, and the thumbs are getting heavier. In India, entire textbook chapters are being rewritten and whole periods, the Mughal era above all, erased; in Pakistan, she added, the curriculum has been doing versions of this for far longer.

Third, journalism as myth-busting. The nationalist story, she argued, is always built on myths; chiefly that the other side is uniformly hostile, even evil, and that there is nothing to gain from engagement and everything to lose. These myths will not be toppled by any single dramatic act of journalism. They erode, if at all, through a thousand small acts of accurate, humanising reporting. Journalists in South Asia have to reclaim their function from nationalism; to insist that the job is to report the world as it is, in all its complexity, and not to serve the identity politics of whoever holds power.

Fourth, and briefly, what journalism cannot do. Cinema, theatre, literature, and music create empathy in a way reportage cannot; some of the most remarkable peace-building in post-conflict societies has come through joint theatrical productions putting actors and playwrights from opposing communities in one rehearsal room. She invoked the late Madeeha Gauhar, whose Ajoka Theatre was carrying Lahore productions across the border two decades ago; adding only that such groups need to be far more deliberate about their outreach. To this she attached a South Asian literary translation fund, making it economically viable to render contemporary books and poetry into every major language of the region, and collaborative fellowships and residencies across journalism and the arts.

She did not pretend any of this would be welcomed. Such collaborations, she said plainly, will be opposed by governments who profit from the status quo, by powers who profit from the current information ecosystem, by media houses whose business model runs on nationalist outrage, and by publics so long fed the enemy-image of the neighbour that any attempt to humanise him will feel like betrayal. Her answer was endurance: if the architecture of hostility was built brick by brick, it must be demolished brick by brick, and something else built in its place. “These are not soft tools,” she insisted; in today’s South Asia they may be among the most powerful available, and the people who wield them carry a responsibility to the shared future of a region facing a choice: find a way to know itself as a whole, or keep fracturing along lines that will eventually become impossible to hold.

What the graveyard teaches

It is worth saying, because the room contained people who lived it, that almost everything Bhasin proposed has been attempted before, and the manner of each attempt’s death is the most instructive thing about it.

The grandest experiment was Aman ki Asha, launched on the first day of 2010 by the two largest media houses of the two hostile states; Pakistan’s Jang Group and the Times of India, an event without real precedent: the mainstream press of two adversaries jointly campaigning against the adversarial frame itself. The campaign’s own commissioned surveys claimed measurable movement: threat perception down by over twenty percent in both countries within a year, two-thirds of respondents believing peace attainable in their lifetimes. Then it went quiet. After 2014 the initiative slid into dormancy under a pincer; in Delhi, a new government with no appetite for it; in Pakistan, the Jang Group under sustained assault from the military establishment in the wake of the Geo–Hamid Mir affair. Nobody banned Aman ki Asha. It was simply made unaffordable to continue.

The subtler death was Himal Southasian, the Kathmandu magazine that for twenty-nine years was the region’s only genuinely pan-regional analytical publication; the closest existing thing to Bhasin’s cross-border newsroom. In 2016 the Southasia Trust announced suspension, and its explanation deserves to be studied like a pathology report: Himal was silenced, the Trust said, not by attack or overt censorship but by “the use of the arms of bureaucracy to paralyse its functioning.” Approved grants sat unreleased for seven months without explanation. Work permits for non-Nepali editors became impossible to obtain. Payments to contributors were indefinitely delayed. No censor’s pen, no midnight knock; just paperwork, withheld. (Himal has since revived in leaner, digital-only form, which is its own lesson about where survivability lives.)

Read together, the two obituaries tell you the one thing Bhasin’s phrase “well-funded, editorially independent” glides past: funded by whom, and domiciled where? The kill mechanism for cross-border media in South Asia is administrative, not editorial; the grant-approval desk, the visa counter, the foreign-funding statute. Any such venture instantly attracts the “foreign-funded, anti-national” charge; India’s FCRA regime and Pakistan’s agencies have both perfected strangulation-by-compliance. Which means survivability is not a footnote to the proposal; it is the proposal. An endowment beyond the reach of any single ministry differs categorically from renewable grants; a diaspora-membership model differs from institutional philanthropy; a multi-jurisdiction digital domicile differs from a Kathmandu office with work permits to renew. The next Himal will be designed around its enemies’ paperwork or it will not last a decade.

One refinement to the archive proposal follows the same logic. Bhasin herself observed that the region’s national histories do not reconcile; which is precisely why a shared narrative is the wrong deliverable, and would merely open a new front in the textbook wars. A shared archive of primary sources; documents, images, manuscripts, objects; the same evidence available to everyone, the arguing left intact, is both more achievable and far harder to attack. Nobody has to agree about Aurangzeb to agree that his farmans should be scanned. And this is the stronger ground for her third proposal too: “myth-busting” as a banner risks sounding like counter-propaganda, which invites symmetrical dismissal; verifiable reporting that leaves the complexity standing, her own better formulation, “report the world as it is“, cannot be waved away so easily.

So the blueprint stands, annotated: right diagnosis, right instruments, and one unanswered engineering question about how the structure survives its first winter. As it happens, the woman who followed Bhasin to the podium is the living institutional memory of that graveyard; she ran the grandest of the dead experiments, watched how it died, and built its successor on the lessons.

That is Part II.

We also second Kabir’s proposal for a book club, with Midnight’s Children as our inaugural read ahead of India and Pakistan’s Independence anniversaries in mid-August.

One. Online-safety reports go by email. From now, any online-safety violation must reach us by email. That is the investigative channel. If it does not land in the inbox, it is not in front of us, and for our purposes a violation we never see did not happen. Send it to us directly.

Two. What Brown Pundits is about: biodiversity and bio-density. Two aims. Density: a 20 comments per post. Diversity: five voices per thread, not a closed loop of a handful names. A hundred comments from a small circle is a monologue. A hundred from ten is an ecosystem, and the ecosystem is what we are here to keep alive.

A post unlikely to reach either metric may be held in abeyance or returned for reworking.

We have felt the losses. BB stepping back, and Indosaurus before that, cost us more than volume. They were bridges. BB in particular always found the connective tissue to sports and the economy that the rest of us missed. So read this as an open invitation home. We will be reaching out, and if either of you is reading, the room is still yours.

The goal of this post will be to act as a counter to XTM’s post about geography not being power. It will rely on realism as a doctrine of international relations to de-cypher the significance geography has had on the Indian Subcontinent and how it has affected the trajectories of the nations within it.

Geography initially reared its head in discussions of strategy during the times of Mackinder and Mahan in the early 1900s. Where Mackinder so boldly stated that “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.”. However, these words were written in colonial era Britain as a device to fear monger about the Russians as they were the perfect counter to their strategy of controlling the world with sea power through internal lines of transportation through Cold Siberia. With that cold logic Russia which had been the ally of British through the two world wars became a target.

Spykman gave that theoretical logic into a more reasonable and pragmatic form for a new form of American Empire. He realized that for all its insulated impenetrability the heartland was a vast and uninhabitable land with little to no permanent lines of transportation that the British feared about. However, it was instead the powers which surrounded the heartland that could instrumentalize it. Therefore, the areas of concern on the Eurasian world island suddenly expanded from Eastern Europe to the Inner Crescent or the Rimlands. These were the fertile plains of the Indian Subcontinent, the deserts of Arabia, the East Asian lands of China and other East Asian nations, and The European peninsula. “States, cannot escape their geography. However skilled the Foreign Office, and however resourceful the General Staff. A state’s foreign policy must reckon with geographic facts. It can deal with them skillfully or ineptly; it can modify them; but it cannot ignore them. For geography does not argue. It simply is.”

America therefore to sustain its own global empire created various treaty organizations to control the rimlands. NATO, SEATO, CENTO (Baghdad Pact), etc to perpetuate its own influence in the rimland to contain the Soviets during the cold war to reduce their influence over the world island. During that time Pakistan utilized its geography to turn a soviet misadventure into a disaster by creating, sheltering, training, and equipping the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. It became a de-facto frontier state against the Soviets. It repeated the same strategy of renting out its geographical position to great powers during the GWOT. Therefore, it would not be inaccurate to say that Geography has been a core part of Pakistani strategy so much so that the words like “Geostrategy, Geoeconomics and Geopolitics” are a part of common parlance.

Pakistan finds itself in relevance again due to its own geographic placement on the rimlands. It is populated enough to be a player and subservient enough to be valuable to any power on the world island or beyond. If India simply didn’t exist Pakistan would’ve been a very different place, it could’ve looked to the deserts of Arabia as an actual partner nation instead of a “security guard” for the Arabs. It could’ve had an actual relationship with Afghanistan instead of the constant insecurity at its frontiers. It could’ve had an actual foreign policy beyond just holding the threat of nuclear weapons up to western nations for the sake of foreign aid.

India for its own part also wishes to imagine a world where Pakistan wouldn’t have existed. It would’ve freed India to have lines of transportation going directly in Central Asia and Russia some of their closest partners historically. It would also open up so much of Indian capacity which goes into deterring Pakistan and could instead be used to project power out into the Indian Ocean its own playground. India would’ve been free of 2-front scenario that constantly rises in the minds of Indian strategic planners no matter how unlikely it might be.

We can see that the Indian Subcontinent today can be home to an actual challenger to the already existing global order unlike during the time of Spykman’s analysis which assumed the subcontinent was too poor to be an actor of its own. However, that requires the subcontinent to have a clear hegemon. India can take that place given enough time to develop its own economy, however the tumultuous nature of the global economy shows clear headwinds against that. In the absence of a clear hegemon the subcontinent will go back to the its original state of being in a balance of powers where outside powers balance against India using Pakistan as a proxy to deter a possible hegemon from emerging. For Pakistan the origins of its significance are its geography due to the absence of any economic prosperity.

A point of leverage which has emerged out of the geography as international law weakens and multi-lateral agreements become tougher to enforce is the Indus Waters Treaty. India’s abeyance of the treaty is contested globally yet there is no consequence for its actions. Many courts may decry the humanity but no nation is willing to punish it for the business its markets represent. Even the Americans and Chinese have largely been silent on this issue making the pitch for its restoration more difficult for the Pakistanis. In a world where every multilateral institution that could ever matter has been humiliated by Trump and actively disregarded its a bit rich to state things such as “There are no exit clauses to the IWT” because even the Treaty of Versailles didn’t have an exit clause in the sense that Germany could remilitarize the Rhine through it. However, great power can rarely ever be bound into certain actions by other powers for long, the IWT persisted beyond its expiry date due to the fact that the Indian capability to build on the Western rivers was rather limited. However, those facts are changing due to the rising nature of India’s economic and industrial capabilities.

Although, I do not expect India to magically develop the capabilities to dam up the Indus for months or something to that effect. The real capabilities we could see coming into effect would be re-directing portions of the Indus into the Eastern Rivers and then damming those rivers up more comprehensively. The total capacity which can be redirect through such an arrangement would be rather limited. It would barely cross the 20% mark on the Indus’ waters. However, in a world where the flows of the Indus are declining every additional capacity of water that India absorbs is an addition to Pakistan’s water scarcity problem.

Finally, Pakistan has worked to stress out any groundwater supplies that may have existed under its lands. It’s cities live in constant water scarcity, many cities like Karachi have declared national security emergency due to water scarcity already. In the coming years we may see a return of geography’s wrath, as large parts of Pakistan become even more uninhabitable for life. As overpopulation in cities means the average person has to sink larger and larger portions of their incomes into simply giving out rents to the “tanker mafia”. The curse of geography is such for Pakistan that the Indus River System is its only replenishing source of water for most of its population. Therefore, Pakistan might threaten the world with a gun to its head for water but in reality the IWT isn’t even the greatest of its water concerns. IWT is just a way for it to shift the blame for its crumbling water infrastructure failing to service the needs of its populations with no sign or possibility of improvement as the state turned rather comprehensively from a “developmental” state to a “hard” state. With budget prioritizing military expenditure over the expenditure for schools, roads, rail, and even water.

1.oh God!! Germany out.
2. Brazil scrapping through. Japan gave Good fight.
3. Morocco hanging on. Netherlands out. What a game!! 
4. Can’t believe and understand why grown up men should wear pink boots.
5. Kick and run northern European football is out, south European irritating tiki-taka is the normal now.
6. People are commenting on the large number of African-descended individuals in the game.