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Let me answer a question on Pakistan from Indian point of view:  How geography, military dominance, ideological transformation and dependence on external powers shaped Pakistan’s history, its rivalry with India and its continuing search for a stable national identity?  Pakistan’s geopolitical history is marked by a recurring contradiction. It seeks strategic autonomy and regional influence, yet much of its security architecture has depended on relationships with larger external powers, principally the United States and China. Pakistan became important not primarily because of what its economy produced, but because of where it was located, whom it bordered and what strategic services it could provide to larger powers. Its geography repeatedly brought military assistance, financial support and diplomatic relevance. Yet this external importance often reduced the pressure to build autonomous political, economic and civilian institutions. Pakistan consequently achieved strategic re...

Infidel:My Life by Ayaan Hirsi Ali | Goodreads ⭐⭐⭐⭐✰ Worth Reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel is a shocking, brutally honest, and deeply captivating memoir that tells the story of a woman who managed to save herself, change her life, and become a voice that is heard, while so many others remain unheard. This autobiographical narrative follows her life chronologically, tracing the various stages of her extraordinary childhood and youth as she moved between Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and eventually Europe. More than a personal story, Infidel is a politically charged memoir that explains how Hirsi Ali’s life experiences shaped her into a vocal critic of Islam and of Western multicultural policies that, in her view, often fail to confront injustice hidden behind the language of culture and tolerance. Hirsi Ali was born and raised in Somalia under the shadow of a rigid and extremist religious environment. Her father was a prominent opposition politician who fought against the co...

Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey  by  V. S. Naipaul Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey | Goodreads ⭐⭐⭐⭐✰ Worth Reading History bears out the proposition that political revolutions have always been preceded by social and religious revolutions.    In Bangladesh, a significant number of people have converted to Islam over centuries, particularly during the medieval period when the region was influenced by conquest of Muslim rulers and proselytization by Sufi saints. Today, there has been t he rapid rise of radicalism in Bangladesh with the ouster of ex- Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina  in the student protest.  The protest has now been hijacked by Islamic extremists. Over the years, there was  a surge in madrasas, and  this has led to growing religious fanaticism, with zealots aggressively pushing an Islamist agenda.  With Islamist influence in power, Bangladesh is modifying national identity by erasing symbols of its secular past, ...

What is an Idea of India? Ask a liberal, this will be a democratic republic where secularism trumps, multiple cultures, and identities coexist in harmony and dignity and embodied in the Constitution. Ask a conservative Hindu, this will be the victory of Sanatan Dharma  and Akhanda Bharat . Indian State was founded on values of equality, redistribution, fairness, and social welfare in 1947. India inherited a liberal Constitution structured over the colonial institutional and legal structures that weren’t exactly suited for liberal democracy. Also, the constitution was imposed upon a society that was feudal in the customs and entrenched prejudices relating to caste, religion, and social hierarchies. The irreducible character of violence in Indian society is best depicted in the idea of the caste system and religious purity. The spiritual legitimization of something as discriminatory as caste is at the very heart of the structural violence that ails us as a society. There were legacie...

In periods of revolutionary upheaval, Islamist hardliners often begin by cooperating with moderate or libertarian-leaning groups. Once stability weakens and institutions erode, these alliances are systematically abandoned, allowing hardliners to consolidate power for themselves. Chaos provides the opening; moral certainty provides the weapon. After orthodox and power-driven actors seize control of a movement, many moderate Muslims - often personally tolerant and uneasy with extremist actions - find themselves unable to resist. Their attachment to faith, combined with intense social pressure, discourages open opposition. Those who do resist face physical assault, exile, imprisonment, or social boycott, frequently justified through accusations of blasphemy or apostasy. As a result, individual tolerance within society does little to prevent the emergence of totalitarian control by hardliners. A key ideological assumption underlying such movements is the belief that moral behavior can be l...

“The scale of the human socio-economic-political complex system is so large that it seriously interferes with the biospheric complex system upon which it is wholly dependent, and cultural evolution has been too slow to deal effectively with the resulting crisis.” —Paul R. Ehrlich is president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. ................................................................................... Both - the US and the Islamic Republics - wish the region back to its status quo ante, where and when they much benefited from the state of war they had manufactured, and under which they both shared the control and domination of the democratic aspirations of the people in the region. Political crises are definitive, sustained, and even beyond the structurally dysfunctional state apparatus rooted in the demographic facts of a young and restless population ruled by an outdated and obsolete theocratic ideology. Questions about loyalty, the role of mil...

“Islam [is] a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.” - Samuel Huntington ; This quote comes to the truth several times by the most religious persons of Islam. We have to make new perception on Islam, hence accepting that all Islam is on a par with Al-Qaeda is grotesque and dead wrong. To understand why even falsely proclaimed perfect system of rules "Islam" is failed by its own followers ? . Religious fanatics are present in every society, it does not mean that they are a part of the culture. The extremism and level of violence permitted help us to view the norms of the civil society. Islamic scholars only look Kuran and Hadith as a pious source and reference while ignoring evidences or voices outside this. The critical mind on the other hand undermines revealed truths and subjects the scriptures to exegesis and interpretation. To confuse the two is to shift religi...

When you talk about Pakistan, as an Indian a question simply arrives:  What do you do with a problem like Pakistan? . There are 8 steps proposed by the author need to be taken at least from Indian perspective. I. Cause economic pain to Defence forces / related entities: II. Offer to pay this mercenary nation for better behaviour III. Reach out to the suffering masses IV. Denuclearize this rabid state V. Increase focus on fissures within Pakistan VI. Resolve Kashmir VII. Threaten to break all diplomatic relations VIII. Provide a face to India’s Pakistan initiative For (super funny) history as read by most Pakistani citizens, the two news article summary is here. Concise history of Pakistan Part– I and Part– II ; I will analyze the situation in another perspective. Ideas did not face organized opposition till monotheistic invaders arrived into India. Since Indian Dharmas were not much organized, the blood shed and violence conflict existed in less proportions. There was fight b...