Rishi Raj Gupta

Supreme Court’s Babri Masjid verdict was “totally illegitimate” from a historian's point of view, says historian Irfan Habib in a conversation with @dksingh73 and @MandhaniApoorva.

Every October 27, Pakistan stages its annual performance of grievance. Rallies fill streets in Islamabad and Muzaffarabad, resolutions are passed, and speakers declare that Indian troops landing in Srinagar on that day in 1947 began an “illegal occupation.” They call it Jammu and Kashmir Black Day. From where I sit—in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, as a Kashmiri Muslim woman who has never needed a Pakistani passport or a Pakistani flag to claim her identity—this ritual is not solidarity. It is a refusal to accept history, geography, and the choices made by people who actually live here. I was born in the Valley after the accession had long been settled in law and in the daily life of my family. My grandmother’s generation remembered the autumn of 1947 differently from the script now recited across the Line of Control. On 22 October, tribal lashkars crossed from the west, burning villages and advancing toward Srinagar. The Maharaja’s forces could not hold them. Only after that invasion did Maharaja Hari Singh sign the Instrument of Accession to India on 26 October. Indian troops arrived the next day not as conquerors but as the force that stopped the raiders short of the capital. My family has never treated that landing as the start of darkness; they treated it as the moment the immediate threat was checked. Pakistan’s version reverses the order of events and then treats the reversal as sacred. That historical inversion has cost Kashmiri lives for decades. The “unfinished business of Partition” that some in Pakistan still invoke was never a promise that every Muslim-majority territory must join them. Princely states chose. Hyderabad and Junagadh chose differently and were integrated. Kashmir’s ruler, facing invasion, chose India. The United Nations resolutions that followed required Pakistan to withdraw its forces first; that condition was never met. Instead, successive Pakistani governments sustained a proxy conflict that turned the Valley into a place where young men were recruited, trained, and sent back to die. My classmates lost brothers to that cycle. The men who returned as militants rarely asked the women of the household whether they wanted the fight; they simply imposed it. The Black Day commemorations never pause to count those dead or the years of closed schools and empty tourist boats they produced. I have lived the alternative that Pakistan’s narrative refuses to acknowledge. I studied in a heritage missionary school, then the state university in the Valley, then built a professional career outside the state because the Indian system allowed me to do so without losing my right to return and inherit property. Before 2019, a Kashmiri woman who married outside the permanent-resident framework risked losing her own residency rights; men faced no equivalent penalty. That asymmetry is gone. Central laws on domestic violence and child marriage now apply without the old loopholes. I can vote in local and national elections, contest for panchayat seats, and open a bank account or register a business without anyone demanding proof that my husband is a “state subject.” These are ordinary rights, not gifts. They are the reason many women of my generation treat the old special-status arrangements as constraints rather than privileges. Pakistan’s annual mourning does not improve any of this. It does not build the roads, colleges, or hospitals that have expanded since the old constitutional barriers were removed. It does not reduce the number of young men still drawn into armed groups whose handlers sit outside Indian territory. When Pakistani leaders speak of the Kashmiri people’s “inalienable right to self-determination,” they mean a right exercised under conditions they themselves refuse to accept—conditions that would require them to end the very interference that has prolonged the dispute. Meanwhile, in the territory they do control, political space is narrower, economic opportunity thinner, and the same religious identity that is invoked as a bond is used to police women’s dress, movement, and speech more tightly than anything I encounter at home. The dream of a merger is not a plan; it is an inheritance of grievance that serves Pakistan’s security establishment more than any Kashmiri household. It allows successive governments in Islamabad to divert attention from their own unresolved questions of federalism, minority rights, and economic viability. It keeps a generation of Kashmiris on both sides of the Line of Control tethered to an outcome that has become less likely with every passing decade. Most people I know want the conflict to end so that their children can plan ordinary lives—jobs, marriages, travel—without calculating the next shutdown or the next infiltration. They do not want to trade the imperfect but expanding opportunities available inside the Indian Union for the uncertainties of a state whose own citizens already struggle with inflation, energy shortages, and the constant threat of further radicalization. Pakistan can continue to mark 27 October as a day of protest. It can pass resolutions and stage solidarity walks. What it cannot do is convert that performance into consent from the people who live under Indian administration and who, by the ordinary measures of education, property, and political participation, have chosen to make their lives here. The unfinished business of Partition is not a map that still needs redrawing. It is the acceptance, by those who launched the 1947 invasion and have sustained the conflict ever since, that the accession happened, that it was legal under the rules of the time, and that the majority of Kashmiris who remain on this side of the Line of Control are not waiting to be rescued. We are already home.

Colonel Shukla's recent critique of the IAF mistakes cultural confidence for institutional decay & selective nostalgia for strategic analysis. As a veteran IAF officer I find the piece more revealing of the author’s assumptions than of any genuine leadership deficit in the service. The charge that Sanskrit quotations and references to the Ramayana at official briefings somehow “Hindutva-ise” the Air Force is particularly thin. Indian public life has always drawn upon our civilisational language. When an air marshal opens a media briefing with a verse, it is treated as ideological signalling. Had the same officer quoted Churchill or Clausewitz, it would have been praised as intellectual breadth. The objection appears less about professionalism and more about discomfort with any open affirmation of Indian civilisational identity within uniformed institutions. That discomfort is the author’s, not the IAF’s. The suggestion that Air Marshal Jeetendra Mishra’s post-retirement appointment is evidence of ideological reward is equally unconvincing. Officers who plan and execute complex operations under real constraints are often asked to take on civilian responsibilities for a variety of reasons, competence being high among them. Reducing a successful operational career to a political transaction does a disservice. It also assumes that every subsequent appointment must be viewed through a single ideological lens. This makes an analyst with an agenda. On the “zero-error syndrome,” the article recycles an old complaint. Risk aversion is a real institutional tendency in any large military, particularly one that operates under nuclear thresholds and simultaneous continental and maritime pressures. Equating measured caution in 2020 with a permanent loss of offensive spirit is an oversimplification. The same service now accused of timidity has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to hold and dominate difficult terrain when the operational picture and political guidance aligned. Leadership is not measured by how quickly one escalates; it is measured by whether the force remains ready, cohesive and capable when the moment actually arrives. The claim of a growing disconnect between “lions” and “donkeys” is the oldest refrain in military commentary. Junior officers have always grumbled about seniors; seniors have always fretted about the quality of juniors. What has changed is the volume of public commentary that turns ordinary institutional friction into a civilisation-level crisis. The IAF continues to attract, train and retain officers who fly demanding missions in difficult conditions. That record is more relevant than seminar-room complaints about language and vocabulary. Colonel Shukla ends by invoking the Truman–MacArthur clash as a model of principled military independence. The analogy is misplaced. India’s constitutional framework and civil-military traditions are not those of America in 1951. Indian service chiefs have long given candid military advice while remaining within the boundary set by elected authority. That is not weakness; it is the system working as designed. Demanding that senior officers “seize the moment” by publicly challenging government policy is not a call for better leadership. It is a call for a different political arrangement altogether—something practised in Pakistan. In the end, the article reads less like a diagnosis of military leadership and more like serious discomfort with the cultural self-confidence now visible in parts of the armed forces. One can debate the wisdom of particular public statements or post-retirement appointments. Turning those debates into a sweeping indictment of the IAF’s professional character is rather like criticising the entire batting order because one batsman prefers a particular stance. The scoreboard of operational performance remains the best measure. On that measure, the IAF continues to hold its own explains Air Marshal Nambiar of the Kargil fame.

Professor Muhammad Yunus received the Hillary Rodham Clinton Award today at Georgetown University. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton presented the award at a ceremony held in Gaston Hall.

Dear Indian origin/American leaders in the US, @satyanadella, @sundarpichai, @ArvindKrishna, @nikesharora, @nealmohan, @MicronCEO, @JayZscaler, @kunalb11, @RamaswmySridhar, @AravSrinivas, @ThomasOrTK, @LeenaNairHR, @snarayen, @VivekGRamaswamy, @RepBera, @CongressmanRaja, @RepSuhas @Kash_Patel It is high time you all speak up against the despicable, dangerous racism and hate against Indians on American social media. And do something about it as Tech CEOs and political leaders. The despicable, dehumanizing hate against Indians is being spread everywhere - Facebook, Instagram, X, Youtube, Reddit, Telegram... Staying silent and not doing anything anymore - as more young people in the US are radicalized to hate Indians using social media - may one day lead to our own family and friends having to face such racist, radicalized, violent, supremacists. American social media platforms are being used by adversarial actors to specifically target Indians in the US. They are seeding racism and hate using violent words and dehumanizing imagery, programming many Americans to become racist and hateful - specifically against Indians. May be it is being done to drive out Indians, attack India for geopolitics, or try erode India-US ties. But it is real, relentless and extreme form of communist hate that's being seeded. There's no reason why, you all as stalwarts of silicon valley and politics can't get together, talk about this crisis, and take action to end ALL hate and racism on social media. It shouldn't be that difficult in the age of AI to filter out, block racist and hate filled comments against any community, isn't it. How come this is not being proposed and implemented across SV companies? And why isn't any of you speaking out against this increasing online hate and racism against Indian Americans and Indians? Among all mentioned above, till now only @CongressmanRaja has talked about the topic of online hate and the recent attempted mass shooting. Please start talking among yourselves, even if not publicly, and kindly take some action 🙏

It is easy to stand with the crowd, but it takes courage to stand alone #DPUpdates