You Can’t Hashtag Your Way Through South Asia
The left keeps finding new ways to disappoint me.
In the latest flare-up between India and Pakistan, I noticed something strange happening online. A familiar instinct, maybe even a noble one, kicking in. People wanted to show solidarity. People wanted to be on the right side. So they reached for the framework that now sits closest to the surface of their minds: Israel and Palestine.
Within hours, the analogy was everywhere. India is Israel. Pakistan is Palestine. A military occupier versus the occupied. The Hindu nationalist regime versus the beleaguered Muslim state. A settler colony versus the displaced.
And just like that, the decision had been made. The progressive position was to support Pakistan.
It was jarring. Not because India is blameless — far from it — but because Pakistan is not Gaza.
Pakistan has a military. A government. A passport. A stock exchange. A nuclear arsenal. It is a state. A broken one, yes. But a state all the same.
It was born in blood, its borders drawn with the ink of trauma and partition. In 1971, it killed its own people in East Pakistan — now Bangladesh — in one of the least remembered genocides of the last century. It has spent most of its history under military rule. And even in the periods when it wasn’t, it might as well have been. The generals never left. They just learned to govern from behind the curtain.
Pakistan’s institutions serve the state, not the people. Minorities are routinely harassed. Journalists disappear. Political parties exist on a leash. Islam is not just the dominant religion — it is the operating system, enforced by law and manipulated for control. The country is not merely Islamic. It is Islamized. Not by faith, but by force.
That’s not to say India is the obvious good guy.
India under Modi has become something else entirely. A country that once prided itself on pluralism now teeters on the edge of theocracy.
Hindutva — a militant ideology that sees India as a Hindu rashtra — has seeped into every organ of the state. The courts. The media. The bureaucracy. The police. Even Bollywood. Muslims are lynched in broad daylight. Dissent is punished with raids and arrests. And the idea of Kashmir as an occupied territory is not a fiction. It is a lived reality for millions.
So no, there are no saints here.
But that’s exactly why the comparison fails.
Israel and Palestine is not a metaphor you can just port over. It’s not a template for every conflict involving a Muslim population. And yet, that’s what keeps happening — especially on the left. The story is already written in their minds. All they need is new actors to plug into the old roles.
They are not wrong to care. But they are wrong about the story.
This isn’t a war between the occupier and the occupied. It’s a standoff between two deeply flawed states. One secular in theory, Hindu nationalist in practice. The other Islamic in theory, militarized in practice. Both nationalist. Both authoritarian in their own ways. Both using Kashmir as a tool — to distract, to rally, to polarize.
What makes it worse is that this projection doesn’t just distort reality. It flattens it.
It turns Pakistan into a symbol of Muslim resistance, erasing the decades of oppression it has inflicted on its own Muslims. It turns India into a one-dimensional villain, erasing the millions who resist Hindutva within its borders. And it reduces Kashmir — the actual site of suffering — to a prop.
That’s the part that stings the most.
Because for all the discourse, nobody’s really talking about Kashmiris. Not the ones living under curfews and surveillance. Not the ones sandwiched between two nuclear states who use their pain for political theater. Not the ones whose lives have been reduced to headlines, hashtags, and hollow diplomacy.
Instead, we’re stuck in a theater of false analogies.
A kind of Western moral cosplay that feels radical but is mostly reactive. That prizes clarity over complexity. That needs a villain and a victim and can’t hold the possibility that maybe, this time, there are neither.
Or worse. That there are both.
I get why people reach for what they know. Gaza is an open wound. Palestine is an undeniable injustice. That story cuts so deeply it shapes how we see everything else. But not every tragedy is the same. And not every Muslim-majority region is a mirror of Palestine.
Sometimes, solidarity means asking harder questions. Who are we supporting — and why? Who gets reduced to a symbol, and who disappears? What pain are we comfortable seeing, and what pain do we ignore?
The truth is, South Asia doesn’t fit neatly into left narratives. It never has. Its borders were drawn by colonial hands and filled in with fire. Its conflicts are older than hashtags. And its people — Kashmiri, Indian, Pakistani — are not allegories. They are real.
They deserve more than our metaphors. Easy binaries are comforting. But they make us stupid.