Umme Haniya
Seventy-five years on this planet is no small feat, but when it comes to Narendra Modi, age is less interesting than irony. The man who promised to project Indian supremacy has, quite unintentionally, written Pakistan’s best success story in decades. His Hindutva project, designed to weaken us, has become the single greatest advertisement for our resilience. If gratitude is in order, it must be delivered with the cake.
For decades Pakistan said India’s “secularism” was a costume stitched for Western eyes. Nobody listened. Enter Modi, bulldozer in hand. From Gujarat in 2002 to Bihar in 2025, he has stripped the costume bare. Today, it’s not Pakistani anchors raising the alarm, but The New York Times and The Guardian chronicling India’s descent. What our pamphlets couldn’t prove in 70 years, Modi broadcast on prime time. Thanks, neighbour.
The Two-Nation Theory, long mocked as dusty dogma, now reads like breaking news. Dalits, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs – all pushed to the margins in Modi’s India – have become living footnotes to Partition logic. Equality in India today is like a Bollywood set: convincing on screen, hollow behind the façade. The more Modi insists on a Hindu-first India, the more he validates why Pakistan was born in the first place.
For decades, India dazzled Kashmir with slogans of democracy, Bollywood distractions, and promises of prosperity. Then Modi, with the arrogance of a monarch, tore away Article 370. In one masterstroke, he clarified what Pakistan had been saying all along: in Kashmir, citizens are subjects, not equals. Today, even the youngest Kashmiri child knows the truth – and it was Modi, not Pakistan, who wrote it on the wall.
Modi wanted to humiliate us in 2019 by sending a fighter jet. Instead, Pakistan served his captured pilot tea, and the world applauded. Six years later, we followed up with a different menu: homemade jets and Chinese missiles. The scoreboard read six to zero. India, seven times larger, watched as Pakistan stole the show. Thank you, Modi ji, for arranging the stage, lights, and global audience.
Standing with QUAD while flirting with BRICS, defending Ukraine while funding Russia, chanting democracy while embracing Netanyahu – Modi’s foreign policy looks less like strategy and more like an identity crisis. For Pakistan, it has been a masterclass in what not to do. Rule number one of diplomacy: if you try to be everywhere, you end up nowhere. Or as even his critics now joke: aap kisi ke bhi nahin, apne bhi nahin.
A free press questions power. Modi’s press amplifies it. Anchors who once claimed to be journalists now resemble cheerleaders at a Hindutva carnival. Loud at home, hollow abroad, they drown in their own echo chamber. Meanwhile, Pakistan suddenly sounds credible by contrast – not because we grew louder, but because India grew deaf to itself.
Once the natural leader of South Asia, India has vacated its chair with every boycott, every walkout, every petty refusal to engage. Leadership is not about empty seats. As India sulks, the region has begun to look elsewhere. South Asia deserves better – and Modi has proved, again and again, that he won’t provide it.
Modi’s embrace of Israel in 2025, complete with Israeli drones in South Asia, was meant to signal power. Instead, it reminded Muslim capitals of their own unresolved wounds in Palestine. Overnight, Pakistan found new sympathy from corners of the Muslim world that had once drifted away. Gandhi once warned that Palestine belonged to the Arabs. Modi, in ignoring even his own founding father, has alienated a billion people in one diplomatic misstep.
Modi turns 75 not as the architect of Indian dominance, but as the author of Indian contradictions. His legacy is a catalogue of backfires – policies meant to weaken Pakistan that ended up strengthening it. For us, the challenge is restraint. We must not imitate his errors. Our task is to watch, learn, and chart a steadier course while India drowns in its own contradictions.
So on this birthday, let us raise a toast, not in celebration of Modi’s triumphs, but of his spectacular ironies. If he remains in power for another decade, Pakistan’s greatest challenge may be resisting the temptation to say “thank you” too often.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
