Paridhi Passi

Pakistan is having one of those summers where every direction you look, something is on fire. In the north, a banned militant group is quietly retooling for a new kind of war. In the west, a resource-rich province is caught between a real, bleeding insurgency and a viral independence claim that has taken the internet by storm. Along the Line of Control, a protest movement that started over flour prices has hardened into open, deadly defiance against Islamabad. Three fronts, three different...

For nearly eleven hours between July 27 and 28, a video posted by the Prime Minister of India became inaccessible on Facebook. Users who tried to view it were shown a notice stating that the content had been withheld in the region following a legal request. Hours later, that explanation changed: Meta attributed the removal to a technical error, apologised, and restored the video. The episode raises a fair and reasonable question, not a verdict, but a question worth examining: in an age where...

History reserves its severest judgement for those who fail to recognise transformation when it stands before them. Every fundamental shift in the international order has yielded two categories of nation: those who identified the resource anchoring the new world and secured it with conviction, and those who perceived it too late, condemned to dependency, stripped of agency, and forced to operate within conditions they played no part in designing. Coal raised empires. Oil remade the political...