As the year comes to a close, Hani and Shaheer set the stage for the upcoming Hyphenated Histories series by highlighting what might have been lost in the chaos of 2025: how Pakistan, despite chronic instability and innumerable contradictions, continues to “fail upward” into workable relationships across rival global blocs, in stark contrast to the results garnered by India. From the enduring hyphenation of India–Pakistan as inseparable political identities (01:17) to the question of why China succeeded where India stalled (03:22), the duo start dissecting how modern South Asian statehood emerged less from organic civic cohesion than from imposed administrative frameworks struggling to govern deeply heterogeneous societies (06:39).

The conversation moves through Hindutva’s ideological overlap with Zionism (08:24) and Nehru’s strategic miscalculations on Tibet as the inflection point that militarized the Himalayas and set the nuclear logic of the subcontinent in motion (12:23), before turning outward to how India–Pakistan collapses into a single identity abroad (17:20). The episode closes with a sober assessment of the contemporary H-1B backlash as a form of soft deportation, revealing not cultural incompatibility, but a declining U.S. political economy increasingly hostile to the very labor it once depended on (29:01).

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