To have spent any time on the internet over the last few days, especially as an Indian, means you have almost certainly stumbled upon the reels, social media posts and reaction videos of young Pakistanis watching the youth protests unfold in India. And what has been striking about them is not sense the schadenfreude at India’s turmoil but something much rarer, envy.

What they have in their videos, and often in their eyes, is an unmistakable admiration for India’s democracy, its plurality, the presence of women and other marginalised communities at the forefront of a political movement. They are laughing, rooting and applauding as Indian students fill the streets, demand answers from the state, and force those in power to respond, and then contemplating in their reels how absent all of this is from their own lived experience of nationhood.

In those reactions there is curiosity, admiration and occasionally even longing. For the first time in a long while, India has made perhaps its most persuasive argument to Pakistan about the uniqueness of Indian identity, of her moral capacity as a state, and the possibility that she still offers a more meaningful way of belonging.

funny part of their protest is that students are openly mocking all government institutions, and their reels are going viral. Yet the government still hasn’t suspended internet services. — Hassnain (@xxhsnain_) July 22, 2026

funny part of their protest is that students are openly mocking all government institutions, and their reels are going viral. Yet the government still hasn’t suspended internet services.

— Hassnain (@xxhsnain_) July 22, 2026

There is a strange magic by which nations convince themselves they are admired, and that they are worth admiring. But however much the state would like for it to be true, no government has ever managed the trick through brute force alone. Admiration can perhaps be conscripted for a season, it can be rented, for the price of a missile test or a border skirmish broadcast on a 24-hour news loop until the anchors run out of adjectives, it can even be garnered by films touting jingoism as virtue. But admiration bought this way is like a drug and always has a short lease, the junkie will come back asking for more than was offered.

Also read: ‘Since When is an Elected Representative Above Questioning,’ Asks CJP as Delhi Police Asks X to Take Down Posts Targeting Govt Heads

For the better part of a decade, the ruling dispensation in New Delhi has measured India’s success by the distance it can put between itself and Pakistan, treating Pakistan’s presumed failures as India’s own credential. The comparison has become almost reflexive, even in their jibes of ‘go to Pakistan’ anytime they are critiqued.

It is seen in cricket, diplomacy, security, elections and culture, Pakistan, to them appears less as a neighbouring country than as a permanent foil against which India is expected to define herself. Of course, the leaders and the masses never seem to realise that when the country constantly seeks to prove it is unlike Pakistan, it........

© The Wire