बद अच्छा, बदनाम बुरा: When Reputation Beats Reality

 

बद अच्छा, बदनाम बुरा: When Reputation Beats Reality

Branding is the art of selling perception as fact. In today’s age of hashtags and headline hunters, being wrong is manageable. But being labeled wrong? That sticks. Who needs evidence when bias does the heavy lifting?

Take the West’s favorite bedtime story since 1979. After the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis, a simple equation went global: Islam = terrorism. Osama Bin Laden didn’t invent the narrative; he just gave it blockbuster visuals. The West had the script ready. The world sat back and nodded along.

And then: Pakistan.

Since 1947, Pakistan has functioned more like a geopolitical chess piece than a sovereign nation. Created as a pressure release for Partition, it quickly became a launchpad for wars, insurgencies, and eventually full-blown terror. India pointed to the wreckage. The West looked away. Even after Osama Bin Laden was found enjoying retirement in Abbottabad, Western funding kept flowing. The lie was too lucrative to quit.

Let’s be clear: Pakistan isn’t the brain behind terrorism in India. It’s the courier. The blueprint? Designed in the West. What they did in the Middle East, destabilize, divide, arm, and extract, they repeated in South Asia. Pakistan was just the forwarding address. The real weapons came with a “Made in the West” tag.

The 2008 Mumbai attacks could have shattered the illusion. For a moment, the world looked at Islamabad without filters. But the clarity faded fast.

Then came Narendra Modi, marketed as the tough guy, the no-nonsense nationalist. But under his watch, Pakistan got a quiet makeover. Today, when there’s blood in Kashmir, suspicion doesn’t stop in Rawalpindi. It boomerangs back to Delhi.

Mission accomplished?

In a moment so ironic it’s almost satire, a U.S. General recently praised Pakistan for “helping fight terrorism.” The same Pakistan that raised it. The same allies that armed it. Diplomacy now doubles as absurdist theater, with the audience too distracted to notice the farce.

And yet, before we look outward, we need to face a brutal truth: India has perfected the art of branding, too.

The caste system was India’s original propaganda machine. Long before PR firms existed, we were assigning labels with military precision.

Poor? Branded thief. Lower caste? Branded suspect. Upper caste? Branded “pure,” even when knee-deep in blood.

History remembers the Thuggee era as a time of criminal cults. What it forgets, or conveniently omits, is that many so-called “thugs” were Brahmins. During Punjab’s “terror years,” state forces framed entire Sikh communities while conducting covert operations of their own. But when you’re not branded “bad,” you can commit atrocities and still exit the stage untouched.

This bias isn't accidental; it's structural. It’s profiling dressed as law. It’s prejudice sold as policy.

Watch Delhi Crime Season 2. They never say “Dalit,” but the suspects are poor, migrant, slum-dwelling families from marginalized states. The crime? Real. The suspects? Selected by stereotype, not by evidence. That’s not justice, it’s judicial branding.

And let’s not forget the system’s current escapist fantasy: flag-waving nationalism. While institutions collapse and GDP shrinks, we’re distracted by weddings worth crores and billionaires throwing tax-funded parties. The rich don’t get arrested. They get NDTV profiles. The poor don’t get justice. They get police files.

This isn’t just India’s problem. This is how power works everywhere. And terrorism? It’s not a belief system. It’s a tool. A tactic. A business. The West perfected it.

Colonial powers used terror to maintain control. Today, the arms industry and foreign policy lobbies use it to justify war budgets and surveillance states. The profit is global. The pain? Always local.

Every blast in Mumbai. Every bullet in Kashmir. Every training camp. Follow the funding, it doesn’t end in Islamabad. It begins in Washington, London, Ottawa, and Canberra.

Pakistan? Just the scapegoat. The West? The ghostwriter. India? Sometimes, the unwitting intern hands them the pen.

Remember when PM Morarji Desai handed Zia-ul-Haq the names of Indian intelligence operatives? RAW’s network in Pakistan was obliterated. Terrorism in Punjab surged. Western countries bankrolled the chaos, from the UK to the U.S., from Canada to Australia.

Still think Pakistan is the sole mastermind? Look again. Think deeper.

Think system. Think sponsors. Think bias.

And if you need one final case study, look westward.

Donald Trump caging children isn’t a glitch. It’s the inevitable result of a country that’s always chosen power over principle. Latin Americans didn’t become “illegals” by choice. U.S.-backed coups and corporate looting wrecked their nations, turning homelands into war zones. The same corporations that caused the collapse now bankroll the border.

When Trump slams the door, he’s not “protecting” America. He’s just making sure the fire he helped start doesn’t reach his front porch.

This is the world now: a place where reality is negotiable but branding is gospel.

Being bad? You can recover. But being बदनाम? That’s a life sentence.

Welcome to a civilization that stopped thinking because someone gave it a label, and it never questioned who wrote it.