One interesting facet of caste is how it shapes the idea of honour. Two states with the worst sex ratios are Haryana and Gujarat. Not all communities do female infanticide and it is two castes in particular that have damaged their state. In Haryana, it is the Jat and in Gujarat, it is the Patidar, especially of the Charotar belt, who have lowered the ratio for the whole state.

Unlike the Jat, however, the Patel does not do honour killing. The reason is that the Patel belongs to a wider mercantile culture imposed on Gujarat by the Jains. This culture stresses compromise and self-interest and pragmatism. There is no premium on ‘honour’ through violence. We cannot honour ourselves. It is our society that honours us. Jat society, unlike that of the Patel, is martial. And in warrior societies the honour of the family is reposed in the body of the woman.

Let us see how this phenomenon of honour in caste affects other religions and, particularly, how it has affected Pakistan. The conversion of Indians is the conversion of castes. One striking feature here is how few of our mercantile castes converted to Islam or to Christianity. The only major caste I know of which has done so is the Lohana of western Gujarat and Sindh. This same caste has produced individuals like Kotak, Premji, Advani, Jinnah and Khorakiwala.

Gujarat is fortunate that it has outstanding mercantile communities among its Sunnis and Shias. No other Indian state has this asset. Undivided Punjab did, but the Partition of Punjab by faith was also a partition of its castes.

In 1947, Pakistan lost the Khatri-Arora combine that today dominates Delhi’s economy. My hypothesis is that the division of the Punjabi nation, a coherent state of 33 million people of all castes, in 1947 produced a Pakistani Punjab that was heavily weighted in favour of the peasant castes.

How do we know this? Because of the British census. In the 1881 Census, of the 1.7 million members of mercantile and trading communities in Punjab, only 4% — less than 75,000 men and women — were Muslim. This is because “conversion was negligible from the higher castes, such as Brahmins, Aroras, Khatris and Aggarwals” (Census of India, 1931).

In his Ethnology of India, Sir George Campbell describes the Khatris in these words: “Besides monopolising the trade of the Panjab and the greater part of Afghanistan, and doing a good deal beyond those limits, they are in the Panjab the chief civil administrators and have almost all literate work in their hands… No village can get on without the Khatri who keeps the accounts, does the banking business and buys and sells the grain… They are the only Hindus known in Central Asia.”

In his work Panjab Castes, Denzil Ibbetson writes that of the 419,139 Khatris in all, only “some 2,600 are Muslim”. The Arora, according to Ibbetson, “is the trader par excellence of the Jatki-speaking or south-western portion of Panjab, that is to say of the lower valleys of our five rivers; while higher up their courses he shares that position with the Khatri… He is found throughout Afghanistan and even Turkistan, and is the Hindu trader of those countries…”

The few Muslim merchants remaining in Punjab were called Khojas, who were either Khatri or Arora converts, and Parachas. The Khojas retained some Hindu features. In A Glossary of Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province, H A Rose writes of the Muslim Parachas: “The Parachas know the Hindi character and nearly all of them keep accounts in Hindi like Hindus”, indicating that they were converts from mercantile castes.

To really understand Pakistan, we must see it through the lens of caste, not religion.

How does all of this relate to the current crisis? While we decide what our course of action should be following the attack on Uri, do we have sufficient analysis of why Pakistan behaves the way it does?

Why does it seem unable to let go of violence, even when its self-interest is damaged?

My view is that it does so because Pakistani Punjab, which is 60% of the country’s population and from where 80% of its army is recruited, does not have internal restraint. Those Punjabis — Khatris, Banias, Aroras — who might have counselled pragmatism and self-interest over honour are gone. What remains is a warlike peasant community that is Jat-dominated in its thinking and insufficiently modern to escape its caste culture. Landing a few blows on the enemy brings it honour even though the long-term consequence is that the economy is gutted.