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, 2026There 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 HeadsFor 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 has already allowed Pakistan to become the measure and ceiling of its own self-understanding about everything.Meaning of national identitiesThe question that has been asked of the habitants of South Asia as they formulated an idea of a political state was, can a people divided by religion, language, caste and ethnicity govern themselves as equals? Pakistan was founded upon the answer no. India, whatever her failures and hypocrisies, was founded upon the answer yes, or at least upon the conviction that yes was a wager worth making every single day. That wager is India’s founding inheritance. And this question had survived, through many ups and downs, in ordinary acts of coexistence, in mundane constitutional habits, and in the daily insistence that disagreement need not become disintegration.The protest underway at Sansad Marg, New Delhi, July 20, 2026. Photo: PTI/Salman Ali.Or at least it was before 2014. Since then, we have answered that question about ourselves in ways exactly as Pakistan has answered. In fact, the Pakistani progressive poet Fahmida Riaz wrote a poem ‘Tum bilkul hum jaise nikle’ (You turned out to be just like us) after the Babri demolition pointing at how India while grandstanding about secularism and diversity ended up being just a mirror of Pakistan.Perhaps that is why the recent reactions from Pakistan mattered so much. What those young people were responding to was on surface perhaps just a protest. But underneath that, they were responding to an argument about what a nation can afford to permit itself. They saw citizens demanding accountability without imagining that doing so diminished the love for their country. They saw women occupying public space with fierce strength and without apology. They saw religious, linguistic and social diversity not as an obstacle to collective action but as its very condition. Somewhere between their cheering and their laughter was also a realisation that this was a kind of patriotism, that they were deprived of. That this version of India, progressive, pluralistic, secular and diverse, was aspirational to Pakistan. Perhaps a million Dhurandhars (experts) would not get you this kind of cultural capital.The irony that should not be lost on us.Police in New Delhi during the youth protest on July 20, 2026. Photo: PTI/Gurinder Osan.For years, this government has attempted to persuade Pakistan that India is stronger through demonstrations of military resolve, diplomatic isolation and nationalist confidence. Yet none of these have penetrated the Pakistani imagination in quite the way a few days of democratic contestation did. Decades of carefully cultivated hard power achieved less than a handful of students holding placards.That is because soft power has very little to do with what governments usually imagine it to be.Joseph Nye’s famous formulation of “soft power” is too often reduced to cinema, cuisine and culture. But soft power is ultimately admiration for a society’s moral confidence, for its willingness to remain visible even in disagreement with itself. Any authoritarian state can export films, music or food. What it cannot export is the image of its own citizens publicly questioning authority without the entire edifice collapsing into fear. A protest that survives contact with the state without ending in disappearance or death says something infinitely more persuasive than a hundred carefully produced advertisements. It tells the world that the nation is confident enough to survive being challenged by its own people.That confidence, more than prosperity or military strength, is what Pakistani youngsters appeared to recognise. They were not admiring India’s perfection, which this government and her followers wanted it to. They ended up admiring her imperfections and her capacity for self-correction. They saw a country still willing to argue with itself. And perhaps, in those moments, they were also imagining what their own country might have looked like had it made different choices about citizenship, dissent and power.The tragedy is that India herself seems increasingly reluctant to believe in the very qualities that others continue to admire.Nations and their founding mythsAspirational myths matter for countries because they always remind them of their unfinished business, they engage nations in the process of constantly bettering them. The US built much of its global influence around the idea of itself as a city upon a hill. The mythology is deeply imperfect, and often hypocritical, but it nevertheless has provided generations of Americans with a language through which to demand that their republic become better than it was. A scuffle between a police official and the demonstrators during a protest organised by Students Islamic Organisation of India (SIO) demanding the resignation of Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan over the NEET paper leak issue and against the police action on students in the Delhi’s ‘Chalo Sansad’ march, in Hyderabad on July 24, 2026. Photo: PTI.India’s aspiration was even more audacious. While the US promised liberty as her founding myth, India promised that extraordinary difference itself could become the foundation of a nation. That hundreds of languages, dozens of faiths, countless ethnicities and histories could inhabit one constitutional home and call themselves equal citizens. It is perhaps the most ambitious democratic experiment humanity has attempted. Chaotic, argumentative, contradictory, and deeply, almost irrationally, hopeful.This is the India that captures imaginations. This is the India that makes her beautiful. And this is certainly the India that makes it worth fighting for her.But the faithful bhakts do not understandA political movement that speaks incessantly of its hatred for Pakistan often appears strangely committed to reproducing Pakistan’s central anxiety, merely with the religious majorities reversed. If Pakistan emerged from the belief that religious identity must determine political belonging, then what exactly is being defeated by constructing a Hindu version of that same logic? One does not refute the two-nation theory by reversing its protagonists. One refutes it by making it intellectually obsolete.Also read: In Defence of the Profanity of ProtestersImagine, instead, what becomes possible if an Indian Muslim can demonstrate, not through vague constitutional promises alone screamed at us from election pulpits but through the ordinary evidence of everyday life, that she is freer, safer, more prosperous and more equal than her counterpart across the border. Imagine what happens to the foundational argument of Pakistan if millions of Muslims voluntarily become the living proof that pluralism offers not merely coexistence but a richer and more meaningful life.Ideas are not defeated by speeches or ‘mann ki baat (speaking from the heart)’. They are defeated when we create a reality that begins to embarrass the centrality of that idea itself. That is why pluralism must not be seen simply as a moral virtue. But as India’s greatest instrument of statecraft.What those young Pakistani kids sawThe young Pakistanis, on the internet, who watched those protests were watching the Indian Gen Z stand up against tyranny and yet have the time of their lives. But perhaps those young Pakistanis were not really watching a protest at all. Perhaps they were watching a country remember itself. They were watching an India that has not disappeared, only receded beneath years of louder certainties. They were watching a people argue with power without mistaking power for the nation itself. That distinction between the state of India and the country of India, between government of India and the civilisational India, is what has always made India improbable.Footwear collected after the July 20 ‘Chalo Sansad’ protest is displayed at Jantar Mantar on July 22 as a symbol of the police crackdown. Photo: PTI.But remembering is not the same as earning. Not while a country that boasts of feeding the world’s largest democracy still cannot say the words Muslim, Dalit, Kashmiri, adivasi in the same breath as the word citizen without someone in the room flinching. A nation must not get credit for a memory it has not yet acted on.The tragedy in all this is not that Pakistan still believes in the logic of the two-nation theory. The tragedy is that India increasingly behaves as though it does too.And yet, for a few improbable days, somewhere between an Indian protest and a Pakistani student smiling into a phone camera, another possibility announced itself. That countries do not attain greatness by the enemies they defeat. They become great by the futures they persuade others are still possible. If India is to remain an answer to the question asked in 1947, then she must first recover the confidence to become the country that, for a fleeting moment this week, Pakistani children thought they were looking at.Raj Shekhar is based out of San Francisco and works in the area of data privacy regulations. He also occasionally contributes as a freelancer writing on politics and runs a podcast on politics called the Bharatiya Junta Podcast.