Reams of digital pages on this forum have been devoted to India–Pakistan relations and the broader Hindu–Muslim, or Muslim–non-Muslim, conflict. I think most of these discussions miss the crucial issue at the heart of these conflicts.
I will try to navigate to that core. This particular reflection was triggered by a news item that broke recently:
If, twelve years into the Modi government’s Hindutva agenda, a dozen educated Muslim employees can allegedly engineer a conversion racket in TCS—with all its POSH and diversity guidelines—one wonders what Muslim radicals might get away with in majority-Muslim countries.
One doesn’t need to wonder. A Dawn report from 2014 alleged that around 1,000 non-Muslim girls are forcibly converted and married off every year. Even if the number is 100, that is a huge number for 2-3% of population. The demographic change in East Bengal over the last eight decades is a testament to these currents.
A meditation on conflict, identity, and the severed wings of Mother India
The Name
A small irony to begin: the blog is Brown Pundits, not Brown Pandas. Though Brown Pandas has a certain charm; large, slow-moving, occasionally comic, surprisingly fierce when cornered. Perhaps not so different.
What Is Happening Here
Look at the comment boards today. We have a serious thread on the Aryan Migration Theory; which needs its own Precedent Post, and will get one. We have Indians and Pakistanis locked in the same mutual obsession that has consumed multiple generations post-Independence, the energy of which, if properly directed, might have built something extraordinary.
Here is the paradox that strikes us: the mutual antipathy between India and Pakistan, Iran and Israel, is not only destructive. It is, in a strange and uncomfortable way, generative. These four states, small by population or GDP relative to the great powers, have nonetheless forced themselves into the front rank of military and strategic relevance. China displaced Japan; the Anglo-French condominium displaced Germany; America and Russia defined the twentieth century. Yet India, Pakistan, Iran, and Israel sit alongside them at the table where it matters. That is not nothing.
Conflict, at a certain calibration, makes nations. The Romans knew it. The Persians knew it. The question is dosage. Too much tension and you get stasis, poverty, the endless self-consumption of the security state. Too little and you get complacency. The great irony is that India and Pakistan have had almost exactly the wrong calibration; enough conflict to militarise, not enough resolution to grow. The long peace that compounds prosperity never arrived.
Perhaps, like the Qinling Panda; brown, shrunken, diverged for three hundred thousand years before anyone thought to ask why. The Brown world is simply waiting to be recognised for what it always was.
We need to have a honest discussion about censorship on BP. We have a contributing author who demands and exercises the right to “ban” other contributing authors from commenting on ‘his’ threads. This, while continuing to spout distinctly one-eyed perspectives and cherry-picked regurgitated content.
Do we want BP to be a space with ‘dueling’ threads, or actual discourse? If Indians and Pakistanis can’t even manage a written conversation on a blog post via comments, without arbitrary petty ‘bans’ justified in the name of “I simply don’t like you” – this is the sort of thing that ends up having a disproportionate impact on the nature of what this space is.
