That’s why I said “South Asian context”.

And you are making the same mistake again.

Hindi is not the only “Indian” language. Urdu is also “Indian”.

Like you have said – Arabic, Persian then Urdu. Urdu. Not Punjabi. Not Sindhi. Not Pashto.

Urdu IS and ALWAYS will be an Indian language.

Brazil having more Portuguese speakers than Portugal won’t make it a Latin American language. It will still be European. Quecha, Guyarani, Maya are Latin American languages.

Similarly USA having more English speakers than England won’t make it a North American language.

Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Balochi are the native languages of Pakistan.

Urdu originated geographically in the upper Ganga-Yamuna doab, in and around the Delhi region, where Khari Boli was spoken. Urdu shared a grammatical foundation with Khari Boli, but was written in a revised Perso-Arabic script and included vocabulary borrowed from Persian and Arabic, which retained its original grammatical structure in those languages.

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Urdu and Hindi are closely related. They share a common, predominantly Sanskrit- and Prakrit-derived, vocabulary base, phonology, syntax, and grammar, making them mutually intelligible during colloquial communication.

Don’t tell me about Ghazals.

You are factually wrong (you love “facts” so much). The ghazal originated in Arabic poetry, then became a genre of Persian poetry and finally a genre of Urdu poetry.

The “Gh” sound in Ghazal doesn’t even exist in Hindi. So that’s an indication.

Even in the South Asian context, Ghazals are Indian and not native to Pakistan.

The Indo-Islamic culture that Pakistanis claim including the language Urdu are all Indian, originating in the Ganga-Yamuna belt.

People belong to Punjabi/Sindhi/Baloch ethnic groups.

But they wouldn’t even know about this ”indic or iranic’ classficiation, which seems to be pretty top down. It’s a linguistic classification based on the language tree and does not denote ethnicity.

The average Muslim Gujjar in Peshawar that you would classify as Indic has much more in common with his Pakthun neighbour than he does with any regional ethnic group in India.

It was a publicly available comment.

But I don’t want to litigate this.

As I said, if he revises his tone with me, I’m prepared to reconsider my policy.

But I will not allow nastiness towards me or my country. That includes passive aggression.

if you have banned him from your threads, you cannot then refer to him in your threads.

what is good for the goose is good for the gander.

Thank you.

If someone makes a publicly available comment surely there is no cause for complaint if I refer to it in a post.

The only reason I have “banned” RNJ from my posts is that he takes a very nasty tone about me and my country. If he were to stop doing that, I have no problem letting him make constructive comments.

that’s perfectly fine; our Moderation efforts are getting stressed at the moment.

We expect more from our Regulars. We’ve been more than lenient this weekend but going forward we will go back to arbitrary mass deletions and revocation of Author.

People can’t go on flouting the rules; it makes a mockery of the process.

RNJ made a comment about Pakistani TV banning commemoration of Asha ji’s death. I referred to that in “Overzealous PEMRA”.

I will not refer to him in future. But I will not allow his nasty anti-Pakistan comments on my threads. This is a red line.

I apologize.

BB had a complete meltdown. If I make one snarky comment, surely this can be understood in context.

Admin Addendum: Kabir, you know the rules, and that you should refer inappropriate comments to Admin rather than respond in kind with racist dog whistling.