This isn’t about censorship. It’s about moderation with intent; not to control voices, but to preserve conditions for honest discourse. Liberalism doesn’t mean indulging in trolling. Open spaces need guardrails to stay open; otherwise they corrode into noise. This leads naturally to one of the most charged terms in our recent conversations: civilizational state.
What does that mean and who gets to define it? At its core, a civilizational state is not just a modern political unit. It is a nation that sees itself as the living continuation of an ancient, layered cultural memory; one that predates colonial borders, constitutions, and electoral math. It’s not about exclusion. It’s about historical anchoring.
By this definition, India that is Bharat is a civilizational state. That doesn’t make it Hindutva. The two are not synonymous. One is a heritage; the other is a reaction. India’s civilizational foundations are undoubtedly rooted in Hindu cosmology but they’ve also been shaped by Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Islamic, and modern secular traditions. There is no contradiction in this unless one insists on one.
Phrases like Akhand Bharat make some contributors uncomfortable — and that’s a valid response. For some, the term evokes imperial nostalgia. For others, it reflects a cultural continuum that was artificially partitioned. The point is: these ideas aren’t threats. They’re memories, and like all memories, they deserve discussion not erasure.
If Pakistan today imagines itself entirely severed from India, from Hinduism, from the subcontinent’s deeper history then it loses not just proximity, but part of its own cultural self. Just as India cannot be fully understood without the Islamic, Persianate, and colonial legacies that shaped it in turn.
This is the kind of conversation Brown Pundits is built to host not to resolve, but to hold. Not to homogenize, but to sharpen. We’re not a publication. We’re a forum. And forums require not just writers, but editors, moderators, readers, and some institutional backbone. It’s fair to discuss paying contributors, building a sustainable budget, and clarifying rules of discourse.
Above all, it’s fair to say that ideology should not be a litmus test. Honest disagreement sharpens thought; dogma dulls it.