Brown Pundits

As Brown Pundits returns to a steadier rhythm, I want to clarify a few things that have come up during the recent arguments, walkouts, and personal attacks. The charge that the blog “leans” one way or another has become common: some say it is too Saffron, others say it is anti-Indian. This is predictable. It is also wrong.

My decisions as Admin have never been based on political alignment. They come from something deeper:

the civilizational context of the speaker.

There is a difference between criticism that comes from within a tradition, and criticism that comes from outside it. A Dharmic voice attacking India or Hindu society is part of an internal quarrel; a family fight inside a civilizational frame. I treat that as internal dissent, even when I disagree with most of it.

A critique that comes from an Abrahamic frame reads very differently. I know that worldview well. I know its instincts, its myths of moral supremacy, its rhetorical tricks, and its hostility to plural traditions. So I scrutinize it more closely.

That is not bias. That is context.

This also explains why some people were frustrated about moderation choices. But the real problem was simpler: for several months, the editors were not doing their job. Delegation failed. Moderation failed. Oversight failed. This strained the entire comment ecosystem and created the conditions for an outrage cycle.

The recent Sri Lanka post is a perfect example of what the blog should highlight. It captured the psychological cost of a civil war that most South Asians ignore. It cut through nationalist posturing and forced readers to confront a real tragedy. That is the purpose of this space. BP is not only a place for endless India–Pakistan sparring. Those fights bring traffic, but they do not deepen understanding.

The blow-up around caste revealed the same problem. The people who claim caste “does not matter” often reveal how central it is to their worldview. When the conversation touched anything sensitive, the same voices who lecture others on “free speech” vanished into a hartal. The moment you discuss caste honestly, you become their enemy.

That was the real trigger; not any one commenter.

The worst part of this episode was the personal abuse I received. One email in particular was dehumanizing in a way that should be unacceptable anywhere, let alone here. The fact that it came from someone inducted onto the blog without proper vetting only made it worse. I was disappointed that this happened at all, and I have made it clear that it will not happen again. Going forward, I alone will approve new authors, aside from Razib, who I see as an ultimate authority. No exceptions.

This is not about ego, control, or insecurity. I am at peace with who I am, what I have built, and where I stand.

This is about responsibility. The person who carries the daily load of the site must also have control over who participates in shaping it. Authority without accountability is chaos; accountability without authority is impossible.

Brown Pundits works only when people argue honestly, write fearlessly, and disagree without turning each other into caricatures. We will get things wrong. We will over-moderate or under-moderate. But the only thing worse than imperfection is paralysis.

Silence is death for a blog. Engagement, messy, uneven, contentious, is life.

BP is alive again. Let’s keep it that way.

By Sbarrkum

Every country carries its wounds, but some of us carry them in our bodies. I rarely speak about Sri Lanka’s civil war on this blog, because most of us have learned, painfully, to move on. But sometimes a comment or a casual reference to the LTTE pulls open a door that many of us have spent decades trying to close gently.

For me, this is not rhetoric. It is family history.

Two of my cousins were killed in the late 1980s; one by the LTTE, the other by the Army. Two more relatives were tortured. During the worst years, mobs came to burn down our home because they suspected we were Tamil. My mother stood outside, spoke to them calmly in Sinhalese, and convinced them to leave. That is how close violence came to us; literally to our doorstep.

I myself was arrested twice on suspicion of being an LTTE operative. I spent two days in police remand and was beaten with a belt. Friends who happened to witness the arrest intervened and contacted someone who could get me out. Had I remained until Monday, I would have been taken before a judge and sent to the notorious Boosa Prison. Many never returned from there.

I also lost people I cared about deeply. My late partner’s parents were among the sixty villagers killed in a single LTTE attack. In the area where I live, nearly every family lost someone; a brother, a father, a cousin, a neighbour.

Most Sri Lankans have made their peace with the past. We have had to. The country could not function otherwise. But when the conflict is invoked lightly or abstractly, without awareness of the cost paid by ordinary people, it reminds me how easily those of us outside the centre of global conversation are forgotten.

This is not a demand for silence. It is simply a reminder:

For many of us, this history is not theoretical. It is personal, lived, and unbearably real.