Intellectual Honesty – Brown Pundits

Also, wanted to add – Its arguably quite morally lazy to simply sweep the multi-generational struggle of the Baloch for self-determination – if not outright secession, that has repeatedly and consistently raised its voice in speech and in blood over the last 7-8 decades.

Nobody on BP outright denies or pretends that there disaffected secessionist tendencies do not exist in the Sunni Valley. Why then, are we going to pretend that the ‘troubles’ in Balochistan are somehow… inconsequential?

This growing tendency to treat every internal conflict in South Asia as if it were interchangeable with Kashmir (the “Sunni Valley“). This is a mistake, and in the case of Balochistan, a very serious one.

The distinction was once put very clearly to me by Benazir Bhutto herself. In the 1990s, while seeking international advocacy on Kashmir, she was asked by Saddam Hussein a blunt question: If we support Kashmir, why should the world not support Kurdistan? Her reply was immediate and precise. Kashmir, she said, is an international dispute. Kurdistan is not.

That distinction matters, and it still holds.

Kashmir is internationalized by design. It is anchored in UN resolutions, formal bilateral agreements, wars between recognized states, and sustained global diplomatic engagement. It belongs to the same narrow category as Palestine or Cyprus; flashpoints where sovereignty itself is contested between states and therefore cannot be reduced to a domestic matter. Continue reading Why Balochistan Is Not Kashmir

I’ve updated this post (Brown Pundits is not an echo chamber) after realising something important.

What began as a spirited disagreement veered into something darker. It turns out that bombay_badshah, a voice I initially assumed to be new, may not be who he claims to be (I had a hunch but so did Kabir, that BB was HS reincarnated). The posting style, the fixations, the timing; all too familiar. My suspicion is that BB may be a derivative or proxy of HS, previously banned. If true, this was not a genuine disagreement; it was entrapment, bait-and-switch.

In that light, I owe Kabir an apology. He was provoked in bad faith by someone who may be operating behind a mask. And that matters, because here on Brown Pundits, identity isn’t incidental; it shapes perspective, and we respect that. We excavate worldviews, not just opinions.

While I cannot definitively prove that BB is HS, the circumstantial evidence is strong. I will allow BB to remain but if the commentary returns obsessively to Kabir or Pakistan, I will intervene. Everyone is welcome to engage on substance. But this space will not be hijacked.

The original post remains below the jump, unedited but its context has now changed.

Continue reading When the Commentariat lies