Tag: moderation

The Gender Protocol Has Teeth

Thank you, Kabir

KK writes on excellent topics, AI and art among them. He is also almost certainly BB, which makes him KB: Kishore Badshah.

Kabir emailed the admin team about a set of KB’s comments. They attacked a Pakistani female politician. They referred to her looks and used a very offensive, misogynistic term of abuse. The Gender Protocol demands courtesy towards women. KB grossly violated it.

KB has had a 20-comment removal fine. That is a sad outcome, because his comments on AI and art were particularly high signal. It is also a public warning: this behaviour will never be tolerated.

When Kabir stepped out of line last month with his own extremely ugly comments, we held him accountable and left those comments up as a deliberate reminder. The Protocols and Precedents exist for a reason.

Many thanks to Kabir for using the appropriate channel and emailing in these gross violations, which had slipped past us.

We always prioritise the safety and wellbeing of our small community. We also hold very firm redlines on acceptable language, especially towards women, minorities and other marginalised people.

Open Thread: The Courtesy Guidance & the Two Factions (Majority vs. Minority)

  • BP’s two Factions in light of its “Bharat” underpinning?
  • What defines the “Majority”?
  • What does Courtesy Mean in an online forum?

The majority, described

Now that we are Brown, that is Bharat, Pundits, all of us who are the majority share things in common. Five come to mind, and they should be front and centre:

  1. Hindu by birth or Hindu by marriage (broadly Upper Caste social milieu).
  2. India’s borders can never be reduced. Some, myself included, are very much in the Akhand Bharat camp; I see Iran to Indonesia as one vast Indic, Hindu Continental sphere.
  3. Hinduism was oppressed under the Anglo-Islamicate legacy, which has been a mixed blessing at best (that is a most charitable view). The LeLi Brahmin view that we should have been grateful to be chattel under Despots, who professed Islam, is odd.
  4. Dharma has space for all, and that more Hinduism does not mean less secularism; as well as an inclination for more Hindu-Indic symbology in the national discourse.
  5. Broadly supportive of the current government of India and sceptical towards RaGa.
  6. Partition was a mistake and the two-nation theory was not a good idea. Pakistan has not succeeded.

That defines the majority to a very strong extent, and the minority is defined by being against these positions, in whatever combination. We have such a strong majority that all of us agree with it, including the full admin team.

It just so happens that even if I’m not Hindu by birth, I’m definitely Hindu by marriage. My entire social reality, where I engage with Brown people, is Hindu, so I have become an acculturated Hindu. A fortnight ago I said the divide here was ideological, not sectarian; the last week taught me the map is older than the ideology. It’s not Saffron or Crescent, left liberals or right wing. It is the majority versus the minority, and in a weird way we are converging towards what is modern-day India, and really mapping that.

The minority Continue reading Open Thread: The Courtesy Guidance & the Two Factions (Majority vs. Minority)

In Ruchira’s Honour

Ruchira’s daughter Sanjukta shared my tribute on Facebook this week and called it amazing. She does not know me. Her mother did, through nearly two decades of this blog, and that a stranger’s grief could reach her family and land as comfort is the whole case for keeping BP alive. The original post is here, Ruchira’s obituary is here, and her daughter’s own tribute is here.

Rest in peace, dearest Ruchira.

In her honour I have started using “I” again instead of the impersonal “we”. I wanted to emotionally invest in this space the way she did in her interactions online.

Moments like this are what I want to cultivate here, so, two years after I revived the blog here from Chennai.

Continue reading In Ruchira’s Honour

Two House Precedents

We apologise for overriding 0M-3’s excellent post, on Geography is Power, but we are pushing it up and allowing it to breathe.

We also second Kabir’s proposal for a book club, with Midnight’s Children as our inaugural read ahead of India and Pakistan’s Independence anniversaries in mid-August.

One. Online-safety reports go by email. From now, any online-safety violation must reach us by email. That is the investigative channel. If it does not land in the inbox, it is not in front of us, and for our purposes a violation we never see did not happen. Send it to us directly.

Two. What Brown Pundits is about: biodiversity and bio-density. Two aims. Density: a 20 comments per post. Diversity: five voices per thread, not a closed loop of a handful names. A hundred comments from a small circle is a monologue. A hundred from ten is an ecosystem, and the ecosystem is what we are here to keep alive.

A post unlikely to reach either metric may be held in abeyance or returned for reworking.

We have felt the losses. BB stepping back, and Indosaurus before that, cost us more than volume. They were bridges. BB in particular always found the connective tissue to sports and the economy that the rest of us missed. So read this as an open invitation home. We will be reaching out, and if either of you is reading, the room is still yours.

High-Intensity Precedent

Brown Pundits runs on attention. When we put hours into the site, it hums; when work and travel pull us across three jurisdictions at once, it slows. We have a backlog of pieces we want to write and lives that keep getting in the way. The June survey took the wind out of the schedule. We do not want to run this place as full-time editors, and we should not have to.

First, a thing worth saying plainly. Brown Pundits is not a magazine. It is a discussion community with essays attached, and it always has been. The life of the site is the conversation, not the rate of publication. Everything below follows from taking that seriously.

The principle is high-intensity posts. A lot of writing is rewriting, and we want authors to work their pieces hard before they go up. We have noticed the same thing for years. A post that carries real thought and attention never dies at ten or fifteen comments. Fifty is our quiet benchmark. Past a hundred, the thread stops being ours at all and takes on its own life, because people come here to argue with each other and use the post as fodder. Signal pulls signal. Thin posts pull nothing.

The rules:

  1. Fresh original writing is the post. Work it hard, put it up on its own, and let the comments run. This is the essay, and it keeps standing where it always has.
  2. Reposts do not each get a post. Links, columns, reviews, the odd video, other people’s work: these stack into a single running thread, one per author or theme. The author upranks the newest entry to the top, refreshes the timestamp, and lets the curation gather in one place. One dense thread beats ten thin link-drops that die overnight.
  3. Open threads, where the general cross-talk lives, stay scarce. We open a new one only when the current thread crosses fifty to a hundred comments, or once a week, whichever comes first. Two or three live threads, not twenty.

The obvious worry is that a long thread walls out newcomers. It does not, because the newest entry always sits on top, and the open threads rotate weekly or at a hundred, so the live conversation is never buried under a year of history.

An example. A contributor who shares a steady stream of links, a column here, a book review there, the odd YouTube, keeps one running thread for the lot instead of a dozen one-line posts. Each new link goes to the top. The older ones stay underneath. The regulars know exactly where to find it and argue about it, and the thread grows heavier and more valuable every week instead of vanishing down the feed in a day.

That is the whole idea. Original essays worked harder, reposts gathered in one place, cross-talk kept to a few live threads. We stay a discussion community with essays attached. We are just building better rooms for the discussion to happen in. Less churn for us, more weight for you.

The Crescent has a sharp edge

Context in BP is cumulative, mes amis.

As we know, certain members of the Crescentiate remain emotionally invested in Pakistan, and certain members of the Saffroniate respond by undermining Pakistan. Neither tendency is a criticism in itself, we try to keep as few Shibboleths as possible in BP.

As an aside the Crescentiate are “Zionesque” (or perhaps more appropriate Jinnahesque) in the sense of preferring Pakistan to Islam.

What is a criticism is repeatedly reaching across that line, eliciting the predictable reaction, and then presenting oneself as the neutral party once it arrives. This is a small community with a very long memory. The personality maps build over time, and we remember who did what first.

The Crescentiate, with whom Sbarrkum is aligned, correctly called Iran the victor in this year’s confrontation with the United States and Israel, a reading the Saffroniate has refused to grant. We deeply dislike the regime but acknowledge that its valiant defence of the homeland may augur new glimmerings for the Ummah (we are who we imagine ourselves to be hence why psych warfare is so dangerous).

Getting Indian Classical Music Wrong

For instance, to tell our resident ethnomusicologist, an academic at Pakistan’s top university (Ivy+ crawls with LUMS researchers), that his field is entirely Hindu is ahistorical. Lest we be accused of green-washing, we prefer the Indian Continent be called Jambudvīpa.

Let's dive into the forgotten map of the ancients - Jambudvipa as described in our Puranas & Itihasas. This isn't just geography, it's cosmic cartography: mapping realms of humans, Devas, Nagas, Gandharvas

But we are also appreciative of historical truth: all major khayal gharanas have Muslim founders, converts or otherwise. Islam has long since moved past the mawali stage.

Imam Bukhari, compiler of Sahih al-Bukhari and the most authoritative hadith scholar in Sunni Islam, had a great-grandfather who was a Zoroastrian convert and mawla of the Banu Ju’fa.

So when someone is triggered, we will look to understand whether the trigger is justified, and what “triggered” the trigger, before acting.

Parliament at her Best:

Remember this is Parliament. And in Parliament, the curious thing is that members of opposing benches are often more cordial with one another than they are with members of their own party. The hostility you see across the aisle is theatre. The knife-work happens at home.

We moderate by nunchi, not by formula, encouraging congeniality both within and across the benches.

the Shah and the Saint

A month ago the Shah wrote to the Saint:

Naah it is a good film… I will make you say Bharat Mata ki Jai by infiltrating into Pakistan and pointing a gun at your head.

The threat to Kabir, however jocularly framed, is the trigger. BB has a habit of strict adherence to the Letter of the Law while frantically attempting to violate its Spirit, and BP’s continued tolerance is contingent on Kabir’s goodwill. If Kabir lodges a reasonable complaint, the sanction escalates.

The next rung is a 40-comment fine and a one-week revocation of authorial and commentator privileges. This applies to BB under any handle or avatar as a lasting Precedent.

We are not heavy-handed and Authorial Autonomy deeply matters to us, but the issue is what the transgression actually was. We want genuine contrition, not a mea culpa followed by the old tricks in slightly more sophisticated form.

Pakistani Centrists, Not Muslim Extremists

A Precedent note

The most important thing to understand about the Pakistani voices on this site is that they are centrists, not extremists. Kabir, El Khawaja, S Qureishi: none of them is a fringe figure in Pakistani society. They are roughly where a literate, urban, employed Pakistani sits, and that fact deserves attention.

It deserves attention because India, over the last decade, has stopped engaging with Pakistanis altogether. Visas have collapsed. Cricket is gone. Cinema is gone. Academic exchange is gone. The everyday oxidation of one society against another, the slow correction by which extreme positions get rounded down through exposure to people who hold different ones, has been switched off. What is left is each side talking to itself about the other.

Brown Pundits is one of the few places where that has not happened.

The thread that prompted this note will illustrate. A week ago, S Qureishi observed that the only downside of the Islamic Revolution was that “there is no OnlyFans.” We were deeply offended by this line seriously enough to write the next piece on counterfactual analysis of Iranian society. Q then returned, under another post, with a fuller thesis: female sexuality must be controlled to sustain a civilisation. Pressed on enforcement, he listed disownment, violence, lawsuits, vandalism. Finally when pressed on honour killing, he admitted it was “horrible” and “immoral.”

Three voices took shape on the thread. The most salient asked that the comment be deleted as misogynist.

We are not deleting it.

We disagree with Q on almost every line he wrote. The thesis that female autonomy is the load-bearing crack in civilisation is one we reject in full. The post on Virginity Policing that triggered this thread was our own. But Q is not a Taliban spokesman. He is a Pakistani who, when challenged in writing by other commenters, was forced to articulate his position, defend it under hostile examination, and concede that violence is wrong. That is not platforming. That is engagement. It is the slow work India has decided it no longer needs to do.

Continue reading Pakistani Centrists, Not Muslim Extremists

Kabir, the Anchor of the Crescent

Dissent Must Have a Home

The parent post set out why the house speaks in the plural and why pruning widens the room. This post sets out the harder discipline. A plural voice that cannot bind itself is not a voice. It is a whip. And a forum that cannot bind its Founders is not a forum. It is their salon.

The Crescent anchor.

When Brown Pundits was revived, two commentators returned before anyone else. Kabir was one of them. sbarrkum was the other. That mattered more than any traffic number. A forum lives by the return of people willing to argue in public, under their own names or their settled masks, on a schedule that does not flinch.

Kabir matters for a second reason. The Centre gathers quietly and often overlaps with the Saffron bench in instinct or historical frame. The Crescent bloc on this site is essentially held together by Kabir. Remove him and the others do not regroup under a new flag. They drift.

Without Kabir, Brown Pundits will become a site where Muslims are written about more than they are written by.

Continue reading Kabir, the Anchor of the Crescent

Founder Sites and Institutional Sites: A Note on Sikh Sacred Geography

This post is to be treated as Precedent on two matters.

First, on moderation

We have been alerted by Hamza that a number of Pakistani commentators on this site have been using anti-Dravidian racialised language against South Indian communities. This will not be tolerated on Brown Pundits.

Any comment that uses racialised language against Dravidian, Tamil, or South Indian communities will be removed, and the offending commenter will have twenty comments removed instantly as an automatic fine. There is no warning phase.

This is personal as well as editorial. DLV’s family was driven out of Sindh by Muhajirs at Partition. It was the Dravidians and the Tamils of Chennai who welcomed them, gave them a second home, and treated them as their own. Any racialised language against those communities on this site will be met with the full weight of the moderation tools available.

To Kabir’s credit, as far as we are aware, he is the only regular Pakistani voice on this blog who has never used racialised language of any kind, even in sharp disagreement. He remains institutional and high-minded even when the argument turns to nuclear rattling. He does not share in the wider Desi pathology with regards to skin colour and race, and that exception is worth naming. It may be the American side of him. Whatever the source, it is the standard this site expects of every commenter, Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, or otherwise.

Second, on substance

The post below establishes a framework for how this site will discuss the sacred geographies of Partition going forward. The recent Kabir-Kishore exchange on Sikh holy places, is the occasion, but the framework is intended to apply across all such disputes: Hindu sites in Pakistan, Muslim sites in India, Sikh sites on both sides of the Wagah, Buddhist sites across the subcontinent. Future BP posts on sacred geography should refer back to the founder-institutional distinction laid out here.

Founder Sites and Institutional Sites: A Note on Sikh Sacred Geography

A recent exchange on this site sets out two claims about Sikh holy places. The first says Sikhs lost most of their sacred sites to Pakistan in 1947. The second calls that claim nonsense. Both are right, and the disagreement turns on a distinction neither has named: founder sites versus institutional sites.

The Pakistan-side Holy Sites

Continue reading Founder Sites and Institutional Sites: A Note on Sikh Sacred Geography

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