The spirit of Brown Pundits has always been dialogue — open, searching, and at times, fierce. But dialogue only flourishes when it is consistent and principled.

Recently, a contradiction has emerged in Kabir’s contributions: applying one set of standards to India and Pakistan, and a different set to Israel. This has led to repeated cycles of disruption, rather than genuine exchange.

To preserve the integrity of our space, Kabir’s participation will be paused until this inconsistency is clarified (we will remove any of his comments that do not address and acknowledge the contradiction; we will also remove any replies to his comments). This is not censorship, but stewardship. Free speech here is not about endless repetition; it is about coherence, accountability, and respect for the whole.

🕊️ On Confirmation, Coincidence, and the Return of Brown Pundits

Exactly one year ago today, 17 September 2024, I published a piece titled “The Battle for the Taj Mahal: India’s Sacred Lands & Waqf Boards Under Fire”.

At the time, Brown Pundits was stirring from hibernation. Readership had dwindled to near-zero, the commentariat was dormant, and the site, once lively and interrogative in its heyday, felt like a forgotten archive. That post, like so many others before it, was written in solitude. There was no traction, no expectation. Just thought, laid down with care.

And yet here we are, one year to the day, and the blog has roared back to life.

📿 What the Baháʼí Tradition Calls “Confirmation”

In the Baháʼí tradition, we don’t reduce these moments to mere coincidence. Instead, we speak of confirmation; divine endorsement coupled with meaningful alignment. A subtle assurance that what was offered in silence may still echo in relevance.

Sometimes, truth takes time. It must be planted, and it must ripen. And then, if the conditions are right, it re-emerges at the very moment it’s needed again.

🏛️ Revisiting the Taj & the Sacredness of Land

That post, exploring Waqf Boards, sacred lands, and the Taj Mahal’s place in India’s civilizational memory, was written in a moment of saturation. Too many headlines, too little context. My intention wasn’t to settle the argument, but to recast it: What makes land sacred? Who has the right to remember? Who gets to reclaim?

Reading it now, what’s striking is not just how relevant it remains, but how the same debate has reassembled; not just thematically, but almost ritually, with new voices circling back in familiar orbits.

🌀 Same Debate, Same Deflection

And so we arrive back, with uncanny symmetry, to Kabir. He’s long argued that nations must be judged by their own internal frameworks:

India by its Nehruvian ideals, Pakistan by its Islamic identity. And yet, when it comes to Israel, the logic crumbles.vHe reject the term “Israeli Arabs” (a legal and domestic classification) and insist instead on “Palestinian citizens of Israel,” while simultaneously claiming they are “oppressed” despite full citizenship, political representation, and democratic protection under Israeli law.

He cites Haneen Zoabi as understandable evidence of systemic oppression. By the same token what happened to Asia Bibi, imprisoned for years under Pakistan’s blasphemy law, menaced by mobs, and left stateless within her own homeland is far far worse.

If one’s framework is:

• “India must be judged by its stated ideals,”

• “Pakistan (& Iran) must be judged by its religious charter,”

• But “Israel must be judged by emotional grievance, not law” —

Then we’re not engaged in intellectual inquiry. We’re navigating selective outrage posing as critique.

🧭 Free Speech Requires Coherence

This isn’t about censorship;  it’s about consistency.

When contradictions like these go unresolved, one’s contributions begin to feel less like principled disagreement and more like rhetorical sabotage. We don’t need agreement, but we do need logic.

This discussion is about Israel proper, not the occupied territories. And his refusal to apply his own framework of “domestic constitutional judgment” is noted. He must clarify his position. Otherwise, I’ll have to consider a moderation pause.

Free speech, after all, is a pillar of this space but not when it’s wielded to derail dialogue with bad-faith inconsistency.

🌱 Final Thought

That this post — one year old to the day — has circled back into relevance feels like more than coincidence. It feels like confirmation. That truth, once written, waits. That arguments, once made, still matter. That Brown Pundits, once dormant, still has a role to play.

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My reading of the paper is that Muslim inheritance law (which divides the estates more or less equally) prevented capital accumulation to the same extent as Hindu family law. Essentially the Hindu joint family concept was very similar (structurally) to the joint-stock corporation; allowing mercantile Hindu families (especially in Western India) to rapidly accumulate capital and also move on to professional management sectors (as Sereno mentions in the previous post; privilege encompasses both financial, educational and social capital).

Furthermore Islam’s prohibition on credit made the waqf’s (essentially Islamic family trusts) less liquid and unable to allow Muslim families to fully take advantage of the assets that they controlled.

After the jump I’ve excerpted two paragraphs from the paper that touch on both the above points.

The four non-conforming Muslim castes (Khojas, Memons, Bohras and Ghiarasis – the last I had never heard of) were the only ones who maintained their pre-conversion Hindu family practises (Dina Wadia argued that the Quaid’s family estate should be divided as per Hindu law owing to his Khoja origins).

As for Hindus accustomed to the joint-family enterprise, the joint-stock company offered opportunities to pool resources across family lines. It thus enabled them to enter sectors exhibiting substantial economies of scale and scope. Through the joint-family enterprise, Hindus could already invest for the long term without locking resources into a particular sector. However, the scale of their operations was no longer limited by their own family’s resources. A complementary advantage of shifting resources to joint-stock companies was access to the professional management of a managing agency. 

One might wonder why the waqf was not used to finance industrial enterprises. First of all, the waqf was not conducive to supplying the liquid capital needs of such enterprises. The rules, as widely understood, required the waqf endowment to consist exclusively of real estate. Second, the capital of a waqf was not sufficiently fungible. If a waqf ’s capital consisted of five stores, by tradition those stores could be swapped for similar stores with the permission of a judge; converting the stores into a factory would have required legal reinterpretations. For both these reasons, as the British exodus opened up new opportunities, preexisting Indian waqfs could not be adapted to new needs.

froginthewellsays:

May 13, 2018 at 9:29 am

In democracies, voting patterns and their consequences are quite complicated, because parties are not single-interest groups; they are umbrella coalitions of various interest groups, sometimes conflicting with each other, and moreover one gets exactly one vote to express one’s opinion on a whole range of issues from religion to infrastructure development to education. Being a politician is all about monkey-balancing between these interest groups. This is why I don’t call the ideology of, say Modi, as either nectarine or poisonous: simply put, he (or other politicians) has no ideology, and his focus is how to do actions with high marginal value for the purpose of his votes. If you are strongly committed to an ideology or principle, you cannot become a politician. (In particular, I am not a fan of Modi: of course he is an unprincipled charlatan like anyone else).

Almost all of India’s academia, Indian Administrative Service (IAS), IFS (Indian Foreign Service), Indian Railways, Indian Police Service (IPS), Bollywood, and Indian cultural elite are dominated by post modernist philosophy. Most know little to nothing about eastern philosophy; and the majority of what they think they know is a misunderstanding. A majority have a subtle contempt for eastern philosophy and spirituality; but it is not based on studying eastern philosophy or their personal spiritual practice. This is also true for many of the elites in the BJP and Hindutva.

The influence of post modernism has grown greatly in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. To better understand how, please see:

I remember believing this when I was 11 years old. It took me many years to find others who thought as I did. Now I understand that very few nominal Hindus (Buddhists and Sikhs included) have extensively studied and deeply ruminated over their own philosophy and practice; which makes expressing this perspective more challenging.

I have always found India and the US to be remarkably similar; albeit their similarity is expressed through different accents, words and symbols. This is why the intellectual response to post modernism needs to be global to work. Some refer to this response as the “intellectual dark web.” Hope to see many articles at BP on this soon.