Joe Shearer
PROFESSIONAL

- Joined
- Apr 19, 2009
- Messages
- 27,490
- Reaction score
- 162
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I have sympathy for the mods though. Of course no group should ever be painted with the same brush but in the past 3ish years there has been a terrible rise in the ultra right wing Indian nationalist presence online. For example I am a member on another history focused forum whose South Asian section is heavily dominated by Indians, with me and a couple of other Pakistani members only. Despite this we had excellent and civil discussions on South Asian history (even when we had clear differences) till I would say around 2014-2015 when a new brand of right wing extremist Indians suddenly emerged out of nowhere. "Pak*" and "sickular" suddenly became standard terms on that forum for Pakistanis and non ultra nationalist Indians. In fact so bad has been their behaviour that the mods of this mainly western dominated forum have repeatedly now threatened to close down the Asian history sub-forum altogether because of the indecent behaviour of this ultra nationalist group, and special "rules" now apply to threads concerning India. Myself and other non extremist Indians with whom I had developed a great understanding also slowly moved away.
So what was different here? And what sympathy for the mods? They just threw the baby out with the bath-water. Keeping saffron and green bhakts both out would have been the idea. Instead they cracked down only on Indians, irrespective of what they thought and how they behaved, and let the Pakistanis go scott free.
There are forums out there, that I found out about lately, that have perfectly civil discussions between Pakistani and Indian, and the odd orc that slips in is quickly hunted down and liquidated. We could have done that here, and it would have remained a good clean forum.