An act providing the freedom of religion for all communities and the freedom to practice their traditions without interference or unsolicited proselytization. For a background on how “Freedom of Religion” differs for…
Category: Religion and Dharma
Constitutional Minorityism: India as A Religious Apartheid State
Cover picture updated Dec 30, 2020 Former prime minister Manmohan Singh had famously said that ‘minorities have the first claim on (the country’s) resources’. While this was hailed as a ‘secular’ statement,…
Mother Teresa Debate – Of Saints, Priests and Seva
[Avadhoot Bhagwan Ram Kustha Sewa Ashram reportedly treating the highest number of leprosy patients in the world] Avadhoot Bhagwan Ram Kustha Sewa Ashram reportedly treating the highest number of leprosy patients in…
Call out Muslim Phobia, debunk Islamophobia
The attacks in Paris on Charlie Hebdo bring to a fore fault lines in Europe. It has fuelled a European right that is calling for bans on Muslim immigrants. A major French…
RTE Act is destructive and communal
[India needs a decentralised education model that does not impose city standards on schools in villages and tribal areas.] “India is more illiterate than it was fifty or a hundred years…
Communalism in Secular Constitution – Time for Reform
India needs freedom from communalism of minority-majority politics. It may be the law of unintended consequences or it may simply be the result of the climate of partition in which our Constitution…
India as a dharma society and the rule of law
[The way forward is not about going back to some hypothetical golden age or denying that we have real problems to solve today. But our problems appear unsolvable because we have failed…
Dead Peoples Tell No Tales
Locating Doniger in the discourse of power “I set out to grasp the mechanisms of the effective exercise of power; and I do this because those who are inserted in these relations…
Hinduism
Hinduism Encarta replaced its article on Hinduism after my critique of it was published. This is the replacement article from Encarta 2008 (now out of print) that was written by Prof. Arvind…
From Sulekha to Rupa: Invading the Sacred
About five years ago a New Jersey entrepreneur called Rajiv Malhotra wrote a column on Sulekha titled “RISA Lila 1: Wendy’s Child Syndrome”—a provocative critique of prominent academics in Hinduism studies in the US. This sparked off…