LETTERS TO THE EDITOR – PUBLISHED AND MOSTLY UNPUBLISHED

Letters to the editor are a helpless and ineffective way for most citizens to express outrage or opine on the issues prevalent around them. I drop my letters at frequent intervals to the only newspaper I follow, The Hans India. The editors were kind in the initial days when the newspaper was establishing itself and the reader base was perhaps slimmer. However, as the editors became busier and more people began writing, my published letters became less frequent, even though I was progressively shortening the content. Anyway, this document is a collection of all my published and mostly unpublished letters lying in the “sent” section of my mail. I thought of putting them together, as it expresses my opinions on practically everything and anything going on around me. For anyone who has the time and inclination to go through it, the reaction on individual issues may range from strong agreement to strong disagreement. That is perhaps not vital, but it would surely provoke some thoughts, and that should be a good enough reason for me to collect these letters in one place for easy reference.

Adivasis and Hindus: Dangerous and Divisive Narratives (February 14, 2026)

The article “Self-respect is the path, our heritage the future” by Lakshman Koya, published in The Hans India on 14.02.26, is problematic. The article is deeply divisive in its content, and it attempts to Balkanize the country based on Jati identities. He is factually incorrect when he asserts that traditional festivals such as Sammakka-Saralamma Jatara are becoming less prominent. I am not aware of others, but the one mentioned is increasingly being celebrated by people from all communities. The government also gives massive support to the Jatara.

The author exhorts Adivasi youths to emulate their neighbours, like the Hindus, by following customs and rituals. This statement automatically implies a separate category of Adivasi people from Hindus. This argument is precisely why tribal people (a better term being “vanavasi”) are targeted by evangelical activity, especially in the Northeast.

The narrative of postulating Adivasis as separate from Hindus has the single most important purpose of breaking India. ‘Adivasi’ (adi=original; vasi=inhabitant), a neologism of the 19th century, hardly a self-description of the tribals, is the most successful disinformation campaign of modern times by the colonials, Christian missionaries, and Indian secularists. In settler colonies like the Americas, New Zealand, or Australia, ‘aboriginal’ made sense to the colonials to distinguish the European settler from the natives. However, in colonies like India, where the colonials did not settle but came exclusively to loot and plunder, the term ‘aboriginal’ became a pure colonial construct.

This colonial narrative now pits the majority of “dominant” Hindus as the original foreign invaders (before even the colonials) against the “original” inhabitants, who are now minorities. The crux around which all these vicious narratives revolve is the patently false Aryan invasion theory, where the Brahmins, Vysyas, and Kshatriyas are the invading and exploiting Aryan descendants, and the Sudras, Dalits, tribals, or Tamilians are the perennially exploited and pushed-out “original inhabitants” of the land – the Dravidians.

This division of Indians into ‘natives’ and ‘invaders’ is a permanent colonial legacy. Susana Devalle, while talking about Jharkhand tribes, says, “This colonial categorisation as ‘tribal’ is at best out of place and, at worst, ahistorical and sociologically groundless.” Many tribes of Jharkhand and Northeast India migrated much laterfrom the surrounding countries than the indigenous non-tribal peasant population. Hence, the historical data do not support the division of India’s population into aboriginal tribals and non-tribal invaders.

Post-independence, international forces like the International Labour Organization strengthened the distinction between dominant national communities and indigenous/tribal peoples, introducing an internal coloniality and a permanent faultline where the minority tribal communities became racially and culturally distinct from the majority national communities. By implication, “majority” refers to the pre-European colonisers of tribal minorities. For millennia, a peaceful exchange without significant disruptions characterised the interaction between the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘minor’ traditions.

‘Tribe’ is a key but obsolete concept from anthropology’s early history that usually served colonial, administrative, and ideological purposes to mainly paint the local groups as ‘primitive’ or ‘backward’. The ancient Hindu religion, dating back thousands of years, is as ‘aboriginal’ as the tribal populations. The belief in many gods and pagan worship in both Hindu and tribal traditions, like honouring the feminine, nature, and animals, clearly sets them apart from religions that focus on one god.

The “tribals” and other “mainstream” Vedic-Sanskritic traditions have many elements in common: partly by way of distant common roots, partly by way of the integration of tribal elements in the Sanskritic civilisation, and partly by the adoption of elements from the Vedic-Puranic tradition into the tribal traditions.

The impossibility of accurately defining them, combined with their broad usage, has relegated the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘tribe’ to the dustbin of social science academia. Strangely, anthropologists spent decades trying to get rid of a pernicious and incoherent concept like ‘tribe’, only to see it sneak back, via Indology and other social sciences, into the Indian Constitution, Indian legislation, and its administration. The narrative that the majority Hindus have displaced the Adivasi as the original inhabitants is both dangerous and divisive.

Amit Shah’s Allegation and Stalin’s Rebuttal regarding “Hindus” (January 8, 2026)

An entirely divisive Dravidian political ideology now grips the nation. Amit Shah’s assertion that Hindus are unsafe in Tamil Nadu, coupled with Stalin’s rebuttal, underscores the colonial legacy of division that persists even after their departure. The most profound impact of colonialism is the colonial consciousness, which has permanently altered our minds to conform to colonial narratives. The saddest chapter in India’s history is the mythical and non-existent Aryan-Dravidian narrative, fabricated by colonial intellectuals to fracture our unity.

The Aryans, as a distinct entity, never existed, and the notion of alien Aryans driving the Dravidians south of the Vindhyas is a grand fabrication, lacking any archaeological, literary, or Vedic evidence. Genetic research provides only the most tenuous corroboration for this hypothesis. Colonial powers have so entrenched this belief that we struggle to dismiss it, even with contradictory evidence. Textual evidence lends credence to an alternative Out of India migration theory, suggesting that it was not the Aryans who migrated into India, but rather Indians who dispersed to other parts of the world.

Those intellectuals, politicians, and academics who subscribe to the Aryan theory, either explicitly or implicitly, propose that the original Dravidians are the progenitors of the Shudras, indigenous Tamils, Dalits, and various tribal groups, while portraying the Aryans as an exploitative minority comprised of Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas. It is highly implausible that the Aryans arrived in insignificant numbers from abroad and managed to dominate a vast majority of the indigenous population. If scholars are to be believed, the indigenous Indians must be perceived as so naïve that they have accepted an inferior position for millennia simply because their ancestors did. Historically, invaders have often become the majority in every culture; in the Americas, for instance, the indigenous population faced near-total extermination.

Dravidians, tribals, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Dalits, Sikhs, Jains, and Hindus all contribute to the rich tapestry of this magnificent land and culture. However, we still grapple with a lack of collective clarity regarding terms such as ‘Hindu’, ‘Hindutva’, ‘Hinduism’, or ‘Sanatani’. Bharat is a beautiful amalgamation of a vast array of traditions, each free to practice its belief systems throughout our history. While Vedic traditions may have laid the foundational basis of our culture, syncretism and organic interactions with non-Vedic traditions are ongoing processes. The term ‘Dravidian’ is understood in both its historical geographical context and its modern linguistic sense; racial interpretations are unscientific and irrational, merely reflecting a colonial mindset.

On Communism and Democracy (January 1, 2026)

The editorial page on January 1 in THI carried two interesting pieces by Mohan Kandaji (on the CPI) and Nomula Srinivasa Raoji (on democracy and corruption). Mohan Kandaji goes extremely soft on communism and Marxism, which were originally conceived as utopian dreams but turned into horrors when the actual data from Russia and China was revealed. The communists in India have consistently demonstrated an extraterritorial loyalty, as evidenced by their involvement in events surrounding World War II and independence, including the Razakar movement, which exemplified their tendency to act against India’s interests and follow directives from foreign countries.

Democracy, as a form of governance, inevitably leads to corruption, nepotism, the rise of mediocrity, an emphasis on oratory and rhetoric, and a significant inability to select the wisest and best leaders for the country. These were the words of Plato two thousand years ago, and they remain consistently true. India had a different form of governance, characterised by decentralised units and a Dharmic monarchy. This model was unique and perhaps the best in the world, enabling India to become a very prosperous country and attracting plunderers of all sorts from the West. However, we are so enamoured with western ideas of political governance like communism, socialism, democracy, and so on that we forget what true Indian culture and heritage were and how our traditions hold the best solution for not only India but also the whole world in the grip of divisive forces at all levels.

Communism is a dangerous philosophy for the World (December 27, 2026)

The news item from December 27 (THI, World Looking Towards Communism: CPI) was intriguing. It reported on the speech delivered by the district secretary at the centenary celebrations of the CPI. However, if the world turns to Communism for the advancement and survival of humanity, it will spell disaster. Lenin, Stalin, and Mao endeavoured to realise Marxist utopia in Soviet Russia and China, leading to the extensive destruction of economic systems and significant violations of human rights. Millions perished for the slightest dissent against the authorities.

In summarising Sri Aurobindo’s views on socialism, he asserts, “All the practical schemes of socialism invented in Europe are a yoke, a tyranny, and a prison. A forced association and mechanical comradeship would end in a worldwide fiasco. Socialism aims to replace organised economic competition with a framework for peace and order. Socialism therefore must do away with the democratic basis of individual liberty, even if it professes to respect it or to be marching towards a more rational freedom. Totalitarianism of some kind seems to be the natural, almost inevitable destiny—or, at any rate, the extreme and fullest outcome of socialism. The possession of power is the ultimate test of all idealisms, and so far, all idealisms, religious or secular, have succumbed to it, becoming diminished and corrupted. There was never a viable connection between socialism and labour dominance. When fully developed, socialism leads to the elimination of the distinction between political and social activities; it results in the socialisation of all aspects of common life, subjecting them to organised government and administration. The socialistic perspective encompasses all aspects of life, including birth and marriage, labour, amusement and rest, education, culture, and the training of physique and character, leaving nothing outside its scope and exercising busy, intolerant control.”

Socialism, with its restriction of freedom and mechanical enforcement of uniformity, is, in fact, anti-democratic. Secularism, as a principle, served as a solution for a Christian world during a particular historical period. Secularism was never intended to be a solution for all forms of pluralism across different cultures. This situation is particularly true between Hindus and Muslims in India, as their clashes are politico-socio-economic in nature rather than doctrinal. That communism can set the basis for interfaith harmony is one of the greatest delusions.

The claim that the communists participated in the freedom struggle is a significant falsehood. Throughout the entire period leading up to independence and beyond, the Communists were taking direct orders from China and Russia. The British even financed MN Roy, their founder. The Communists collaborated with the British and acted as their spies during the Quit India movement, motivated by Russia’s alliance with Britain during the Second World War. Following independence, the story of resistance against the Razakars is compelling, but the communists were acting under orders from Russia to establish a separate communist state within India. They only stopped when Russia asked them to do so.

India’s approach to governance was characterised by decentralised units under a Dharmic and enlightened monarchy. This framework has historically enabled India to prosper and has also attracted various plunderers throughout its history. While democracy, capitalism, and socialism each have their challenges, they are fundamentally anti-Dharmic. Unfortunately, our intellectuals have collectively failed to recognise this reality. Among these ideologies, communism represents the most perilous threat and an unmitigated disaster for the world. However, one thing communists excel at is crafting narratives and terminology that often overlook or even invert the empirical facts of history while simultaneously placing themselves on a high pedestal.

Removing the words “secular” and “social” a constitutional conspiracy? (December 25, 2025)

The article by Sri Madabhushi Sridharji, published on 23rd December in THI, presents an intriguing perspective. The author asserts that the terms “socialist” and “secular” have defined the character of the Indian Republic since independence, arguing that their removal from the preamble constitutes a constitutional conspiracy. However, this argument raises the question, “What was the character of Indian civilisation over 5000 years before secularism and socialism became popular concepts in recent centuries?”

Socialism, as a utopian model, has predominantly failed globally, being chiefly linked to brutality and tyranny, especially in Russia and China. The foundational essence of Indian culture is rooted in Dharma, rather than in socialism, capitalism, or free-market economies. It is a form of colonial consciousness that hinders Indian intellectuals from recognising this crucial aspect of their culture, as they remain captivated by Western narratives and discourses.

Sridharji defends the inclusion of the terms ‘secular’ and ‘socialist’ in the 42nd amendment during the Emergency, noting that subsequent Supreme Court rulings have upheld the validity of the preamble. However, without discussing the intellectual reasoning or the wisdom of the courts, this logic seems flawed. In a Supreme Court judgement from 1994, each of the seven judges articulated a distinct interpretation of secularism. Consequently, in the Indian context, secularism seems to be a flexible concept, with some arguing that it should include caste discrimination in addition to religious diversity.

The first constitutional amendment of 1951 serves as a prime example of parliamentary tyranny. A government that even lacked popular mandate established reservations based solely on birth, restricted the freedoms of the press and judiciary, and abolished various aspects of the zamindari system. Various court rulings had previously challenged the reservation system and the government’s methods of zamindari abolition. The government manipulated the Constitution itself, exerting pressure on the President to alter it, particularly Articles 15 and 19. The public reveres the Constitution as an inviolable holy text every time a proposed change occurs. Regrettably, this most human-made legal document, the Indian Constitution, also holds the distinction of being the most amended constitution in the world.

Since its inception in 1950, the Constitution has undergone 106 amendments, averaging nearly one alteration every eight months, which may come as a surprise to many. The Constitution appears to be India’s most malleable document, with its principles seemingly inscribed in sand. Despite extensive parliamentary debates and Supreme Court involvement, the meanings of ‘secularism’ and the rationale for socialism as the optimal policy for India remain undefined, even as evidence suggests that the latter leads to failure and widespread human rights violations.

Intellectuals often fail to recognise that secularism was a solution tailored to a European Christian context at a specific time in its history when various denominations were in conflict. All involved understood the meaning of religion, Christ, and Christianity when the state separated from the Church. This solution, albeit fairly successful for a predominantly Christian world, was intended for a particular context, not as a universal remedy applicable to all cultures across all times.

The difficulties Europe faces in managing its influx of Islam, alongside the increasing polarisation in India despite secularism being the guiding principle, underscore the limitations of the secularism model. Historically, India has managed multiculturalism far more effectively than any other culture in the world. However, our politicians, academics, and intellectuals seem so entrenched in a colonial mindset that they cannot even entertain the possibility of existing solutions within Indian culture. Instead, all solutions to our problems appear to be sought exclusively from the West.

The Portuguese Model of Economy (December 12, 2025)

Many people from European countries colonised India. However, nothing was more damaging and impoverishing than the Portuguese, who had an amazing 450-year rule (1510-1961) over Goa. Portugal, though a ‘pioneer in expansionism’, was one of the backward countries in western Europe. The Portuguese rule in Goa was disastrous, as the economy relied solely on taxes, lotteries, and excise without any infrastructure development. In 1939, around 20–25% of total income consisted of excise tariffs, second to customs as the greatest source of state revenue. Portuguese India had the dubious distinction of being the most ‘intoxicated’ country in the world.

It is sad to read news items about how the Excise Department is struggling with the revenue targets set by the governments. A government that desires that its people consume more alcohol to generate more revenue and pressurises its officials is inherently morally disturbing. But then, the Portuguese might have quietly won over all their European colonisers in the best way to guide India’s policies.

Problematic Understanding of Indian culture by Mohan Kandaji (October 16, 2025)

Mohan Kandaji’s article (‘Division’ between rational and superstition is in one’s mindset) posits that rituals and practices, such as applying Kumkum on the forehead, are comparable to superstitions and, consequently, irrational. This viewpoint embodies a considerable misunderstanding of Indian culture, which is distinctly different from Western culture. It reflects a colonial mindset that erroneously evaluates Indian practices solely through a Western lens.

India is rich in traditions that are deeply rooted in rituals. In Indian culture, instinct, intellect (reason), and intuition facilitate access to knowledge, which is considered the highest form of divinity. Intuition is the path of rishis, achievable through yogic sadhana. Rituals and traditions also promote community spirit, a central tenet upheld by our ancient rishis. In a culture where every secular activity is imbued with spirituality and does not obstruct the pursuit of the divine, there is no contradiction in a scientist reciting Vedic mantras.

Practices such as applying Kumkum or wearing bangles are merely traditions passed down from our ancestors and do not necessitate further justification. However, a mind limited to the realms of intellect and reason may find it challenging to comprehend this straightforward idea, mistakenly labelling these practices as superstitions. While many superstitions do exist, equating them with traditions reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of Indian culture.

Hurling a shoe at the CJI (October 8, 2025)

The editorial on October 8 was thought-provoking. The hurling of a shoe at the Chief Justice of India (CJI) is a shameful act by an advocate, without a doubt. However, the comments made publicly by the CJI while rejecting a petition do not reflect well on the status of an important figure representing the most crucial pillar of our democracy, regardless of his private feelings. The general public does not expect such remarks from public figures. Nonetheless, a larger question arises: when the police resort to encounter killings to eliminate rapists and murderers, or when shoes are thrown at public figures, it raises pressing concerns about the effectiveness of the entire judicial system in the country. When such acts of “instant justice” receive public applause, it signals a profound need for the judiciary to reflect on where it has faltered in independent India over the decades.

Marwaris Go Back: A Sad Agitation (August 25, 2025)

The great Indian culture unites us as one people and one land. The foundation of Indian culture lies in its diverse languages, faiths, religions, jatis, and numerous subcultures. Movements that target Marwaris in Telangana, Biharis in Maharashtra, North Indians in Tamil Nadu, or individuals from the Northeast in Delhi inflict immense pain and agony on every Indian citizen who genuinely cares for India. Such efforts by divisive forces aim to undermine the integrity of the world’s greatest democracy. Regrettably, our political leaders, media, and academic narratives often exacerbate these divisive tendencies. We must all strive to earn the protection of our armed forces. Infighting only serves to harm India.

Excessive Violence in Telugu Movies (August 23, 2025)

The teasers, trailers, and movies of our superstars have become a compelling reason to worry. The amount of violence and killing shown to heighten the image of ageing and haggard “heroes” is detrimental to the psychology of people who still look up to these celebrities as some kind of role models. The recent chilling murder of a young girl by a tenth-standard student is an outcome of this constant messaging in the movies that brutal killing is all right. The violence depicted in the movies is highly unnatural, and anyone seeing them would almost feel that there are no police or law services existing in the Telugu or Tamil lands. I haven’t watched many Kannada or Malayalam movies. Hence, I cannot comment on those films. Filmmakers in Telugu and Tamil are struggling to produce well-crafted movies that provide either entertainment or subtle messaging. They are instead focused on blatant ideological messaging or reviving the images of ageing superstars who refuse to act their age and have no qualms about romancing women the same age as their granddaughters. Can someone act on the filmmakers because they are beyond any rational reasoning?

RSS and Gandhiji’s assassination (August 18, 2025)

“A lie spoken a hundred times becomes the truth.” This maxim applies well to our intellectuals, who paint the RSS as a terrorist organisation responsible for Gandhiji’s assassination. Godse was a lone assassin who killed Gandhiji for reasons he was convinced about. He made no attempt to escape and did not oppose the death sentence. He was disconnected from the RSS at the time of the assassination, and the courts exonerated the RSS from the planning of Gandhiji’s murder. As Koenrad Elst writes, the most significant damage Godse did was to the Hindus themselves; they were vilified and went into permanent defence mode due to the Congress’s policies to ward off political threats from Hindu bodies. Secularism evolved into a comprehensive policy of minority appeasement that increasingly disadvantaged the Hindus of the country.

Abusing and Praising Our Cricketers (August 5, 2025)

“It was roses, roses, all the way”—Robert Browning opens his renowned poem “The Patriot” with these lines. The poem vividly depicts a hero celebrated upon his return, only to observe that a year later, the same public has turned against him, subjecting him to persecution as he faces execution. Our celebrities, and, more specifically, our cricketers, would benefit from reading this poem regularly to grasp how fickle both the media and the public can be. Praise and criticism can shift in an instant. For instance, the nation widely condemned poor Siraj for missing a catch, only to laud him to the skies the next day. Nothing is permanent, a lesson that applies to both successful and unsuccessful individuals in any endeavour. What remains constant, however, is the speed at which public perceptions can change. Maintaining a sense of balance is crucial for navigating both failure and success.

India should not play with Pakistan (July 28, 2025)

Indian cricketers, the BCCI, and the celebrities shamelessly endorse keeping the India-Pakistan interactions alive even when our soldiers are dying on the front. This is absolutely unbelievable, and our political leaders also seem to be allowing such stances. There is no justification for individuals like Saurav Ganguly to advocate for a separation between cricketers and soldiers in the context of Pakistan. It seems that cricketers can earn money, while soldiers risk their lives. This unfortunate lack of understanding of enemies, referred to as ‘Shatrubodha’, has been responsible for our continuous invasions over the centuries. BCCI and the government should not allow cricket or “art” interactions with Pakistan. People may be kind-hearted, but we should treat a rogue nation as such and nothing more.

Secularism can never bring harmony (July 8, 2025)

Why do intellectuals who argue for or against secularism not realise its basic historical roots? Secularism was a solution specifically designed for Christianity, applicable to a particular region (Europe) and period (the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries), during which various Christian denominations were in conflict and the State separated from the Church. While it proved to be a fairly successful solution, its original intent was not to serve as a universal solution for handling pluralism across all cultures and times. Intellectuals often overlook the significant stress on the secularism model in Europe today, as the continent struggles to cope with the massive influx of Islam. Similarly, in India, polarisation and friction between the two main religious groups are only increasing, despite strictly adhering to secularism as a guiding principle for handling India’s diversity. India has managed its pluralism more effectively than any other culture throughout history, and it is preferable to examine these successful solutions rather than focus on a solution that appears to be failing globally, particularly in India.

Discarding Secularism (June 28, 2025)

Secularism emerged as a solution for the Christian European world during a particular period in its history when various Christian denominations were in conflict. The state distanced itself from the church in a predominantly non-plural context where everyone understood what Christ, Christianity, or religion entailed. It was never intended to serve as a universal remedy applicable to all cultures. Our post-independence politicians and intellectuals, who were thoroughly captivated by Western ideologies, simply imposed secularism onto a cultural landscape where it was ill-fitting.

Secularism struggles to accommodate multiculturalism, as evidenced by Europe’s substantial influx of Islam. In India, despite the widespread adoption of secularism across all political parties, polarisation among the two primary “religious” groups has paradoxically intensified. Historically, India has managed its multiculturalism and pluralism more effectively than any other nation. The strategies for handling its multiculturalism and diversity were not secularism, nor were the issues that emerged due to a deficiency of it.

What if the diverse phenomena observed within Indian culture—such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Animism—were not religions at all, but rather more accurately described as traditions? Referring to this extensive array of “traditions” as “religion” constitutes a significant category error. The former includes living gurus, lineages, rituals, deities, mythologies, philosophies, and all elements of nature, both animate and inanimate. In contrast, the latter (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) predominantly centre around a singular Book, Prophet, God, or Temple—concepts that are conspicuously absent in traditional cultures.

Traditional cultures have a different way of living, characterised fundamentally by “indifference” to differences. This perspective surpasses the conventional approaches to harmony that rely on “tolerance” and “mutual respect.” The transformation of Indian traditions into formal religions of the Abrahamic type represents a critical error made by our political-bureaucratic-academic alliance. The Indian solution was to traditionalize the religions which came from alien lands. Instead, we are, in reverse, religionising our traditions, fostering an ever-increasing intolerance. Attempting to apply the principles of secularism to Indian traditions is akin to labelling a vegetable as a fruit and then expressing surprise when the fertiliser intended for fruits fails to benefit the vegetable.

There is a lack of clarity in India about the true meaning of “Hinduism” and its classification as a religion. Essentially, religions assert, “I am true, and you are false,” whereas traditions proclaim, “I am true, but you are not false.” India stands as the most tolerant nation globally, and secularism is an alien solution that represents a profound affront to the country’s traditions. Our uncertainty about the meaning of secularism exacerbates this issue. In a notable Supreme Court judgement from 1994, each of the seven judges presented differing interpretations of secularism. The sooner we discard secularism as a proposed solution, the better it will be for our nation, which currently interprets the term as only appeasement. We must begin to comprehend India more thoroughly within decolonised frameworks to move beyond these concepts in pursuit of genuine harmony.

Dangerous statements on languages by celebrities (June 6, 2025)

Celebrities like Kamal Haasan often express opinions on matters of which they possess neither the authority nor the understanding. Thomas Sowell notes that such conduct reflects a common delusion among popular figures, who mistakenly believe that expertise in one area grants them the right to speak on all others.

The Dravidian movement, initiated by Periyar, exploits the speculative Aryan Invasion Theory to categorise most North Indians and Tamil Brahmins as Aryans and the rest of the Tamils as indigenous Dravidians. Additional claims include assertions that Tamil predates its rival Sanskrit and that there exists a completely distinct Dravidian culture. However, archaeology, inscriptional studies, ancient coins, and the rich Sangam literature strongly contradict these assertions.

Archaeological evidence indicates that urban civilisation in Tamil Nadu emerged two and a half millennia after Indus cities. Current findings suggest that the earliest Tamil kingdoms were established around the fourth century BCE, with urban developments occurring a century or two later. Excavations reveal that culturally, the people of the South shared many beliefs and practices with those in other parts of the subcontinent. Tamil culture placed significant importance on the cult of the dead and ancestors, mirroring aspects of Vedic culture. The coins from the Pandya era provide substantial evidence of Vedic sacrifices and Vedic-Puranic symbols.

The Sangam literature (300 BCE to 300 CE), encompassing texts such as Tolkappiyam, Kural, and Purananuru, contains numerous references to Vedic sacrifices, with no mention of conflict between Aryans and Dravidians. As with the organic development of any language, Tamil has assimilated and incorporated between 20% and 40% of its commonly used vocabulary from Sanskrit.

The term ‘Dravida’ does not appear in the Tolkappiyam, which is the oldest surviving work on Tamil grammar, literature, and linguistics. Sage Tayumanvar first used it in the eighteenth century. In Vedic-Puranic-Itihaasic literature, the term ‘Arya’ denotes a noble individual, whereas ‘Dravida’ had a strictly geographical connotation.

The temples and devotional literature produced by the Alwars, the Nayanmars, and other seekers exhibit a profound integration of Vedic-Sanskritic elements into Tamil. The Tamil genius has made significant contributions to temple architecture, music, dance, and literature, influencing both the North and other South Asian countries. The term ‘Dravidian’ retains meaning in both its historical geographical sense and its modern linguistic context; attributing racial or entirely distinct cultural meanings is unscientific and irrational.

Each region of India has developed according to its unique characteristics while remaining true to the overarching Indian spirit. These artificial divisions are colonial narratives that both the educated and the general public have internalised. The long-lasting Indian culture has existed for thousands of years and includes all three human groups (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid), six language families (Indo-European, Dravidian, Austric, Sino-Tibetan, Burushaski, and Andamanese), many traditions (both Vedic and non-Vedic), and various religions interacting in an organic and peaceful manner while evolving. We are one people and one land. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, statements such as “Tamil gave rise to Kannada” only fuel dangerous conflicts. We do not require this.

Cultural Differences in Morality and Ethics (May 8, 2025)

The essay by Dr Mohan Kanda, Making Ethical Sense of Moral Values (THI, 8th May 2025), is interesting; however, it overlooks the fact that moral and ethical issues can differ significantly across cultures. This implies that ethical values cannot be considered uniform across all societies. The fundamental categories that define moral domains are specific to each culture, encompassing concepts such as “selfhood”, learning processes, and the experiences of “body”, “space”, and “time”, among others.

An “agent” in Western culture basically connotes an “inner core” in each person, separate and different from all the outer coverings. In Indian culture, an organism’s “actions” during evaluation by another entity serve as its “agent” and nothing more. Thus, one can be a good father and a good son but a bad husband at the same time. In Western culture, the peeling of the outer layers reveals the “true” agent standing independent, which needs discovery; in Indian culture, such peeling reaches an emptiness. This has extremely profound consequences in morality in Western and Indian cultures, says philosopher SN Balagangadhara.

Any domain of knowledge, including morality, never has a terminus because the universe is complex. Western culture, obsessed with moral discussions, feels that morality can have a terminus and there can be some fundamental moral rules that are universalisable too. As Balagangadhara states, contemporary ethical discussions, which consist of rules that require a foundation, are secularised interpretations of theological beliefs. Christianity admits only one Sovereign, and His Will is the Law of the universe. “Being moral” means obeying this law, as there are no other moral laws or sovereigns. The way Christian theology framed the question has resulted in secular concepts that are considered “definitionally true”, “intuitively obvious”, and universal to all cultures.

Indian culture references numerous “sovereigns” when discussing morality. The most fundamental moral judgement category in Indian traditions is appropriateness. Actions lack meaning outside of their contextual interpretations, and moral actions gain their “appropriateness” within specific contexts. As articulated by various Indian traditions, the highest form of appropriate action is one performed without any desire, without pursuing a particular goal, and without attaching intentionality to human actions. This represents an attitude that transcends both good and evil.

Western culture, obsessed with morality and pinning ethical behaviour to some golden universal rules, has indulged in many “chilling” deeds: crusades, jihad, inquisitions, witch hunts, colonisation, the genocide of American Indians, Nazism, world wars, and transforming continents and cultures into slaves. It takes an enormous amount of goodwill to entertain the possibility that these cultures are not intrinsically “evil”, says Balagangadhara. Indian culture does know of tortures, wars, or cruelties, but they are insignificant in comparison. Thus, the knife cuts both ways: against the backdrop of the Western conception of ethics, Indian traditions “chill the blood”, as the colonials felt and our academia perpetuated it after independence. Against the background of Indian traditions, the West appears equally chilling.

Blaming the Victims is Wrong for the Kashmir Problem (May 3, 2025)

The intolerance in Kashmir, the terrorism, the genocide of Kashmiri Pandits, and their forced exodus are not political issues concerning Pakistan. It is a blatantly religious problem, and the sooner we engage in direct debate with the concerned intellectuals on all sides (the Hindu right, the Hindu left, the liberals, and the Muslims), the more we would move towards solutions. In the meantime, there are remarks that appear to insensitively blame either the victims (the “weak” Kashmiris not fighting back like the Sikhs or Marathas) or others for the problem in Kashmir (such as lax governments, security lapses, and Pakistan). The issue in India for centuries has been the intolerance of one religion.

Sri Aurobindo said in 1909, “Of one thing we may be certain, that Hindu-Mahomedan unity cannot be affected by political adjustments or Congress flatteries. It must be sought deeper down, in the heart and in the mind, for where the causes of disunion are; there the remedies must be sought. The assimilation of the Mahomedan culture also was done in the mind to a great extent and it would have perhaps gone further. But in order that the process may be complete it is necessary that a change in the Mahomedan mentality should come. The conflict is in the outer life, and unless the Mahomedans learn tolerance, I do not think the assimilation is possible. The Hindu is ready to tolerate. He is open to new ideas, and his culture has got a wonderful capacity for assimilation, but always provided that India’s central truth is recognized.”

The moderates on all sides need to reevaluate what religions and traditions mean in the first place. India is a land of traditions and not religions. Sanatana Dharma, or its closest correlate, Hinduism, is a huge conglomerate of many traditions. Traditions are characterised by indifference to differences, and they basically say, “I am true, but you are not false.” Religions that come from alien worlds are characterised by a drive to proselytise and basically say, “I am true, and you are false.” Religion inherently contains intolerance. The religious wars of Europe involving the various denominations of Christianity as well as Islam in the past and the constant present-day strife across the world due to Islam are proof enough of the inherent intolerance of the “other.” The moderates and intellectuals never seem to address it.

India’s multiculturalism was far more peaceful and successful than the rest of the world at any time in history. The reason for its harmony was not secularism, and the problems it had were not due to the absence of secular values. The fundamental strategy of Indian culture is to traditionalise foreign religions. Their attitude at a sociocultural level shifted from an intolerance to an indifference to the other. Of course, this “traditionalization of religions” is something that evangelists and madrasas strongly resist.

However, our political-academic collaboration, especially after independence, instead of continuing this process, followed the colonial process of converting our traditions into religions. We transformed from a culture of indifference (and even organic assimilation) to intolerance. Secularism was a solution for the Christian world at a specific point in its history when the State separated from the Church. However, it was a non-plural world where everyone in the background knew what Christ, Christianity, or God meant. It was not meant as a universal solution for handling any sort of multiculturalism.

A security lapse is the last in the chain of explanations for the gruesome tragedy in Pahalgam terrorism. India must genuinely comprehend the enduring nature of Indian phenomena while simultaneously combating terrorism with unwavering determination.

Secularism as a flawed solution for India (March 29, 2025)

Further to Ramu Sharma’s incisive article on March 29 (INDIA Block should realise its grave political misstep), secularism is a bad solution to bring harmony to the country. Thinkers and political leaders, fascinated by the West’s material prosperity at independence, transferred solutions for specific Western problems to Indian soil. Secularism was a solution to a Christian world at a specific time in its history when the various denominations were fighting each other incessantly. The state separated from the church, bringing harmony in a Christian world where everyone knew in the background what religion, Christ, or Christianity meant.

The intention was never to provide a universal solution for all cultures and forms of multiculturalism. Secularism is in a very tight position in Europe today as it struggles to manage the influx of Islam into their population. Despite secularism being the unifying mantra for all parties in India, communal polarisation seems to be increasing. As scholar Jakob De Roover points out, secularism is actually breeding fundamentalism in the country. The peculiar interpretation of secularism in Indian politics is an appeasement of the so-called minorities, much to the unhappiness of the so-called majorities.

The Congress stayed in power for long by appeasing the minorities and not worrying about the divided Hindus. The BJP, simply a child of the Congress, focused on a united Hindu vote to gain power. Democracy, seen merely as a numbers game, raises the question of whether losers can ever find contentment, a point Ananda Coomaraswamy highlighted a century ago. The united Hindus appear to stay with the BJP, because they perceive it as the least of all evils. However, the BJP’s own understanding of Sanatana Dharma, which they are projecting themselves as upholders of, remains problematic.

Bharat and Sanatana Dharma have had far more vibrant multiculturalism, pluralism, and harmony for ages—better than the rest of the world at any time in its history. The solution was not secularism. Our thinkers and political leaders should urgently look into our past and rediscover solutions for harmony which were perhaps always there. Secularism as a principle is only going to be increasingly disastrous in the days to come.

Call to increase fertility (March 4, 2025)

A politician or a religious leader urging the people of the state or religious denomination, respectively, to increase fertility in order to prevent injustice during delimitation exercises or to become demographically strong highlights a fundamental flaw in democracy. Ananda Coomaraswamy called democracy a “tyranny of the majority” where numbers rule and sacrifice other honourable qualities like honesty, efficiency, and the capability to rule. In a democracy, the losing side would always be unhappy, whatever the margin of defeat. Democracy is as ineffective as any other philosophy of governance, except perhaps a decentralised model and an enlightened monarchy, which India had in the past. It was certainly a successful model, despite many criticisms of being weak politically, since a strong social, cultural, and economic India was attacked incessantly by everyone across the world for its riches, and the reverse rarely happened. The desperation for achieving numbers in any possible way is making democracy anywhere in the world into a farce.

A PROPER UNDERSTANDING OF SANATANA DHARMA (January 4, 2025)

With reference to Ramu Sarma’s article, “Stop Hindu Bashing…” it is difficult to conceive how the Congress, especially at the central level, along with some regional parties, consistently fails to take the Hindus into consideration. The communists have always been against the ethos of Hindu traditions. This must be the most unique political phenomenon in the world, as political parties readily disregard the majority and even divide them in pursuit of a united “minority” vote. The BJP is no different, but it is simply a child of the Congress, where it just bats for a united “majority” vote to gain power.

They have never been able to address the real problems facing the Hindus, especially those related to temple management and Articles 25–30 of the Constitution, which form the crux of the detrimental policies against them. They have completely failed in erasing the false history related to ancient India (the mythical Aryans), mediaeval India, or the independence movement, focusing only on a few individuals and a single party as responsible for our freedom.

Why cannot the political parties across India, along with their supposedly guiding bureaucracies, understand the plain fact that Sanatana Dharma is a conglomeration of many traditions, both Vedic and non-Vedic in character? The Vedic traditions are the foundation of Indian culture, and the non-Vedic traditions (Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and so on) have played an equally important part in building up the grand Sanatana culture. There was never an enmity between the traditions. This was a construction by the colonials and carried unquestioningly forward by our intellectuals in independent India.

When traditions meet, they may debate or exchange ideas, but their “indifference to differences” is most important. Traditions say, “I am true, but you are not false.” Alien religions came to India with the philosophy of “I am true, and you are false,” and this was indeed a problem for Indian culture. The solution for the well-formed culture of Bharat was to traditionalise these religions, so they remained independent but generally lost the rush to convert or distinguish between “truth” and “falsity.” Rather than advancing this process of traditionalising religions, which happens continuously at the sociocultural level, the political-bureaucratic combination has instead reinterpreted our traditions as religions. This is fostering rifts and increasing discord between the so-called majority and minority groups. All political parties and the intelligentsia mistakenly believe that the country encompasses numerous religions, with secularism serving as the optimal solution. Sanatana Dharma is the broadest essence of our magnificent culture, which is inclusive of all the multiculturalism packed into India.

Blaming the Victims is Wrong for the Kashmir Problem (May 3, 2025)

Movies depicting dubious moral values (November 5, 2024)

James Hadley Chase was a popular author in our college days who used to write stories related to crime. The racy and enjoyable stories typically featured a protagonist who embarked on a life of crime, achieved some success, and ultimately failed. Despite making crime the central theme of his stories, his overarching message was, “Crime never pays.” However, call it an age of loosening ideals and morals; our cinemas and stories seem to be almost celebrating crime. The extremely hit movies “Pushpa” in the past and “Lucky Bhaskar” in recent times raise some disturbing messages for society in the name of entertainment. The latter movie glorifies a life of crime, providing extremely flimsy justifications for a middle-class person to steal from the bank where he works as a cashier. Such movies, despite the excellent production values and brilliant acting, leave some very disturbing messages for society and its young, growing generations. In his book, “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt chillingly demonstrates how a “phone-based” childhood has replaced a “play-based” growing up, leading to a profound mental rewiring that has disastrous consequences for the mental health of society in general and teenagers in particular. Movies like these celebrating the individual desire to become rich by any means add to the existing fire of twisted morals and needless aggression burning our society.

The obsession for caste censuses betrays of poor understanding of Indian culture (October 31, 2024)

The idea of a “caste census” seems to be the driving obsession of some political parties, even as certain other organisations advocate a casteless society. Both perspectives illustrate the consequences of trusting democracy and its elected leaders as the optimal form of governance. The truth is that, since independence, the social sciences in our country have completely failed to provide a healthy understanding of our culture and civilisation, which have, at the very least, endured for the last 5000 years.

Instead, the social sciences simply followed the colonial understanding of the caste system and perpetuated it in our academia by generating more data to fit the theories. This understanding of social sciences permeated our politicians, bureaucracy, and media, creating a distorted perception of Indian culture among those in positions of power. It demonstrates a complete disconnection between the real-life practices in society and the imposed caste narratives.

The only lived reality of India is its “Jatis,” which began as a small number and have grown over many centuries into the nearly 4000 that exist today. Individual ideas related to language, culture, food practices, worship of gods, reverence for gurus, occupation, and even gender shape the Jatis. Jatis evolve, merge, split, and go up and down on the socio-political-economic scales all the time. The administration of the country, from colonial times to the present, has never been able to establish a direct correlation between the vibrant and dynamic Jati arrangement and the four constant Varnas.

Nobody knows about the rules of Varna; there are no central organisations implementing them, and there has been no attempt to understand the concept of Varna, which is based on ideas like Swadharma, Swabhava, Guna, and Karma. Deeper connections exist between the four Varnas and the other two quartets—the four “ashramas” and the four “purusharthas.” Society’s main metaphysical beliefs, including karma, rebirths, and the Supreme Ideal (Self, Brahman, Purusha, Sunya, Avyakta, and so on), are at the basis of all the three quartets, in turn. Distancing Varna and Jati from the other quartets and the culture’s metaphysics results in significant harm to the culture, a phenomenon evident in today’s numerous flawed narratives.

Caste and subcaste developed in western contexts where class and hierarchy were the primary pillars, while Varna and Jati flourished in Indian settings. Surprisingly, Indian scriptures do not contain an equivalent word for caste. Over centuries, we have imposed caste, sub-caste, and even sub-sub-caste onto our Varnas and Jatis, resulting in severe misunderstandings and constant friction within Indian society.

There are three strands to the caste story in India: 1) The actual Varna and Jati arrangement, the rules of which are unknown but have organically grown; 2) The colonial understanding of the caste system as they experienced Indian culture; and 3) The post-independence political and bureaucratic hardening of the system by creating more and more classifications in its zeal for “social justice.”

Today, the entire narrative is mired in conceptual confusion, with some factions attempting to dismantle Hinduism itself to counteract the “evils” of the caste system, others striving to establish an unfeasible casteless society, and still others promoting censuses to guarantee “equal outcomes” in society. American philosopher Thomas Sowell elegantly demonstrates the eternal and impossible nature of the last dream. While we can achieve equal opportunities for all in a few generations, the history of the world shows that we can never achieve an equal outcome based specifically on caste in Indian society.

SUPREME COURT WANTS HINDU’S MONEY BUT NOT THEIR SENTIMENTS (October 1, 2024)

The Supreme Court asks a CM to keep God out of politics. This is precisely the damage that Western concepts of liberal secularism inflict on Indian culture. India has traditionally been a blend of politics and religion. The enlightened monarchy or politics operated in communication, coordination, and cooperation with the “spiritual” realm. The separation of the “spiritual” from the “temporal” was an enlightenment solution for a Christian world at a specific time in Europe when the various denominations were fighting each other. The mess we find ourselves in today stems from the wholesale transfer of a western solution for harmony to Indian soil. However, with the same logic, the governments should urgently remove control of the temples, like for other religions. The politics of the country certainly seem to want the Hindu gods’ money.

SECULARISM IS AN ATTACK ON INDIAN CULTURE (September 28, 2024)

At a fundamental level, the concept of secularism hits at the integrity of the country. India is a land of many traditions, both Vedic and non-Vedic. The essential attitude of these traditions towards each other is “indifference.” When they approach each other, there may be debates and syncretic interactions, but they never escalate into physical violence. The basic attitude of a tradition is “I am true, but you are not false.” This contrasts severely with the phenomenon known as “religions,” exemplified by Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Religions differ from traditions in many ways in looking at the world, but the fundamental attitude is “I am true, and you are false.” There is an inherent intolerance in the configuration of religions, a trait not present in traditions.

When alien religions came to India, they met a well-formed culture and, at a social-cultural level, started behaving like other traditions, thus either remaining indifferent or growing together in syncretism, barring some exceptions, of course. However, the violence associated with the religious wars in Europe was largely absent in India. During a specific period in the history of European Christendom, where multiple denominations engaged in a struggle for supremacy, secularism emerged as a solution. This solution successfully separated the state from the church. However, for secularism to be a successful model, everyone knew in the background what religion, Christ, or Christianity meant.

A solution for an intra-Christian world could not be a universal solution to deal with multiculturalism of all cultures across time. The influx of Islam into Europe and the problems of increasing polarisation along “communal” lines in India show that secularism in fact might be breeding fundamentalism, as Jakob De Roover shows in his book. He demonstrates how the concept of secularism is transforming our diverse and adaptable traditions into rigid, doctrine-based religions. This is increasing intolerance towards each other. The traditional Indian solution to dealing with multiculturalism and pluralism was to “traditionalise religions.” However, the reverse process of “religionizing traditions” is the root cause of the intense polarisation currently occurring in the country. We are moving from indifference and healthy interaction to intolerance.

Influential intellectuals such as Ananda Coomaraswamy and Sri Aurobindo have insisted that the secularist idea of separating the church from the state, or the “spiritual” from the “temporal,” is causing intense damage to our culture. The separation of the “sacred” and the “profane” never existed in our culture. We spiritualised every secular activity in the material world, using it as a pathway to the divine. The antagonism between religion and science in Indian traditions also fails to make sense. When a rocket scientist breaks a coconut in a temple, there is no dichotomy. Similarly, the concept of atheism is also foreign to our culture. One can be a part of Sanatani culture without acknowledging the importance or existence of gods. The enlightened monarchy, decentralised polity, and the intimate intermingling of the state and the temples all point towards a different configuration of culture that could better deal with diversity.

Is there evidence of India’s rich traditional past, devoid of secularism, serving as a model? Yes indeed. We were the richest countries in the world, both in terms of spirituality and material riches. Everyone came to us to invade and prosper, not vice versa. The peculiarity of the Indian brand of secularism lies in its tendency to appease minorities while ignoring or rejecting the needs of the majority. The state seeks control, rather than guidance, of the Sanatani spirituality while submitting to the dictates of the “minority” religions.

Please Build Good Roads (August 29, 2024)

Kudos to the government for breaking down illegal structures with an iron hand without worrying about the celebrity status of the owners. However, it would also be excellent if the government focused on building some good roads, sanitation, and traffic systems. Most Tier 2 cities apart from Hyderabad are on the verge of collapse. One single severe rain throws everything off. Our governments and bureaucrats should also direct their attention equally, if not more, towards constructive activities. One cannot find a kilometre stretch anywhere in the state (apart from the highways) without potholes of all dimensions. The poor drainage systems are forever a breeding ground for illnesses. Epidemics that occur regularly should not come as a surprise to anyone. These are far more important issues expected from political parties of all hues and from the whole system of bureaucracy for an average Indian citizen than caste censuses.

Addressing Rape: India is not the “rape capital” of the World (August 23, 2024)

The disturbing rape and murder of a doctor on duty is shaking the nation’s conscience. Suddenly, rape emerges as a widely prevalent phenomenon in India, prompting intellectuals to attribute the occurrence of one rape “every 15 minutes” to the country’s state of democracy, culture, or illiteracy. One movie depicting rape makes another statement that “it is ironic that crime rates against women are higher in a nation where nearly 80% of the population worships goddesses.” How is rape correlated to democracy, literacy, or praying to goddesses?

Comparing with other countries, the incidence of rape is much lower in India. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime states that in 2010, the incidence of rape per 100,000 in India was 1.8. Simultaneously, the USA stood at 27.3, the UK at 28.8, Sweden at 65.3, and South Africa at an overwhelming 120. Again, it is only democracies that have a sturdy reporting system and clear definitions of rape. Many countries do not even report rape, and their definitions may differ. That certainly skews the worldwide picture, putting only the countries with a reporting system and strict definitions in the spotlight. The widespread criticism of “under-reporting” for any crime, including rape, is not a problem specific to India. Yet, even if we assume ten times less underreporting in India and absolutely no underreporting in the Western countries, we still have a challenging time catching up with the US, UK, or Sweden.

Rape is a distinct phenomenon with biological roots. One cannot confuse correlation with causation. Sweden has the highest literacy and atheist rates in the world. Can we say that high education or atheism leads to more rapes in Sweden? Could a strong belief in ‘devis’ potentially explain the lower number of rapes in India? Botswana, which is 80% Christian, has a rape rate of 92.9 per 100,000 people. Correlations can lead to all kinds of nonsensical cause-and-effect conclusions.

Rape is a despicable crime, an extension of the obsession of the human mind with sex. The intellect and instinct of the human mind combine at this point of evolution to create a curious mix of the ideal and the base. Sex is the primary evolutionary driver that has propelled humans to the forefront. The association of sex and pleasure exists in other animals too, but is unfortunately very strong in humans. Sex embeds deeply into our genetic make-up. Yet, most people can control or divert the basic instincts, and this may be one of the reasons humans go up a little further on the evolutionary tree. The human mind has consistently strived to reach higher spiritual realms by conquering the urge for sexual activity.

No Act or punishment, including capital, will ever work to stop an act of passion. However, we must improve areas such as women’s safety mechanisms, easy reporting, and quick justice delivery. We are severely deficient in all these areas. There are 100,000 backlog cases awaiting justice in India, and the conviction rate stands at only 32%. Ineffective judicial systems lead to issues with reporting, recording, investigation, security, policing, and conviction. It is perhaps a mistake to bring goddesses, education, or democracy into the discussions about rape.

Secularism and the UCC (August 16, 2024)

Unfortunately, PM Modi’s advocacy for a secular civil code in the country could potentially harden stances and raise objections such as “majoritarianism” and “anti-secularism.” Secularism, a solution to ensure harmony, seems to be failing despite being a consistent political policy since independence. Why? The separation of the public “social” sphere from the private “religious” sphere was a direct import of European intra-Christian ideas battling their religious issues. It was hardly a universal model that could be applied to all cultures across all time periods. The stress on secularism is all too evident with the influx of Islam into Europe today and the ever-increasing polarisation between Hindus and Muslims despite all efforts to implement secularism.

In India, specifically, there is no clarity on what constitutes religion or whether “Hinduism” is even a religion as exemplified by Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. There is an inherent category error when we refer to a vast collection of “traditions” as “religion.” The former encompasses living gurus, lineages, rituals, deities, mythologies, philosophies, and all aspects of nature, both living and non-living. The latter relies primarily on A Book, A Prophet, A God, and A Temple, concepts that are clearly absent in traditional cultures.

Fundamentally, religions say, “I am true, and you are false,” while traditions say, “I am true, but you are not false.” In a culture with a single religion but different denominations (like European Christendom at a specific time in its history), secularism, with separation of state and church, made immense sense and was successful. Where multiple faiths are involved, like in India, the traditional solution to harmony is essentially an “indifference to the differences,” which far transcends the ideas of “secularism, mutual respects, or tolerances.” India handled multiculturalism far better than any other society, and this did not stem from secularism. We should urgently explore our different solutions instead of pursuing a model that paradoxically increases friction. Our solution was to “traditionalise the religions,” but now we are “religionizing our traditions,” leading to intolerance and fundamentalism. Indian secularism, in particular, faces accusations of appeasing minorities and causing harm to Hindu interests.

After independence, India became a peculiar liberal democracy with uniform criminal but not civil laws. The Indian state thus recognises both individuals and communities as bearers of rights. The criminal law recognises only individuals, whereas the civil law recognises most minority communities as distinct legal subjects. The summary of the arguments against a Uniform Civil Code is that India is not a homogenous country, and therefore legislative uniformity in personal and family matters cannot be at the expense of diversity, as it obliterates the differences.

However, this argument has multiple fallacies: 1) The argument that UCC obliterates differences logically leads to different Constitutions that cater to the significant regional differences in not only religions but also languages, cultures, and customs; and 2) Despite the heterogeneity of Hindu society, a forcibly uniform set of personal laws is enforced for all Hindus. This again leads to the logic of repealing many Hindu-related Acts, allowing various segments of Hindu society to follow their own customary personal laws.

The country needs the UCC, which addresses marriage, divorce, inheritance, succession, adoption, maintenance, guardianship, and other family and personal matters, but it should be implemented gradually. The most important issues, which may be against constitutional principles, include a uniform age of consent for marriage and the banning of polygamy.

Polygamy cannot be ideally accepted in a country that upholds equality before the law, parity between sexes, and gender justice. A gender imbalance in matrimony with excessive unmarried men in the sexually active age group creates social, familial, criminological, and psychological stress on the population. Polygamous societies are more prone to violence and instability, as empirically noticed. Polygamy only for select religious groups can destabilise religious demographic balance, causing disturbances and anxieties detrimental to national unity and integrity. It would be tremendous if Muslim intellectuals, without bowing to the pressure of the clergy, engaged in larger debates. The Uniform Civil Code is not an attack on the country’s Muslim brethren, but they should be willing to seek pro-active reforms for the greater good of the nation.

Hinduphobia in our neighboring countries (August 10, 2024)

The increase in Hinduphobia in our neighbouring countries is alarming. India is the only hope for Hindus in the world, and it is sad that the Indian government faces resistance at all levels to even try to help the severely persecuted Hindu brethren in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Turning a blind eye and denying the clear statistics seems to be the most common response. It is unfortunate that the dislike for a single person in the form of the PM is converting into a dislike for all the Hindus. In Afghanistan, the Hindu and Sikh population was 7 percent of the total in the second half of the twentieth century. Now only a few hundred Hindus and Sikhs live in Afghanistan, putting their lives at risk. The proportions of Hindus in West Pakistan and East Pakistan (Bangladesh now) were around 15 percent and 29 percent, respectively, at the partition of India in 1947. Hindus now make up 2 percent of Pakistan’s population, and Hindus in Bangladesh have progressively decreased to below 9 percent. India and its embedded Dharma present the only hope for multiculturalism in the world to survive. Unfortunately, a uniformly poor understanding, spanning across all political parties, of the nature of Sanatana Dharma or its closest correlate, Hinduism, is causing intense damage to the country’s fabric. The ruling party aims to unite Hindus in order to win elections, while the opposition seeks to divide them into disparate groups in order to gain power. Both these types of political manoeuvres obscure Hinduism’s true essence, resulting in only injustice to the Hindus and the country both.

On Reservations across the World (August 3, 2024)

In his illuminating book, ‘Affirmative Action Across the World,’ American philosopher Thomas Sowell takes a deep look at reservations around the world. Group preferences and quotas under many names exist in Britain, India, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Malaysia, Indonesia, Israel, China, Australia, Brazil, Fiji, Canada, Pakistan, New Zealand, and the successor states of the Soviet Union. He writes that though projected as “temporary” to address inequality, especially of the economic variety, these measures not only persist but tend to grow. This is evident in India, where the Constitution writers after independence, including Dr. Ambedkar, wanted reservations as a temporary measure for at most ten to fifteen years.

Today, reservations are almost a permanent political policy, with all parties and at all levels promising to only increase it. Sowell makes a significant claim that the concept of “when and where there is economic inequality” encompasses virtually the entire world and virtually the entire history of humanity. Sowell characterises a ”temporary” policy, defined by the goal of achieving something unprecedented in the world, as eternal. We may achieve equality of opportunity within a feasible time frame, but this is entirely distinct from eliminating inequalities in results.

Sowell writes that all multi-ethnic societies exhibit a tendency for ethnic groups to engage in different occupations, have different levels and types of education, receive different incomes, and occupy a different place in the social hierarchy. He says, for example, that most military services do not reflect the composition of multiethnic societies. In Czarist Russia, 40 percent of the army’s high command came from the German ethnic minority, constituting only 1 percent of the country’s population. Gross disparities in ethnic representation in occupations, industries, and institutions exist in all countries across time.

Empirical studies have noted that reservation policies only benefit a select few sub-groups within the larger group, perpetuating a cycle of conflict. He notes how reservations have disrupted the social fabric of India, causing anger instead of promoting harmony between the various groups. Communities frequently attempt to integrate with the “other backward classes” in order to gain access to the associated incentives. The spread of benefits to many groups leads to dilution, especially when more than half the population of the state or country becomes entitled to them, as in both India and the United States. Sowell also notes that altering the terms of the competition can worsen the initial beneficiaries’ situation.

Another problem, which he notes, is that advancement of one preferred group tends to create ‘‘greater tension between structural neighbours in this hierarchy than between the top level and the bottom level.’’ In the 1990s, there were violent clashes in several Indian states, more common among competing poorer groups than between these groups and the more elite castes. In Tamil Nadu, for example, the highest of the ‘‘backward classes’’ legally entitled to preferences, constituting 11 percent of the total ‘‘backward classes’’ population in that state, received almost half of all jobs and university admissions set aside for these classes.

The major socio-cultural disruption occurs when incentives modify the behaviour and attitudes of both preferred and non-preferred groups. In the preferred groups, some sub-groups with additional complementary factors tend to take full advantage, while those without such factors often feel less motivated to acquire them now that entitlements are available as substitutes for achievements. For example, there may be a de-emphasis on the development of job skills, which affects the country as a whole.

Sowell cites examples of the exodus of Chinese from Malaysia, Indians from Fiji, Russians from Central Asia, Jews from much of prewar Europe, and Huguenots from 17th-century France in response to discrimination that drained all these countries of much-needed skills and talents. Thus, preferential policies can represent a net loss, as both groups respond by contributing less than they could to society as a whole. Importantly, group preferences compromise the cooperation and collaboration that are important in a variety of occupations, from scholars to policemen. There can be serious intergroup resentments between the preferred and the non-preferred groups. According to Sowell, one of the things that prevents affirmative action from being a zero-sum process is that minor transfers of benefits can cause major resentments among far more people than those who have actually lost anything.

Significantly, Sowell writes that though statistical data shows progress of groups with preferential treatment, it remains a challenge to determine how much of that progress was due to preferential policies rather than to other factors. In the United States, the proportion of the black population going to college doubled in the two decades even preceding the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, and this was reflected in the occupational rise of blacks. White resentments and their questioning why blacks cannot advance themselves like other groups are an outcome of misperception, because that is what most blacks have done.

Political discussions of these policies often overlook both the incentives and the consequences, focussing on their justifications and presumed benefits while ignoring actual empirical results, according to Sowell. In many countries, affirmative action has led to the deterioration of intergroup relations and the disruption of the social fabric, a phenomenon that is clearly visible in India. Equality of opportunity is achievable in a shorter time and has the potential to cause far less distress to society than equality of results, which is perhaps an unending, ever-increasing project leading to more fissures in society.

At a meta-level, our understanding of the word “caste” itself is faulty. Caste and sub-caste grew in western contexts; varna and jatis grew in Indian contexts. It’s possible that the imposition of caste on Indian social systems is causing significant harm to our cultural understanding. Typically, we view justice as an individualistic concept, attributing it to an individual’s efforts. Clearly, we need to redefine justice within a group context. There have been no studies determining the nature of present and past oppressors and oppressed, or how the present preferred groups have a moral right to access reservations in view of the evils of the previous generations of the non-preferred groups. A new understanding of Jati, Varna, Biradari, caste, and reservations is required. The Supreme Court’s decisions are only temporary fixes if we fail to address the underlying causes of the issue.

Fashion Trends focussing on skin show (July 17, 2024)

It was such a breath of fresh air to see actress Sukhada Khandekar on the Womenia page (THI, July 17) in beautiful attire. These days, fashion has experienced a peculiar shift, emphasizing the level of skin exposure over the actual dress. A majority of fashion trends depicted in the movies and fashion shows could never be attempted by the general public in their daily lives or even for special occasions. I wonder how our activists remain silent on this blatant celebration of skin shows in the name of fashion. The lovely dress that the actress wore was the epitome of simplicity, grace, and class. I wish our influential filmmakers and actors, who determine public opinion, got back to such depictions of fashion.

Amitabh Bachchan delving into the Mahabharata (July 14, 2024)

It is heartening to note that Amitabh Bachchan (AB delves into the wisdom of Mahabharat, THI dated July 14th) is trying to read the Mahabharata in a never-too-late mode. Otherwise, the entire country has lost its cultural moorings, ignoring the words of wise thinkers like Ananda Coomaraswamy, who wanted the itihasas (Ramayana, Mahabharata) and the Upanishads to be essential reading right from school. Making them “religious” and then shunning them from all educational levels in the name of secularism has been one of the biggest debacles of post-independent India, responsible for the sad, derooted, and deracinated state we are in collectively. The messages of “one Self in all” and “dharma” are an eternal solution for the world and are the basis of all humanitarianism, ecology, and feminism. Amitabh appears to be one of the more sensible stars, but it was shocking and sad to read that he believes in the idiotic claim that the Mahabharata should not be kept at home. Before writing this, he should have sought advice from some knowledgeable individuals. In a country where celebrities rule the roost and guide public opinion, this was a serious mistake on the part of the superstar.

Challenges to Indian Democracy. The Way Ahead? (July 13, 2024)

The article, Challenges to Indian Democracy, by Ramu Sarma (dated July 13, 2024), was certainly thought-provoking. Peculiarly, our politicians and citizens swear by democracy but refuse to accept the results when they are not to their liking. Some say the PM is “your leader” and “not mine.” This takes us back to the profound statement of Ananda Coomaraswamy that democracy is finally a “tyranny of the majority where the defeated are always unhappy.”

There has been an essential problem with democracy, as continuously articulated since the times of Socrates and other Greek philosophers two thousand years ago. Democracy does not allow the “wisest and best” (who choose to stay away from politics) to reach governance positions. When the sole criterion is the ability to garner votes, factors such as money, physical power, oratory skills, celebrity status, nepotism, and unbridled corruption become prominent. Another sad outcome of universal suffrage democracy, which is quite evident in India, is a divided people, as politicians seek votes by consolidating group solidarities. The current opposition leader is determined to further divide the population along narrower lines in order to secure victory in future elections.

Thinkers such as Sri Aurobindo, Gandhiji, Swami Vivekananda, and Ananda Coomaraswamy expressed dissatisfaction with the Westminster Parliamentary form of democracy, which we ultimately adopted as the most suitable model for our needs. They wanted a decentralised model in which the villages served as the crux of administration and development, with larger units (region, state, and country) developing in an organic and dynamic relationship. The current democratic norms and the urbanisation mantra have led to the destruction of villages. We almost feel proud that in the next three or four decades, our rural population will be only 30% and our urban population will be about 70%, so we should focus on urban planning now. This is indeed a sad outcome.

Given that democracy has become the norm in any civilised society and we cannot revert to traditional forms of government, it is imperative for thinkers to devise methods to enhance the current democratic model. Perhaps we should establish strict criteria for entering politics, similar to those for any other profession or occupation. This can begin with, of course, some educational background as a necessity and not a luxury. There could also be a formal test to assess the potential politician’s awareness of issues related to the region, state, country, and international arena.

Poor Understanding of Indian Culture and Ignorance of History (July 6, 2024)

Ramu Sarma’s op-ed piece, “The Pot Calling the Kettle Black,” published in THI on July 6, takes a harsh stance against our politicians, who frequently invoke the Constitution to justify their ludicrous statements, often lacking a thorough understanding of both Indian culture and history.

Firstly, the majority of Indians do not adhere to any “one book” or set of fixed doctrines. We are a conglomerate of many traditions, with even the religions that came from an alien land transforming into traditions and integrating into Indian culture. In its basic configuration, a traditional world primarily consists of “indifference to differences.” The ultimate goal of the individual and culture, in the words of Sri Aurobindo, is moksa, and for this, there are multiple books, multiple teachers, and multiple methods (Karma, Bhakti, Jnana, and so on) individualised to the individual or the community on the path.

Guru-shishya paramparas and sampradayas are extremely vital in this configuration of the traditional world, where multiple paths exist. However, our rishis were very intelligent people. Adi Shankaracharya’s Vivekachudamani emphasizes the ideal qualities of the guru and student and how to define each other. In Indian culture, there will always be fake Babas, but Indian spiritual masters meticulously distinguished the genuine from the fake.

Viewing the Constitution, a human made legal document, as a sacred text that cannot be altered without causing violence actually undermines our understanding of Sanatani Indian culture. Another aspect that the Constitution defenders seem to forget is the fact that, since independence, the Constitution appears to be the most pliable and flexible document in the world. The Constitution’s inviolability appears to be in jeopardy, given that the first amendment in 1951 occurred only a year and a half after it was declared the most significant document to elevate the new democracy.

The then-government found that the Constitution significantly interfered with its policies. The Supreme Court was intervening in matters relating to Zamindari abolition, press freedom, and caste-based discrimination in education. They used the Constitution itself and persuaded the President to amend it, particularly Articles 15 and 19.

The Constitution has undergone 106 changes since its inception in 1950, nearly every eight months, which may surprise some. While there are numerous reasons to criticise the BJP government, these criticisms often stem from ignorance. If this is any relief, the BJP government has amended the Constitution only eight times, or once every 15 months. Before 2014, the various governments changed the Constitution 98 times.

The Leaders should work for its citizens (July 4, 2026)

Rahul Gandhi’s behaviour in Parliament as the Leader of Opposition leaves much to be desired. His sense of entitlement and arrogance come across in ample proportions, despite the apologists trying to justify his behaviour. He always seems to be in an angry mood, whether dealing with his own people (tearing the Ordinance in front of a shocked Manmohan Singh) or with others who are not to his liking. One day, he will surely gain power if he assumes the immense responsibility of building the nation rather than building himself as the next Prime Minister. This time is, in fact, the best advertisement for democracy. A robust government, impervious to overthrow, and a robust opposition capable of preventing the executive from adopting arbitrary and tyrannical policies have rarely happened in our country’s history. All leaders from the ruling party and the opposition should seize the opportunity to build the country in terms of roads, water, food, environment, and security for its citizens, who are unfortunately remembered only during elections.

SANATANA DHARMA: THE ONLY HOPE FOR THE WORLD (June 29, 2024)

Religion has come to play a major role in increasingly polarising the world, including India, and no amount of denial would change this fact. In these troubled times, a ray of hope comes from the philosopher S.N. Balagangadhara. His core thesis, as he explains in his books, is that India is a land of traditions, not religions. Indian phenomena like “Hinduism,” “Jainism,” “Sikhism,” or “Buddhism” belong to the category of “traditions,” and these are different in many respects from “religions” represented by Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

Traditions have a completely different configuration than religions. At the fundamental level, religions say, “I am true, and you are false,” in contrast to traditions, which say, “I am true, but you are not false.” The two categories of traditions and religions are as distinct as the categories of vegetables and fruits. Indian culture has dealt with multiculturalism and pluralism far better than the West at any time in its history, with far less violence. How did this happen?

Balagangadhara says that when alien religions came to India, they met an already existing, well-formed culture. The culture assimilated religions, making them just another element of the numerous existing traditions. At a social-cultural level, the “traditionalisation” of religions led to numerous instances of genuine syncretism and organic unity within Indian culture. The religions lost focus on “absolute truth” values and the consequent critical dynamics of their proselytisation drive. The correct way to understand Sanatana Dharma is as a huge conglomerate of Vedic traditions, non-Vedic traditions, and the many religions that now behave like traditions. This traditional land, with Dharma as its driving essence, adheres to the philosophy of “indifference to differences” and represents the only path forward in today’s world.

Rather than advancing the ongoing process of traditionalising religions, our thinkers, politicians, and academics are perpetuating the colonial concept of transforming our traditions into religions. Our social sciences have to develop new theories of Indian culture instead of parroting what the West has said or continues to say about us. Converting Indian traditions into proper religions breeds intolerance and fundamentalism. The rise of so-called “Hindu fundamentalism,” an aberration of the highest kind, is the result of this faulty collective understanding of our traditions.

In traditions, it is not a single god, temple, or doctrine that is important; sampradayas, paramparas, guru-shishya lineages, multiple texts, and multiple philosophies are the norm. In a traditional world such as India, rituals encompass every aspect of life, from conception to death, rendering the distinction between religious and secular practices illogical and, in fact, an intense assault on the culture. Secularism, or the separation of the private religious sphere from the public political sphere, was a solution for European Christendom at a specific time in its history, when the various denominations were clashing with each other in many wars. It was never a universal solution for all cultures and times.

Secularism poses a significant challenge to Sanatana Dharma, particularly in its current distorted form of appeasing the so-called minorities. Every country divides its citizens into nationalists and minority groups. Only India divides nationalists into two groups: a majority and a minority. Unless we urgently understand the country as thinkers like Sri Aurobindo or Ananda Coomaraswamy articulated, there is no hope for India, and there is no hope for India becoming the key solution for the whole world in the grip of religious frictions.

India should go back to the ballots. Really? (June 24, 2024)

The interview with Dipankar Bhattacharya (India probably needs to go back to the ballots) in THI, dated June 24, shows the typical Communist strategy of repeating a lie a thousand times to make it a truth. In this regard, he mentions saffronisation so generously. History has repeatedly shown that the Communists, since their inception, have been the most consistent anti-Indian group. As a policy, they followed orders from Russia and China and sided with the British during the Quit India movement, serving as spies and informants. Their role in creating Pakistan was second only to that of the Muslim League. They played a nefarious role in the Hyderabad movement, only ceasing their anti-India stance on orders from Russia. By insinuating themselves into the academic powers, they completely distorted and destroyed our history books, causing near-permanent damage to the socio-cultural fabric of India. Surprisingly, they are still made to look relevant when they utter their nonsense about democratic norms, even as they sympathise with the Naxals, who do not really care about democracy. Bengal and Kerala are prime examples of how communism in politics could destroy prosperous states.

Changing IAS officers promptly. What does it imply? (June 20, 2024)

As soon as they come into power, new governments change previous decisions, IAS officers, and various authorities promptly. Is the bureaucracy really free? The things that all people actually want, like roads, water, security, and clean and transparent access to administration, remain a distant dream. However, the disunity among people seems to intensify with each election and each day, even as the political-bureaucratic nexus unleashes the unbridled pursuit of personal interests. The only two things required to build the country today would be absolute personal honesty and an absolute love for the country. Nothing else matters. However, it would be a huge challenge today to pick a leader or a bureaucrat who would fulfil these two conditions. That is indeed the sad state of Indian democracy.

Elon Musk’s Comments on the EVMs (June 17, 2024)

The editorial, ‘Empty Vessels Make More Noise’ (June 17, THI), should effectively silence the opposition and the critics. Sadly, that will not happen. It points to the nation’s collective intellectual entrapment by the white man. Sita Ram Goel identified Macaulayism, a term derived from Thomas Babington Macaulay, as the effective educational strategy of British India, which resulted in a generation of Indians ensnared in colonial notions about India. It fosters a sceptical attitude towards anything Indian unless approved by Western authority. It’s amusing to observe how a single Westerner’s comment on the EVMs can lead the entire opposition and critics to adhere to it as if it were a firmly established doctrine. Colonial consciousness, the perennial reverence to the white man’s words by a permanent alteration of the intellect, hangs heavy on the political parties (whether ruling or in opposition) and the citizens of the country.

Is Democracy indeed a great option? (June 15, 2024)

India, at all levels, goes to enormous lengths to conduct elections and then choose governments. Extraordinarily, following the elections, defeated leaders, people, and communities loudly proclaim their disapproval of the verdict and the new leaders. This reiterates what Ananda Coomaraswamy, one of India’s most profound and largely ignored thinkers, said about democracy: it is finally a tyranny of the majority, where the defeated minority is always unhappy. The near-permanent unhappiness of the defeated overwhelmingly raises the question of whether democracy is indeed a beneficial model for governing any country. Philosophers have questioned whether liberal democracy, with adult suffrage and the opportunity for any individual to rise to positions of power regardless of education, is the most effective model for placing the ‘wisest and the best’ in power since Socrates’ time. Greek philosophers cited nepotism, oratory skills, celebrity swaying, money power, and corruption as the major consequences of democracy, where votes are the only method to choose the government. Surprisingly, these criticisms of democracy still apply to our governments today. Like God, corruption is pervasive and ubiquitous in our civic lives. The state of the roads in most parts of the country is the most graphic example of this collective incompetence of governments at all levels since independence, when we thought democracy was the best way forward.

Regarding Photographs of celebrities in the Entertainment Section (May 23, 2024)

Today’s fashion has taken on a unique form. Celebrities were traditionally defined by the shape, form, and material of the dress, but today’s fashion emphasises the amount of exposed skin. Remember the bell bottoms, hair styles, or side pockets popularised by Amitabh Bachchan or Vinod Khanna? The ladies used to popularise sarees and attire from different parts of the country. Now, everything has descended into obscenity, with the emphasis on the skin rather than the dress itself. The latest fashions do not inspire but simply evoke revulsion at the display of nudity and vulgarity.

The Indian Economic Story (May 10, 2024)

Satyapal Menon (India’s Contrived Growth Story, THI, May 10, 2024) joins all of the country’s great naysayers who will never believe India can be an economic powerhouse. A layperson finds it frustrating when experts juggle the same set of “facts” to present exactly opposite interpretations. To all the naysayers, the question is: if we were so poor, why did the whole world come sequentially to plunder us when we should be doing so in reverse? If we are a poor country, why does the world still come to us? India never had the need to go out to invade and loot; we did venture out, but only for trade or spreading knowledge.

The famed GDP, the subject of maximum mutilation and interpretation in India, was always high. However, the GDP per capita, i.e., the GDP divided by the population of India, was never so high. The high population in the denominator always seems to be a factor pulling the numbers down. Is a high population good or bad?

The second half of the 20^th century, with broadly two phases: 1950–1980 and 1980–2000, holds an amazing Indian economic story. By 1991-2000, an economic liberalisation standing on the shoulders of a huge agricultural revolution increased the GDP to 6.2 percent, while population growth slowed to 1.8 percent—a per capita income growth of 4.4 percent a year. Successive governments built on their previous successes.

There were serious naysayers, such as Raj Krishna (1978), who coined the “Hindu rate of growth” to denote the slow rate of GDP growth from the 1950s to the 1980s. The slow rate had more to do with governmental licensing policies and an inefficient political-bureaucratic machinery. Raghuram Rajan reaffirmed this theory. Angus Maddison’s research shows how India (very Hindu in its character) was consistently contributing to almost 35–40% of the world GDP from the beginning of the common era to the 17th century, when the East India Company landed. Colonial plunder ensured that, at independence, India was contributing a pathetic 1.8% to the world GDP. Of course, the word GDP needs to carry some meaning. To add to the confusion, there are figures such as the “growth rate of per capita GDP,” where India appears to have performed well.

Economists also confuse people by constantly changing the definitions of poverty. Some different methodologies include income-based calculations, consumption- or spending-based calculations, purchasing power parity (PPP), nominal relative basis, multi-dimensional poverty index, and global hunger index. The prevalence estimates of poverty in India, using various definitions, range widely: from 6.7 percent to 60 percent of the population.

The rich 1 percent may hold upwards of sixty percent of the total wealth, making it one of the world’s most unequal countries. A more equitable distribution of wealth and decreasing the levels of corruption in both the public and private sectors should be our goal. Of course, Robin Hood-type money distribution would be a social disaster. Irrespective of political alliances, one would rather believe a better story than the perennially dark economic story of the present author. Despite all the disputes, one can safely agree that the Indian economy stood on strong ground, with a mix of the good and the bad, like for all countries, across the centuries.

THE CONSTITUTION OF INDIA: HOLY AND SACRED? (April 29, 2024)

There is unbelievable scaremongering that the BJP will change the Constitution if it comes to power again. There are secularists and leaders who swear by the infallibility or unchangeability of the Constitution, like the religious scriptures. Unfortunately, the most human-made legal document, the Indian Constitution, is also the most amended Constitution in the world. The first amendment was just one and a half years after it was proclaimed as the greatest blueprint for uplifting a new democracy.

It is another matter that it was mostly a rehashed version of a previous 1935 document under the guidance of B.N. Rau. The Bicameral Legislature, the division of powers between the Centre and the states, the residuary powers, emergency provisions in the event of a collapse of the constitutional machinery, the posts of the Governor, the powers of the judges and the Supreme Court, the laws regarding interstate relations, and the establishment of the Public Service Commission almost made the 1950 Constitution an amended version of the 1935 Act, according to many critics. One member had cryptically commented that theConstitution was essentially the Government of India Act of 1935, with only adult franchise added.

The then-Congress government’s finding that the Constitution significantly interfered with its policies led to the introduction of the First Amendment in 1951. It created reservations based solely on birth, as well as curbed press and judiciary freedom. The courts had previously passed a variety of judgements that questioned the reservation system and the government’s zamindari abolition methods, particularly those related to compensations. It is a fantastic story about how the government used the Constitution itself, along with arm-twisting the President, to change it, particularly Articles 15 and 19.

The Constitution has undergone 106 changes since its inception in 1950, nearly every eight months, which may come as a surprise to some. There are many reasons to critique the BJP government, but this is actually ignorance. If this is any relief, the BJP government has amended the Constitution only eight times or once every 15 months. Before 2014, the various governments changed the Constitution 98 times! The Constitution appears to be India’s most pliable, flexible, mouldable, bendable, and plastic document, with words written not on stone but on the sand beaches of a stormy sea.

Terrible Road Construction in our country (September 28, 2023)

Except for some major highways, most roads inside the country present a picture of apathy and destruction. The potholes on the roads are a mirror of the political-bureaucratic incompetence and corruption right from independence irrespective of any political party at the center or the state. Citizens should demand only one thing from its governments and that is construction of proper motorable roads which lasts at least for a decade after construction and not a few days. The focus of all media should only be on the roads. All the so-called development of the country at all levels simply does not mean anything to its citizens. The governments successively have failed the middle-class taxpayers uniformly in all departments since decades and it is perhaps the only thing which can provide some relief to them. The governments should realize that building good roads can be more effective than the freebies in gaining and retaining their power.

English medium and Secularism damaging our national education (September 21, 2023)

Further to the thought-provoking article by Mohan Kanda (The Mission and Vision of Gurus, THI, September 21, 2023), Ananda Coomaraswamy, one of the greatest intellectuals of modern India, put forth ideas about Indian education that are relevant even today. He wrote that education, as devised by the English, was a striking blow to “almost every ideal informing the national culture“. What, then, are the essentials from the Indian point of view that are so important to preserve?

The almost universal philosophical attitude of Indians.
The sacredness of all things(the antithesis of the European division of life into “sacred” and “profane”). In India, this was never so; religion idealises and spiritualizes life itself rather than excludes it.
The true spirit of religious toleration, as illustrated continually in Indian history.
Etiquette.
Special ideas in relation to education, such as the relation between teacher and pupil; memorising great literature; music as an important carrier of individual and national culture; learning not to become a mere road to material prosperity; and the extreme importance of the teacher’s personality.
The basis of ethics is the principle of altruism, founded on the philosophical truth: “Thy neighbour is thyself.”
Control of action and thought; concentration; and capacity for stillness.

For Coomaraswamy, national culture was the only vantage point from which a person can take a wider view of other cultures. Education should not divorce the “educated” from their past nor raise an intellectual barrier between them and the “uneducated”. The two great Indian epics and Puranas have been the great medium of Indian education for the transmission of national culture and the basis of real character building. Modern English education ignores and destroys this. “The story of Arjuna focusing on the bird’s eye embodies the culminating ideal of the nation,” says Coomaraswamy. The object of education must be to make good Indian citizens, and this is possible only by using the national culture and the national languages (literary, musical, and artistic) as the medium of instruction.

After independence, ignoring primary education led to a huge variety of schools with little coordination, limited relevance to Indian conditions, and poor attempts to ground pupils in Indian history and culture. The future citizens of India grew up with little in common, sometimes sharing the minimum of memories and values with their parents. Secularism also damaged our education greatly. Classifying the most wonderful philosophies and metaphysics available in our Vedas, Upanishads, Darshanas, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Bhagavad Gita, Puranas, and countless other texts as “religion” and then excluding them from study at the school level has been the single most important cause of the lack of pride in our culture.

Coomaraswamy says: A single generation of English education suffices to break the threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived of all roots—a sort of intellectual pariah who does not belong to the East or the West, the past or the future… Of all Indian problems, education is the most difficult and most tragic. Our acceptance of both the English language as the major medium of instruction and secularism as the guiding principle of our curricula clearly manifests as a colonial consciousness where we still parrot colonial stories about our religions, castes, science, and history instead of developing an indigenous understanding. Hopefully, the new education policies will address some issues that Coomaraswamy worried about more than a century ago.

The sham of multi-party democracy in India (September 16, 2023)

Further to the thought-provoking article ‘Maligning the media is not Samabhav’ (THI, 16th September 2023), when 26 parties come together with a single agenda of defeating the party in power, one wonders at the idea of a multi-party democracy itself. Each party supposedly has a unique approach to improving the lot of the people. Ananda Coomaraswamy called democracy finally a ‘tyranny’ of the majority, where the defeated are always unhappy. Sri Aurobindo was not in favour of the blindly adopted Westminster model of parliamentary democracy at independence.

Indian traditions had free citizens and more unity across Bharatvarsha under an ‘enlightened monarchy’. The bedrock of Indian polity was the three quartets, according to both Coomaraswamy and Aurobindo: the four varnas, the four ashramas, and the four purusharthas. The duty of the king and the state was to give protection to these quartets. The highest ideal of the nation was moksha, and this was achievable by any person within the duty-bound framework of his or her own varna dharma. Untouchability and other detestable social practices were weeds, typical of any society or culture across the world. These needed removal in the best possible manner, but it does not mandate dismantling the whole structure of Sanatana dharma as some are keen to suggest.

Indian traditions focused on qualities and duties at all levels, from the king to the ordinary citizen, unlike Western ‘rights-based’ traditions. The kinds of wars fought in Europe in mediaeval times were perhaps unusual in the Indian context. Indian wars, by principle, mostly left the agricultural lands and the temples intact. A bond linking rulers and people across kingdoms allowed free movement for pilgrimages and access to knowledge. Shankaracharya could raise the four mathas in four corners of the country. Hence, alternatives to democracy thrived without affecting trade, agriculture, literature, or the sciences across the country.

Indian civilization, at least five thousand years old, apart from a high quotient of personal happiness, had a thriving economy with highly evolved arts, literature, education, sciences, spirituality, architecture, and so on. Our indigenous systems had some worth, as their outcomes certainly attracted thousands from Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.

The antipathy and the failure to look at Indian traditions have been dominant in the ‘modernity’ narratives of academia, the media, and political theorists, where the past is always primitive. Instead of parroting western theories, our social sciences can look at our past to come up with better theories for governance. The proof of traditional models is the immense success and survival of the great Indian civilization. Traditions are not fossilised items, and they have immense flexibility to offer solutions for any period. However, is there any hope for a change as ‘liberal democracy’ has become the norm for all countries despite so many problems?

Sanatana Dharma- the Hope for Humanity (September 13, 2023)

The ‘Hinduism’ we know today is a construct built over centuries by an alien understanding of our culture. A confusion in semantics is the root problem. Sanatana Dharma is a huge conglomerate of ‘traditions’ (Vedic and non-Vedic, including the so-called tribal), encompassing the whole of the land. Sanatana Dharma is metaphorically the trunk of the tree from which various traditions branched off at different points in time. The fundamental essence of traditions is an ‘indifference to differences.’ Traditions grow into symbiotic relationships with each other, dependent yet independent. As Ananda Coomaraswamy writes, the superficial differences between ‘Buddhism’ and ‘Hinduism’ disappear on deep study when they start resembling each other. Buddhism might have rejected the Vedas as an authority like the Jains or the Sikhs, but the messages are clearly Upanishadic in nature.

‘Religions’, where doctrines are important, contrast with traditions. At a fundamental level, religions say, ‘I am true and you are false.’ Religions have settled into more ‘tolerance’ and ‘mutual respect’ modes, primarily in the form of secularism, but the underlying intolerance is active. Secularism was primarily meant for only Christendom at a specific time in European history, and it was not a universal solution for all cultures across space and time. Secularism is not able to handle the strife generated by the influx of Islam into Europe today, and neither does it seem capable of handling the ‘communal’ problems in India.

A West rooted in religion could not imagine that a culture could exist without religion. Hence, when the colonials came to India and set the narratives, they experienced the various traditions around them and constructed ‘religions’ out of them. Traditions say, ‘I am true, but you are not false’. This is the fundamental configuration of Indian culture. The reason we have relative peace in the country is because most religions, which came from alien lands, started behaving as traditions. Of course, there were huge frictions, but the integration happened gradually as the religions got traditionalized. They could practice their own faith and build their own churches and mosques, but they would lose the great zeal for conversion as its primary mover.

Our thinkers, like the colonials, instead of continuing the process of traditionalizing religions (always happening at a socio-cultural level), started converting our traditions into religions. Now, we traverse the path from tolerance to intolerance. India could well be on the path of destruction like the ancient Greco-Roman traditional world if we successfully make our traditions into religions and thus generate strife of gargantuan proportions. Hinduism (the trunk of Sanatana Dharma in a metaphorical sense after all the branches have branched off) will not only battle with Christianity and Islam but also the ‘religions’ of Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism. We see such things starting to happen.

Harmony and peace can only come if we truly understand the nature of Indian phenomena as traditions and not religions. The country has solutions for the world, which sees increasing diversity packed into smaller geographical areas. In the narratives of ‘white Christian Europe’ of the past and its ‘secularised’ versions today, many present narratives of non-western cultures override the traditional understandings. The future of humanity depends on correctly understanding Sanatana Dharma. However, we must first study India through our own lenses rather than those provided by Europe (or the US in recent times).

Noxious statements against Sanatana Dharma by dangerous politicians (September 4, 2023)

The biggest and most serious problem for the majority of politicians, thinkers, and academicians since independence has been their faulty understanding of Sanatana Dharma as a term and as an idea. The colonial-initiated scholarship, continuing till date, attaches the words Hindu, Hinduism, and Hiindutva to us and then goes on explaining what they mean in terms of the good, bad, and ugly. It is thus important to have a defence from our own side to reject noxious statements coming from ill-informed politicians, which, when applauded by people, reflect only ignorance, bias, or both. Sanatana Dharma is a huge conglomerate of ‘traditions’ whose core philosophy is an ‘indifference to differences.’ Tradition says, “I am true, but you are not false”. This is not how religions in the classical sense behave when they say, “I am true and you are false”. Making the traditions of the Sanatana world into religions like ‘Hinduism’, ‘Buddhism’, ‘Jainism’, and ‘Sikhism’ has been the fundamental flaw of intellectuals in the modern world. The Indian solution to harmony has been to make religions that came from alien lands into traditions and make them tolerant in the process. This was always happening at a social and cultural level. However, our great political-academic combine insists on making our traditions into proper religions of the Abrahamic mould and then gets surprised why the country is progressing from tolerance to intolerance.

Communists alliance with the Congress (August 28, 2023)

The Communists trying to ally with the Congress after BRS withdrew support is ironic. The only party that consistently fought the Congress, stayed mostly with the British, strongly helped the formation of Pakistan before independence, and persistently took orders from Russia and China to formulate its policies after independence has been the Communists. It is rich when they talk about ‘betrayal’. Looking at the alliances now happening, party-based democracy seems meaningless, as thinkers like Sri Aurobindo warned. We can disband the party system completely because, firstly, there can never be a single ‘ideology or philosophy’ to tackle all the problems related to a country, and secondly, the only purpose of everyone is to gain power by any means, which is a flaw at a deeper level of democracy. Parties are merely a ‘group’ identity that confers benefits on individuals, but they are never about an idea to develop the country.

A Demographic Disaster- Not Really (August 24, 2023)

Vincent Fernandes’ article (India staring at a demographic disaster, THI, August 24) was filled with rhetoric, unsubstantiated claims, and general naysaying about the prospects of a golden future for India. How did he manage to say that India’s education is a mess, and its democracy does not measure up to international ratings? The problems with Indian democracy are the generalised problems of any democracy articulated since the times of Socrates and Plato. It is finally a ‘tyranny’ of the majority, where the defeated are always unhappy.

Our primary education was a failure because it did not have a direction and a unity of purpose in building national character. The country made the error of solely concentrating on higher education, ignoring primary education. However, this was not true for higher education. This consequently led to the creation of an unemployed middle class, many of whom migrated to greener pastures. After 1991, the process is now slowing down. Unlike many countries, which depend on foreign degrees to get their validation, India has a strong higher education system in place.

India’s demography is an advantage, a story of immense hope, and can only be a disaster for people whose idea of India is perhaps different. The most important demographic change in the next 20–30 years is that our average age will be in the 30s. Every country goes through three demographic phases: first, a high birth rate and a high death rate; second, a prominent young working and labour force, which can be a backbone for industrialization; and third, an increase in the elderly. The last has happened to most western countries and is soon going to happen to Asian giants like China and South Korea.

Primary education has come back as a big force in the country, and when combined with the demographic change, our country is ready for a huge leap in infrastructure and heavy industrialization. There is everything positive going for our country in education and demographics, and we should perhaps not mess it up. But this story is one of hope rather than dismay and depression, as the article seems to convey.

THE SCARE OF THE HINDU RASHTRA- POOR UNDERSTANDINGS OF SANATANA DHARMA (August 21, 2023)

‘Hindu rashtra’ and the scare of a ‘fascist Hindutva’ state are the shrill notes nationally and internationally. At a fundamental level, ironically, we do not even know the definitions of ‘Hindu’, ‘Hindu religion’, and ‘Hindutva’. ‘Hindu’ was originally a geographical and historical entity for people on the other side of the Indus River. This later became a separate group from Muslims and Christians. The colonials, rooted in their own understanding of the Christian religion, constructed ‘religions’ out of the differently behaving traditions of the country. This led to the formation of ‘Hinduism’, ‘Buddhism’, ‘Sikhism’, and ‘Jainism’, an artificial division of the larger Dharmic framework. As Balagangadhara says, Hinduism in scholarly descriptions is a religion, a culture, an inverted tree, a mathematical empty set, an unnatural creation, a lasagna, a rope, a potpourri, or whatever else the scholar feels like.

Despite all the ambiguities in defining Hindus and Hinduism, even by the Constitution and the judiciary, Hindutva appears to be the clearest manifestation of all evil. However, historically, it has simply been the defence or kinetic component of Sanatana Dharma against a constant stream of attacks on Indian culture. Islamic rule, colonial rule, the missionaries, the Marxists, Indologists in German and American universities, and the colonised Indians after independence have formed one nearly unbroken spectrum of attacks on Indian culture.

The 19^th-century defence of the Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj against the idolatry criticism of colonials and missionaries was the beginning. Hindus crystallised further into ‘Mahasabhas’, but without political traction, in the early 20^th century in the wake of the Montey-Morley reforms, the Khilafat movement, the Moplah riots, and the constant perceived appeasement policies of the Congress as well as the British authorities. After independence, ‘political’ Hindutva evolved as a defence against the unfair shunning of Hindus following Gandhiji’s assassination and a stream of perceived appeasements disfavouring Hindus (secularism, the Shah Bano case, MF Hussain paintings, the Uniform Civil Code delay, selective control of religious places, cow-slaughter issues, and so on). The huge push into political prominence came, of course, with the famous Rath Yatra, but this was perhaps the culmination of centuries of Hindu struggle.

Sanatana Dharma, a conglomerate of traditions, is the solution to harmony for the entire multi-cultural world. Traditions work on the principle of ‘indifference to differences.’ Religions became traditions when they came to India, and socially, there was always harmony and attempted syncretism. Today, a reverse ‘religionization’ of traditions is leading to many intolerances unnatural to the nature of ‘Hinduism.’ Thankfully, it is a minority today. The scare is going to increase in the days to come if the poor understanding persists and power is the sole drive for politics.

We need a radical understanding of what Hindu, Hinduism, and Hindutva even mean. But first, the political, academic, and intellectual elite of the country need to shed their huge colonial baggage. The pontification, “Hinduism is good and Hindutva is bad,” is silly and shallow intellectualism. Sanatana Dharma is the overarching philosophy of Indian culture, which transcends and permeates all religions and traditions into one unifying whole.

Depiction of Mindless Violence in Movies (August 11, 2023)

The unbelievable violence depicted in Indian movies, especially Telugu ones, is a matter of serious concern for the responsibilities of our filmmakers. The common refrain for such beyond comprehension violence, of course, is that “art imitates life”. However, the kind of violence shown in our movies, especially with the ‘superstars’, ‘celebrities’, and ‘legends’, has an absolute disconnect with either urban or rural life. It is gory and ruthless, and it points to an absolute lawlessness in the land. Mass murders using weapons of the most imaginative kind are a terrible insult to the entire culture and the administration of the land. However, the reverse of “life imitating art” definitely happens. A society where peace and respect for the law need to ingrain themselves deeply now finds justification for its abnormal behavior through these movies. One cannot justify, in any healthy society, highly paid stars glorifying crime and violence the way they are doing it in their movies. The movie makers are not transmitting entertainment, values, or information to society but only perversions with the sole purpose of making money. Art, perhaps for its own sake, seeking the ultimate, has been the driving force of Indian culture. Such grand definitions of art bear no meaning today in our society. However, in these troubled times, art has a huge responsibility towards society, and movies are simply the most popular and effective in impacting society. Thus, the great power inherent in it calls for a greater responsibility towards society and culture. Can we, as a first step, tone down the mindless violence and absolute lack of values depicted in our movies?

Promotion of Breast feeding (August 7, 2023)

We have been celebrating World Breastfeeding Week from August 1 to August 7 every year since 1992. It is a sad fact that only 44% of infants in the first six months of life were exclusively breastfed over the period of 2015–2020. One cannot overstate the importance of breastfeeding for both mother and child. The reasons for denying breastfeeding are many: family, social, cultural, medical, and economic, to name a few. At a meta-level, it is disturbing that something so basic as breastfeeding, a necessary part of any species evolution, needs aggressive promotion and advertisement uniformly across all countries in the world.

As basic biology texts make it clear, the three basic qualities of living organisms are protection, growth, and propagation of species. The last is to prevent the extinction of species. Evolution works as a dynamic interplay between nature and the species to nurture these three basic qualities. Breastfeeding is extremely basic for our survival (and arguably our success) as a mammalian species. Among the other factors contributing to removing the infant from breastfeeding are the present narratives of individualism and the utilitarian approach to gender equality. Society is dangerously losing its understanding of the exclusive value that birthing, motherhood, and lactation bring to women. One author significantly says that attacks on the most obvious institutions maintaining female accessibility to males—heterosexuality, marriage, and motherhood—form the core triad of feminist ideology. There is something problematic when a biological function becomes a matter of rights or an impossibility to execute because of the many factors around us. If we need to promote breastfeeding, the fundamental brick of species survival, are we really progressing and evolving as human beings?

The Rise of Religious Fundamentalism in India (July 28, 2023)

The arrest of an anaesthetist on alleged terror links in Pune is disturbing, to say the least. What is it that drives even educated people like doctors to indulge in anti-national activities? In the days to come, intolerance in the name of religion is going to increase from all sides, without exception. Religion essentially “others” a person, and it says, “I am true and you are false.” The only way it gets peace is by converting the other or even eliminating him, as in the olden days. This was true of not only Islam but also Christianity. The history of Greco-Roman conversions in the first centuries of the millennium was brutal.

One of the fundamental misunderstandings people have about India is that “Hinduism” or its closest correlate, “Sanatana Dharma ”, is a “religion”. Sanatana Dharma is a conglomerate of a huge number of traditions (sampradayas and paramparas, where ancestral lineages and gurus count equal to, if not more than, individual deities and doctrines). Sanatana Dharma is the “tree” metaphorically from which all the great traditions of India (Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and such) branched out.

Sanatana Dharma is finally a great conglomerate of many Vedic, non-Vedic, and so-called ‘tribal cultures’ interacting with each other in a syncretic manner, independent yet dependent. This, across many thousands of years and in a far greater amount of peace than seen anywhere else in the world, has the greatest capacity to absorb and assimilate any number of thoughts without violence. What remains after the branching out of the main trunk is perhaps the “Hinduism” we know today, but it remains hard to define for the best scholars.

The fundamental philosophy of traditional lands is “indifference to differences,” and this is the Indian solution for the world to deal with multiculturalism and its consequent strife. Traditions, in contrast to religions, say, “I am true, but you are not false.” Conversions to another stream and completely giving up the previous faith are alien and violent concepts. India dealt with alien religions when they came to India by “traditionalizing” them and making them tolerant in the process.

There is no problem today for any Indian when Christians and Muslims sing the highest devotional praises to Hindu deities without any fear of losing their own religion. This was always happening at the social level. However, our thinkers at the political and academic levels, instead of continuing this process, started to make our traditions into religions. The efforts to define Hinduism (or Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, or any such “isms”) as a “religion” are causing more harm to society than ever before. The so-called rise of “Hindu fundamentalism” is a consequence of such a faulty understanding. India is one and home to all, but there is an urgent need for us to understand it better and not accept wholly, without reflecting, whatever the colonials said about us. India is the key to world harmony.

Strange alliances of political parties (July 19,2023)

The alliances formed for the next elections are only a pointer to the sham called democracy. One of the most profound thinkers of the last century, Ananda Coomaraswamy, called democracy a tyranny of the majority. Whether the win is by a slender or large margin, the defeated always feel angry and vengeful. The only aim of every single politician and party is to ascend to power and stick to it. Every route is valid to attain the purpose, mainly involving bribery, corruption, and nepotism. This has been true for all democracies for centuries. Greek philosophers were critical of democracy in saying that the ‘wisest and the best’ hardly come to office to administer the country. Sri Aurobindo was not in favour of a Westminster model of parliamentary democracy based on adult suffrage. However, we are now stuck with a so-called ideal system where all adults have the power to vote and choose monarchs at the state and central levels. Our ancient multiple kingdoms perhaps had fewer fights amongst each other. There is division and splintering among people as a direct consequence of the intense desire to gain power. The individual states actually feel that they have no part to play in the nation. The balkanization of the country we see along various lines is a direct outcome of political shenanigans. It is sad and heartbreaking when the most diverse ideologies unite with the only intention of removing one man from power. The ruling party alliances are also as diverse as possible, with the only idea being to stay in power. One of the smartest but troubling moves is to call the opposition alliance I.N.D.I.A. If you are opposing the parties, you are now opposing the nation itself. These are the popular slogans, apart from the liberal freebies that have won elections for parties while the country spirals on a downward path.

Training of unqualified people as ‘doctors’ a dangerous move (July 13, 2023)

In India, there is increasing specialised healthcare for those who can afford it. The gap between medical delivery for the rich and the poor is increasing. The Bhore Commission Report (1952), to reformat the medical and health systems, sought to fill the vacuum of trained doctors in rural areas. There was previously a licentiate system of medical practitioners (LMP) that provided valuable services to rural India. They underwent training in medical colleges and had an official degree to practise medicine, though in a limited manner. Unfortunately, the committee rejected this system in its entirety. Its core recommendation became a properly trained ‘basic doctor’ as the best person who, given adequate ancillary staff, can impact health delivery. Some solid recommendations, however, remained utopian, as we are still struggling with the health parameters. The load is now on tertiary-level hospitals, which are not able to cope. The Primary Health centres, visualised as the backbone, crumpled to their present degenerate state.

Rural India stays detached from the main hospitals in most instances. Ironically, the majority of Indian doctors stay in urban areas, catering to an urban population that may form only 20% of the Indian population. With a weakened primary health care system and poor transport facilities, health delivery in the villages has gone into the hands of quacks. Barely educated, they are smart people in the villages who have exploited fluid medical systems to make money.

There has been a recent move to introduce a system that allows untrained people, outside of the medical college curriculum (like in the past), to become trained as ‘community health providers’ who can practise preventive and primary medical care. This can be a dangerous and ill-conceived move to increase the doctor-patient ratio. A proper debate is essential to devising a method of training a group of ‘middle-level practitioners’ who would be useful and at the same time non-dangerous, addressing the biggest fear of concerned Indian doctors. It would be a far better idea to look for well-trained nurses to fill this need for primary health care. Their numbers are better than doctors, they are part of a structured curriculum, and they are an inherent part of the medical delivery system without any ambiguity.

Health does not depend only on the availability of doctors, drugs, and equipment. It depends greatly on the provision of clean water, good roads, the elimination of garbage, closed drainage systems, improved food and educational opportunities, and sterling transport services. The very act of covering our drainage systems would eliminate many of our health problems. But successive governments across the country have not done too well on these counts. The reasons are mainly faulty planning at the political-bureaucratic level, even as doctors take the blame for many of the ills plaguing the medical delivery systems.

Secularism and the debate on UCC (June 30, 2023)

Secularism, the separation of the public social sphere from the private religious sphere, was a straight import of European intra-Christian ideas battling their religious issues. The debate on the relationship between the state and religion ranged widely in the Nehruvian period. It was a vaguely defined concoction of ‘indifference’ to religion. However, Nehru’s state, claiming all the rights in its relations with the Hindus, took liberties. Nehru objected to the President inaugurating the rejuvenated Somnath temple; objected to Bande Mataram because of religious connotations; allowed the Hindu Code Bill; and insisted on debating religious issues such as the Hindu personal law and cow slaughter in secular terms. But he dared not touch the Muslim personal law, despite his anxiety to have a uniform civil code. In claiming the rights of a Hindu state, Nehru’s government’s refusal to accept the obligations of defending Hinduism incurred charges of inconsistency in applying secularism, says eminent scholar Bhikhu Parekh.

After independence, India became a peculiar liberal democracy with uniform criminal but not civil laws. The Indian state thus recognises both individuals and communities as bearers of rights. The criminal law recognises only individuals, whereas the civil law recognises most minority communities as distinct legal subjects. Article 44 of the Constitution mandates that the State endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India. The summary of the arguments against a Uniform Civil Code in all circles is that India is not a homogenous country, and therefore legislative uniformity in personal and family matters cannot be at the expense of diversity as it obliterates the differences. However, this argument has multiple fallacies and inherent contradictions:

A secular democratic republic under a written Constitution guarantees equality before the law and equal protection of the law to all citizens. This argument logically leads to different Constitutions catering to the huge regional differences in not only religions but also languages, cultures, and customs.
Hindu society itself is not homogenous, with so many languages, cultures, and customs, yet there is a forcibly uniform set of personal laws for all Hindus. This again leads to the logic of repealing the Hindu Marriage Act, the Hindu Succession Act, the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, and the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act and allowing various segments of Hindu society to follow their own customary personal laws.

In the face of the ridiculous proposition of having multiple Constitutions catering to various segments, the UCC is necessary for the country. As one scholar points out, a Uniform Civil Code covers matters relating to marriage, divorce, inheritance, succession, adoption, maintenance, guardianship, and other family and personal matters. It would be prudent to progress gradually through piecemeal legislation by initially taking up the most important issues that are against constitutional principles.

This includes a uniform age of consent for marriage between all citizens, irrespective of both religion and gender, and the banning of polygamy as first steps. Polygamy is illegal for Hindus (section 494 of the IPC), but legal for Muslims and certain tribal populations. A secular country guaranteeing equality before the law, parity between sexes, and gender justice cannot allow polygamy.

Polygamous societies are more prone to violence and instability, as empirically noticed. Polygamy only for select religious groups can lead to the destabilisation of religious demographic balance, causing disturbances and anxieties detrimental to national unity and integrity. It would be great if Muslim intellectuals, without bowing to the pressure of the clergy, engaged in larger debates. The Uniform Civil Code is not an attack on Muslim brethren in the country, but in some places, they should be willing to seek reforms pro-actively for the greater sake of the nation. Goa should be an example here for the nation.

On the state of democracy in India (June 29, 2023)

Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote that democracy finally descends into chaos, where the defeated will always have a grudge against the victors. The amount of hatred that the Republicans and Democrats have for each other in the USA is even preventing marriages across the groups, if reports need believing. The same hate is now evident in the multi-party system of India, where things are even more chaotic. Both for the parties and the people following the parties, affiliation with the party seems to matter more than the nation itself. A new party comes into power and immediately undoes whatever the previous party has done, good or bad. There is prompt renaming of many schemes and benefits.

Even something so simple as praising a past PM on his birth anniversary becomes a slugfest between political parties as one accuses the others of inadequately honouring him. Great Indians who worried for their country are now in the brackets of narrow political identities. The most disturbing thing for an ordinary citizen is the role of the governor. There are all the reasons to disband it completely now that it has become a political post. In most states, allegations and counter-allegations abound that the governor is acting as the centre’s agent. The governor is mostly on an absolutely independent but ineffective path, unconnected to the ruling party.

The mess is of gargantuan proportions, and finally, the desperation for votes and the greed for power seem to be driving the country’s democracy rather than a love for the country. However, Greek philosophers two thousand years ago made the same criticism of democracy. Is there a way out? Perhaps the first would be to ensure some qualifications to become leaders, like some basic education and a lack of criminal records. Any civilization looks at qualifications and authority to allow any person to do his duty. It is sad that in a democracy, there are requirements to qualify for the lowest of the posts, but none for ruling the people, except the power to gain votes by any means possible. The leaders of today are only dividing the people in every conceivable manner, with rarely a holistic vision encompassing the country. Unfortunately, the people are following suit.

ADIPURUSH AND THE ATTACK ON HINDU CULTURE (June 21, 2023)

Adipurush movie writer Manoj Muntashir Shukla, in a video from five years ago, reveals that adding the name Muntashir brought changes to his persona. He started countering the Shiv Stotra chant of his priest father with verses in praise of Islam in a loud voice. This is not surprising and shows the deep problem of secularism in our country. For European Christendom, at a specific point in its history, secularism became a solution for harmony when the various denominations were fighting each other. Secularism separated the Church from the state. However, it could not be a universal solution across time and space, as Europe struggles with the influx of Islam today. It was also inapplicable to non-Christian cultures like India, where the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘secular’ deeply intertwine and their separation is actually a ridiculous proposition. Secularism for India, an inappropriate application of western solutions to India, now comes to mean abusing the majority, appeasing the minority, and converting our highest philosophical insights into ‘religious’ thoughts (to be shunned or abused). With such writers, no wonder Adipurush was a deep strike on Indian culture.

RITUALS AND SCIENTIFIC TEMPER: THE WORRY OF SHARAD PAWAR (May 29, 2023)

Sharad Pawar, commenting on the rituals at the inauguration of the new parliament building, said that India was going backward, clashing with the Nehruvian ‘scientific temper’ so essential for constructing a modern new India. This is an important example of the gross ignorance of our political, academic, and constitutional thinkers about both the nature of Indian traditions and Indian history. Fundamentally, India is a land of traditions, not religions. As the strong hypothesis of Balagangadhara says, only Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are ‘religions’ in the definitional sense. Religions have a strong basis in their doctrines and their truth values. The fascination with ‘true’ or ‘false’ and the ‘why’ question has, as its consequences, religious wars, the importance of conversion, ‘tolerance to the other’ as a solution for harmony, atheism, and science, amongst other things. The science and atheism that grow in such religious cultures typically clash with their religious institutions.

Traditional lands (like India or the Greco-Romans of the past) have ‘rituals’ as their basis, and their focus is on the ‘how’ question, and their solution for harmony is an ‘indifference’ to the differences. The construction of various ‘religions’ in the Abrahamic mould of the various traditions of Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism) has been the single most destructive and important contribution of the colonials. Unfortunately, our dominant ideology-driven academia and naive politicians in post-independent India did not question this narrative. Traditions having the ‘how’ or ‘performative abilities’ as their basis equally develop a scientific temper. Only the framework is different. The clash of religion with science is a straight western import, transferring the clashes of the church with its scientists to Indian traditions, where it is an almost unknown phenomenon.

For those who believe that India was primitive before the colonials came, the slightest reading of the works of Dharampal would bring enough light to dispel their ignorance. India had highly developed mathematics, astronomy, architecture, metallurgy, agriculture, and engineering, apart from the arts, before the colonials came. The colonials had an initial sense of awe and wonder, but later it was one of their important requirements to project a primitive civilization to justify their “civilising mission”. Indians still continue to believe that story.

The solution to harmony in India was to convert the religions that came from alien worlds into traditions. Reversing this process, we are converting our traditions into religions, which is responsible for much of the mess today. We are transitioning from an indifference to an intolerance characterised by traditions and religions, respectively, in their pure forms.

Marrying someone from my own ‘jati’ is not discrimination against the rest of the world. It is simply narrowing the search domain for the desired results. Conducting rituals in one format is never discriminatory against all the other traditions (or religions) of the land. This is a fundamental thing that modern social scientists thriving on western literature and our political thinkers should understand when they hold forth on topics such as discrimination and oppression.

Loving and hating Modi (May 26,2023)

The hatred for Modi by the opposition and a significant number of citizens must be one of the astounding phenomena of Indian democracy today. On the other side is the extreme reverence for him by another section of society. Each calls the other by the choicest of names. All the other ministers have faded into the background, as it appears that every single good or bad thing in this country is because of Modi. The extreme polarisation of people around a single person is unfortunate. Both the extraordinary hate and love are scary for the future of India, as people on both sides of the fence are losing balance and hurting India in the process. Despite all that, the banning of the inauguration of the Parliament building by the opposition is the saddest day for Indian democracy, and unfortunately, there are other citizens too who support such a ban.

Civil Servants and Politicians (May 24, 2023)

There is a lot of media coverage whenever the civil service results are out. Rightly so, as we need to celebrate grit, determination, and success. However, all the ‘adhikara’ and quality invested in becoming a civil servant or, for that matter, in becoming anything in the country today seems to be offset by the single lack of quality and ‘adhikara’ in becoming a politician. Sadly, there are stringent criteria for entering any profession, yet no such qualifications exist to become the ruler of our country and guide its people. The exclusion of the political leader from any qualifications except his or her ability to garner votes fundamentally represents the many problems of India in particular and democracy in general.

Religions and Traditions- The Need to Understand India Urgently (May 22, 2023)

The article Grave Faith: Faith-Based Terrorism by DC Pathak (May 22, 2023) was thought-provoking. Muslim intellectuals and Hindu seculars should seriously remove their heads in the sand and address the elephant in the room. There is a need to understand that, despite a significant Muslim population and occasional clashes, Indian society has been far more peaceful at any time in its history since Islam landed than any other part of the world. The indigenous solutions for harmony were different. It is fundamental to appreciate, which our political and academic thinkers failed to do, that India is a land of traditions and not religions. Religions are definitionally intolerant of ‘non-believers’ and ‘others’ easily and do not have the capacity to accept diversity. Traditions are ‘indifferent’ to others, which transcends the concepts of acceptance and tolerance. Islam and Christianity became a part of many traditions in India, and they became a part of the symphony of Indian society. Instead of continuing this process, our thinkers, in reverse, are largely converting our traditions into religions. Sanatana dharma breaks down into many religions (Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism), and it gives rise to the abnormal phenomena of ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘aggression’ termed pejoratively as ‘Hindutva’.

Further to the thought-provoking editorial (SC rightly holds back in matters of culture, dated May 20, 2023), who defines animal cruelty? Humans have an unequal and complicated relationship with the rest of the animal kingdom, which has evolved over many million years. Animals come into the equation with humans in myriad ways: as food, as pets, for entertainment (sports that may or may not involve killing the animals), as experimental animals in the pharmaceutical and medical industries, as beasts of burden, and as war animals.

Pet abuse is a favourite obsession of NGOs like PETA. The number of animals used in the medicinal industry is too mind-boggling to even mention. We are enjoying the longevity provided by the medical and pharmaceutical industries because of experimentation and trials on an infinite number of animals. Food animals are too numerous to mention. The percentage of vegetarians in almost all countries in the world is in the single digits. India stands between 29 and 40%, which is clearly an outlier. Circuses and sports of various forms, like Jallikattu, bull fighting, and deer hunting, constitute using animals as sport. This is one area where there is a lot of noise from the animal rights crusaders, the media, and the lawyers.

ANIMAL CRUELTY AND HUMANS (May 20, 2023)

The use and abuse of animals is part of the evolutionary game, and there is no way we can avoid that. We cannot apply moral standards and ethics to our behaviour towards them selectively. It is all right to consume them or use them in the medicinal industry for our benefit, but we seem to have exacting standards to deal with them when used as pets or for entertainment, perhaps in non-impacting areas. Again, the size of the animal seems to matter. We do not have any problems with the sacrifice of millions of rats, mice, and guinea pigs (sometimes killed during advanced stages of pregnancy) to study medicines and procedures, but horses and elephants used for film shooting become an area of intense discussion. In short, we have created our own standards for what is ‘humane.’

In such circumstances, talking about the cruelty of Jallikattu and cockfights while having a chicken tikka masala does not make any sense. It is good to have some moral standards in dealing with animal use, but they will always be fluid, grey, and interpretable. The aim for humans (in an allegedly advantageous evolutionary position) would be to settle in a dynamic equilibrium where the animals do not outnumber us and simultaneously make use of them for our own survival without completely removing them. And hence, Jallikattu will continue, bullfighting will continue, deer hunting will continue, meat will continue, and PETA will continue. We will continue to have fish in our aquariums, talk to them, and consume them too. This is the way of the world; this is the way of the complex human mind.

CJI and his woke activism damaging Indian society (April 20, 2023)

The biggest tragedy of most Indian intellectuals since colonial times till date is the acceptance of all narratives about India as set forth by the west. Sita Ram Goel called it ‘Macaulayism’ and Balagangadhara has a more detailed thesis of ‘colonial consciousness.’ The latter is a colonial violence on Indian intellectuals who fail to look beyond the western understandings while studying both ourselves and the west. This happens much later after the colonials have left with almost a permanent altering of our intellectual frameworks. Rejecting the colonial consciousness is hard work which lazy intellectuals and ideology driven academia failed to do in independent India.

Where does this colonial consciousness work? The Aryan story; converting Indian ‘traditions’ into ‘religions’ and then accepting secularism as the best solution for harmony; superimposing ‘caste’, a western idea, into the varna and jatis of India, a different phenomenon altogether; solidifying politically and legally a rigid hierarchical “caste-system” at divergence from the socio-cultural practices; our disdainful view of traditional medicine despite its great contributions; the blanking out of Indian philosophy from all learning in schools by calling it “religion”; the need of English language to prosper and also as a national language; the idea of one dharmashastra (Manu) as prescriptive and authoritative for all eternity to come; making the western clash between “science and religion” our own; understanding our practices and rituals from a scientific perspective and making them superstitious and irrational; accepting the political ideologies of the left-right-center; the disbelief in a golden period of India which attracted plunderers from across the world; the story that we were never a nation and the British united us; ad infinitum.

Broadly, biological sex is ‘hardware’ determined by the chromosomes and the genitals; gender is ‘software’ (arising in the brain) which may think of the self as anybody in a spectrum ranging from ‘pure’ male to ‘pure’ female. The confusion between the hardware and software issues leads to bizarre activism of all kinds today with many interfering seriously in the work of medical professionals. Presently, the ‘woke activism’ of the west which has the ‘autonomous individual’ as the focus point of all its narratives has infected the Indian intellectuals. The recent ideas of the Chief Justice Of India on same-sex marriages does not make sense from an Indian cultural perspective but is an explicit example of colonial consciousness looking forever west.

Marriage or vivaaha has a special place in Hindu thought and Indian culture. Reducing it to western ideas by colonised intellectuals in positions of power can potentially cause an immense destruction of Indian social fabric. While Indian culture may accept gender identities of any form freely without persecution and may even allow same-sex people to live together, the idea of marriage and vivaaha simply is a gross violence on Indian culture, Hindu customs, and its philosophy. It betrays a poor understanding of what Indian culture is all about and exemplifies the forcible universal application of western ideas on all cultures.

INSTANT JUSTICES: A TIME TO REFLECT ON THE JUDICIAL SYSTEMS (April 18, 2023)

The moral and legal conundrums related to crime and justice come to the fore with extra-judicial killings of terrorists, criminals, Naxalites, murderers, or rape accused. Every single political party of all hues across the country are witness to and even party to the extra judicial eliminations. Yogi is neither the first nor going to be the last. Certain people deserve the highest punishment, whether capital or otherwise, and there can be no second opinion on this. What is debatable is the means to achieve the end which raises more uncomfortable questions than answers. When the entire country erupts in joy at the dramatic and instant killing of any accused it reflects directly on the judicial system of the country. The delays, the leniency, the ineffectiveness, the injustices of the courts themselves have come to a point that a civilised society is rejoicing in killing of a person. The instant justices are getting too common which should only make the judicial system reflect on itself rather than involving in issues which do not even remotely concern them. The activism perfected by many judges in recent times needs replacement by an aggression to clear the pending cases. Many of those killed deserve capital punishment but the vexed citizens would hold their heads in pride if a fast-track court convicted them and then proceed with the punishment. The present encounter in UP may be a feel-good solution but leaves a huge set of questions for the citizens, the governments, and the judicial systems. When judges fear to do their jobs or are susceptible to influences of many kinds it is surely a sign of deepest worry. The last surviving pillar of democracy needs some serious overhauling.

EDUCATIONAL QUALIFICATIONS OF OPPOSITION MEMBERS (April 10, 2023)

A new bug of demanding to see the educational qualifications of opposition members has now infected politicians. Instead of focusing on the country, this is a huge diversion which fails to make the least sense. The Constitution of India on the eligibility criteria for an MP or MLA categorically makes no mention of educational qualifications. Ironically, right or wrong, perhaps the only professions in the country which does not require an education to practice are medicine and politics, both related to the well-being of the individual and the nation. An education is desirable but not mandatory for election as a people’s representative. For that matter, no democracy in the world asks for educational qualifications except mainly a certain age, citizenship of the country, and an absent criminal record. If at all, political parties can focus on the last to attack the opposition with. The defining criterion in democracies today is in making the education of its representatives irrelevant! Since the times of Socrates, the ideal governing model which selects the ‘wisest and the best’ to take care of its citizens has always been an enigma for thinkers. Democracy just appears to be the least of all the evils.

REWRITING HISTORY BOOKS (April 4, 2023)

The removal of the history of Mughal Empire by the NCERT takes the political interventions in history writing from one extreme end to another. In post-independent India, the Congress along with the historians steeped in leftist ideology pushed a distorted history based on the ideas of secularism. Whitewashing the Islamic Empire’s crimes and severe iconoclastic activities in history books was a solution for them to achieve ‘communal harmony.’ This was a weird acknowledgement of the association of the present-day Muslims with the past Islamic rulers.

It was a disastrous move because the historical depictions in our textbooks went against a huge body of descriptions of contemporary historians of those times (mainly Muslims) which exist intact in the libraries. When true history comes out, faster and more effective in the globalized and connected world, the Hindu seethes in anger and the Muslim attempts to defend the indefensible. A far better way would have been a true depiction of the barbarities of the Islamic Empire (a blip of six or seven centuries in a 5000 year old Indian civilization) and stressing that the present day Muslims had nothing to do with the Islamic rulers.

India had an Islamic scholar as an education minister for ten long years after independence. This unique event in the history of any country would have certainly helped the implementation of these policies. Inappropriate ideas of secularism could not have the maturity of dealing with the problem between two communities whose frictions dated back to centuries. It grasped the definition of secularism as appeasement of ‘minority’ and liberalism as abuse of the ‘majority’ which managed to create a great disharmony unsurprisingly. The present decision to ban Mughal history is equally immature as the previous governments which is sure to aggravate the religious tensions in the country.

The Hindus Remain Ignored by All Political Parties (March 25, 2023)

When elephants fight it is the grass which suffers. With rising intolerances between the political parties and increasingly partisan attitudes of the judiciary appearing to act on personal whims it is the country and especially the Hindus who are suffering the most. BJP is an outcome of the amazing Congress policy of seven decades after independence where the latter divided the Hindus on every conceivable faultline. Not only that, their consistent definitions of ‘secularism’ and ‘liberalism’ were appeasement of the minorities and abusing the Hindus, respectively. The other political parties were too insignificant to change the Congress attitude.

The BJP simply consolidated the Hindu vote which, fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, still has the majority share in the vote. When an angered Hindu community voted en bloc to the BJP, suddenly and ironically, democracy went into ‘danger.’ Unfortunately, most of the opposition, in its dislike or even hatred for the BJP and specifically Modi, is transforming into a hatred or dislike for the Hindus and even India. No political party is trying to make amends by trying to appeal to the Hindus that it will do better for them.

For most Hindus, the BJP happens to be the least of the evils, but worried intellectuals have been disappointed at their performance. The BJP still thinks of binaries of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ It continues the Congress policy of dividing people into various groups, offering sops to each, and finally trying to project that it is doing more for the Hindus and protecting them from even extinction. As an example, the freeing of the temples from government control and the rejecting of many historical narratives set by the left-liberal academics is the minimum the government should have done till now for the Hindus.

What we need perhaps is a new avatar of BJP or a new party in India which takes in the real principles of Sanatana Dharma in running the country. Hindu, Hinduism, and Hindutva are very porous constructions which means everything and anything to politicians and scholars depending on their ideology and political affiliation. The silliest and the most popular of course is “Hindus and Hinduism good; Hindutva bad” which shows ignorance at the deepest level.

Hinduism may or may not be the same as Sanatana Dharma, but it has the closest association. Sanatana Dharma has been existing for thousands of years as the driving philosophy of the nation, and which has an immense capacity to absorb any pluralism, diversity, and multiculturalism more than any other political philosophy, faith, or religion in the history of the world. India has the solutions for harmony not only for itself but for the entire world if there is a true understanding of what the great country is all about. The few people who correctly understood the country were Sri Aurobindo in the past and scholars like Dr SN Balagangadhara in the present. It is time we look at them more diligently.

The Dangers of AI- the Indian approach to machines (March 22, 2023)

‘AI isn’t close to becoming insentient’ by Nir Eisikovits (THI 22^nd March) is a brilliant article on the ethical issues involving the latest innovations in technology. He warns humans of the danger of anthropomorphizing machines and believing that they can one day take over the human world. Many scientists in the belief of the philosophy that there can only be progress with regards to scientific developments agree to this position. Ordinary humans are scared of such alarms.

However, if one looks at Indian Darshanas, there can be some hope and solace. Western materialism and science are of the overriding view that consciousness and sentience is secondary to matter. Starting with the atoms, matter organizes itself in higher orders of complexity (molecules, inanimate matter and then finally animate matter). The development of sentience and consciousness is a logical outcome of such a progress of complexity, and it is only a matter of time. Machines asking the question, ‘Who am I’ are just around the corner. The corner might be a few thousand years from now, but it will come.

Indian philosophies are very clear on its stand (a few western philosophers too but maintaining a contradictory deep relevance to science) that Consciousness (with a capital C) is a primary entity and stands separate to matter. Mind and matter belong to another set and are two sides of the same coin. The human brain, a manifestation of matter, does its functions when ‘electrified’ by the primary entity called Consciousness (also called Self or Brahman in Advaita Vedanta). In such a stand, machines can never develop the sentience and consciousness which the west is so scared of.

Machines might become the smartest with the progress of technology and might surpass the capacities of the human brain in terms of what it can achieve. However, they will always fall short of the primary qualities of Consciousness as per Indian philosophies- ‘Existence, Awareness, and Bliss’ (I know I exist, I am aware of myself, and I have a potential for maximal bliss). Machines will never have these according to Indian philosophy though their potential to help human brains might appear limitless. Importantly, the ethical issues which plagues the western world regarding the ‘progress of science’ distinctly fails to create an impression in Indian philosophies. Dangers exist in the external world which may even lead to extinction of the species and the world, but the purpose of life is entirely in a different direction turned inwards towards the Self.

The irony of Communists moaning the death of democracy (March 18, 2023)

There are many statements which politicians of all hues make which are ambiguous, contradictory, strange, and of course opportunistic. However, nothing beats them all (one might say ‘irony just died a thousand deaths’) when Sitaram Yechury (Shun BJP to save democracy, THI 18^th March 2023) declares that BJP is responsible for the death of democracy in India. Anyone, whether right or wrong, has a right to moan about the death of democracy in India but it takes an enormous amount of gall and courage for the Communist Party to talk about democracy. Throughout the world and in India, the consistently anti-democratic party have been the Communist parties. If one can believe some rankings, the Communist party of India links to top terrorist/insurgent organisations too. Democracy is doubtful as the best form of governance as philosophers since the times of Socrates have stressed upon but for the present world, it may be the least of all evils. Despite problems with all political parties, they have a place in the democratic system excepting perhaps the Communist party as its record of anti-democratic and anti-national activities have ample proof in the annals of history.

BEING CRITICAL OF INDIA IN FOREIGN SHORES (March 10, 2023)

It is a simple rule of the family that the parents criticise the child inside the house but give fulsome praise outside. And so goes the old pun: an ambassador is a person who ‘lies’ abroad for the sake of his country. Any diplomat, politician, or an ordinary citizen has a grave moral responsibility to be kind to his country when talking about it in foreign shores. But the cheering crowds seem to unbalance our public figures and people cutting across party lines and in different professions have been guilty of it. Stand-up comedian Vir Das having a go at India; PM Modi criticising Indian doctors; and now Rahul Gandhi moaning about the death of democracy in India are some examples. I am no fan of any political party but the biggest problem today with the intellectual, academic, and political combine of the country is that dislike of a party and hate for a person is translating into hate for the entire Hindu community and the country too. The BJP does not represent the Hindu civilizational ethos, and its understanding of Sanatana Dharma is equally poor. It has become successful in consolidating the Hindu vote only because of the consistent anti-Hindu stance of the Congress for seven decades.

DANGEROUS STATEMENTS FROM PUBLIC PERSONS (March 7, 2023)

Economist Raj Krishna coined ‘Hindu rate of growth’ in 1978 to denote the around 4 per cent growth in GDP from the 1950s to the 1980s. Amazingly, despite his knowledge and position in the past, Raghuram Rajan makes a statement that the present economy is ‘dangerously close’ to the earlier Hindu rate of growth. The colonial-missionary narratives attached the Indian social systems and all its problems to Hindu religion, and we still have not been able to reject it. The surprise comes when either with ignorance or deviousness even economic issues attach themselves to the Hindu religion. The ex-RBI governor has a responsibility to explain his statement and that he is not trying to undermine the integrity of the country by putting Hindu religion in the dock.

There were three economic phases in the 20^th century: 1900-1950; 1950-1980; and 1980-2000. The first two phases were of stagnation. An economic liberalization standing on the shoulders of a huge agricultural revolution by 1991-2000 rapidly increased the strength of our economy. PV Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh (as an economist) played a huge role in this transformation. The successive governments continued this making India into one of the fastest growing economies of the world by the turn of the century.

India had democracy first (1950) and capitalism afterwards (1991), a reverse situation of the west. Democratic pressures ensured that ‘welfare’ began before there were welfare-generating jobs. Democratic socialism pressures like free power to farmers and other subsidies dampened growth and reform process in the first three decades of independence. The state as an entrepreneur failed mainly because of corruption and bureaucracy. The dreaded licensing system, beginning with the Industrial Licensing Act of 1951, inflicted the worst damage on the private sector. The system resulted in stifling competition and allowing only state monopolies, often in remote places with improper technology, run by ignorant and inefficient bureaucrats.

The period from 1960 to 1985, considered as the ‘dark period for Indian economy’ was a result of warped political-economic policies rather than anything else. Economist Gurcharan Das attributes six state policies as reasons for this: adopting an inward-looking, import-substituting path rather than an export-promoting route; setting up a massive, inefficient, and monopolistic public sector; over-regulating private enterprise; discouraging foreign capital and denying itself the benefits of technology and world class competition; pampering organized labor to the point of extremely low productivity; and ignoring the education of its children. The routine explanations for the slow economic growth (‘the otherworldly values of the Hindus,’ ‘the immobilizing caste system,’ ‘the conservative merchant caste’) including the label ‘the Hindu rate of growth’ may not be true at all, says Das.

Angus Maddison’s research shows how India (and very Hindu) was contributing to almost 35-40% of the world GDP consistently from the beginning of the common era to the 17th century when the East India Company landed. Indian degeneration in terms of its economy, culture, heritage, and educational systems during the colonial plunder ensured that at independence, India was contributing a pathetic 1.8 % to the world GDP. The question is if ‘Hindu’ ideas slow economic growth, why did everybody in the world come to India to make money and why did we cross our civilizational borders only for trade and exchange of culture rather than to loot and plunder? The ex-governor of RBI and the acclaimed economist must tell us how ‘Hindu’ religion factors into these economic facts of the past and present.

SUICIDES IN THE MEDICAL PROFESSION (February 25, 2023)

The suicide attempt of a young post-graduate pursuing anaesthesiology now battling for her life is unfortunate but more so is the huge politics now colouring the issue. For a start, the strict and sometimes harsh behaviour of a senior towards a junior during a medical residency program is almost a universal phenomenon. Most of the doctors go through this process of discipline and exposure to harsh remarks without fail and it is almost a normal part of their professional training. This is like the internal discipline in the armed forces training which to an outsider may appear highly brutal and almost inhuman. There are, of course, many understood limits, but exceptions do exist where the limits may cross. However, such instances are extremely rare.

Suicide is a very serious issue and many times it is more about the individual rather than anything else. In a medical career of almost a decade starting from my MBBS entry to the end of my specialization, I saw almost a suicide each year which included my juniors, colleagues, and seniors. The routes of suicide were horrifyingly dissimilar, and reasons were hugely varied but the problem in each case was that the person could not handle the stress of problems happening at a personal or professional level. The way forward of course is to constantly counsel the students and young populations to handle pressure and to make them strong to receive the setbacks of life. But pre-emptive measures to identify highly sensitive persons who will fall off the edge at a seemingly trivial trigger point appear difficult at present.

Hence, depressingly, as long as the human mind is in the present state of evolution, the negative aspects of society like crime, murder, rape, and suicides will stay though thankfully uncommon. There will perhaps be more stories of determination, the will to succeed, and a fight against adverse circumstances. With extreme sympathy towards the young doctor battling her life the heart also goes out for the boy as what could be a simple open and shut case, whole new dimensions of group and religious identities enter the fray.

The cacophonous narratives of ‘love jihad’, ‘atrocity acts’, ‘minority victimhood’, and ‘religious protection’ will ensure that truth will have a burial. From the experience of a long medical career, it could simply be a case of personal and professional interaction gone horribly wrong without any connections to sexual harassment, caste, or religion. But let the agencies conduct their investigations in peace to know the truth. We are unfortunately living in an increasingly polarised society and hence issues which were never were important while tackling the problem of depression and suicide in the past are becoming prominent. The trial by media and the involvement of politics and group identities is sad to say the least.

CONFLATING RACE AND CASTE IN THE WESTERN WORLD (February 23, 2023)

The popular discourse in western countries (US, UK) seeks to include caste for its anti-discrimination laws (THI, 22^nd February 2023, Seattle Resolution seeking ban on caste bias sparks debate). Such attempts betray a lack of understanding on the nature of varna and jati and how poorly they correlate with the concepts of caste, race, and slavery which grew purely in the western contexts. The anti-discrimination legislation proposes to add caste as “an aspect of race” alongside the other elements that had made up the idea of racial groups (color, nationality, and ethnic and national origins).

The present scholarship conflating race and caste and the campaign for caste legislation stigmatizes Indians as presumptive caste oppressors whose public profile has clearly turned positive with regards to employment, educational performance, family stability, and less crime involvement. However, western accounts of multiculturalism, as an agency to destroy caste, paradoxically becomes intensely inimical to jatis. Scholars ignore the important social reality of jatis (about 4,000 of them today) in their discussions on caste. Europeans used caste first for varna, then to both varna and jati, and even included terms like biradari or kula. It is therefore unclear what caste specifically picks out in the conceptual language of caste studies.

The classical conception of the caste system presupposes that jatis are oppressive hierarchical systems which are birth-based, endogamous with exclusionary purity rules, and occupationally restricted. The source of caste is Hinduism, Hindus are its carriers, and its perpetrators are Brahmins. These ideas, clearest in the writings of Christian missionaries, are present in secularized form through the social sciences. However, regarding the “caste system,” two centuries of research has failed to determine its rules, properties, consequences, relation to social conflict, and differences from other social organizations. The confusion on the meaning of the most basic of terms in almost all caste studies remains glaring over the last two centuries.

Three main characterizations in race and caste scholarships (endogamy, which allegedly preserves purity of blood of the groups; color-consciousness or skin color of people as the discriminatory mark of both caste and race; and hierarchy of the groups) suffers from fallacies, assumptions, and contradictions. Scholars are yet to explain that if the races and castes are similar social organizations, how would one explain the existence of thousands of jati groupings in India, as against only two basic racial groups in the United States? How could a dual system of race (blacks and whites) transpose itself to a society with thousands of mobile jatis with no fixed hierarchy and variable group status across time and space? In different ways, the muddled academic-political superimpositions of slavery (initiated by the Enlightenment theories), race (initiated in the post-war years) and caste on the varna-jati indigenous systems end up causing immense damage to Indians and its culture surviving against so many odds across the centuries. But how long will it hold?

Sanatana Dharma Defines India (February 7, 2023)

Harish Rao’s declaration that protection of Sanatana Dharma is a necessity (February 6) and DC Pathak’s article (India security lies in strong nationalism; THI, February 7) are both thought-provoking and intricately linked. Ill-informed Indians follow post-colonial scholars using the modern definition of a nation-state and declare that India was somehow a creation of the west and we were “never a nation.” Standard western theories, mainly Marxist-influenced, trace the origins of nations in transformations which achieve a “cultural homogenization” based on language, religion, ethnicity, and so on. Thus, scholars at JNU believe that India is incoherent, fragmented, and marked by foundational differences.

However, “nation” does not do justice to India’s expression of oneness. India has been an ancient “felt community” for thousands of years because it does not emerge through deliberate systematization. This process manifests itself as “culture” autonomous of the state. Thus people, despite many diversities, could belong to the same set of meanings, symbols, and land (swastika, the lotus, the temples, the pilgrimages, Sanskrit language, and so on) as a great unity. Bharatvarsha exists in the oldest scriptures as the land “south of the Himalayas and north of the oceans.” The Mahabharata, Ramayana, and the Vishnu Purana describe “Bharata” Varsha with clarity in the various travels of its characters across the land. The 12 Jyotirlingas, the 52 Shakti Mahapithas, and the 26 Upapithas spread over the Indian subcontinent became the defining point to draw the boundaries of the country based on pilgrimages. Despite an absent political unity (with few exceptions) in the European definition of nation, a united geo-cultural India existed for thousands of years making India a continuously surviving civilizational state.

The words Hindu, Hindutva, and Hinduism remain undefined in unambiguous terms even today constitutionally, legally, and academically giving rise to many controversies. Whether Hinduism is synonymous with or is a subset of Sanatana Dharma, the only understanding of India can come from within the framework of this Dharmic philosophy defining and permeating the land of India. Only Sanatana Dharma, a huge conglomerate of traditions, has the immense capacity to absorb all faiths, religions, and beliefs if they go on the path of becoming traditions. The key to harmony in a traditional world comes from its fundamental philosophy of an “indifference to differences” which far transcends the classical paradigms of “tolerance, acceptance, and mutual respect of the other.”

Indian culture and traditions are an unbroken continuity for thousands of years, a melting pot of all three purported human groupings (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid); six language families (Indo-European, Dravidian, Austric, Sino-Tibetan, Burushaski, and Andamanese); many traditions (Vedic and non-Vedic interacting in a syncretic mode); and many religions configuring in the traditional mould. We are one people and one land. The solutions for multiculturalism and harmony can only come from us but only if we truly understand the nature of traditional India and not become too fascinated with whatever the west says about us.

K VISHWANATH- A GREAT AMBASSADOR OF INDIAN CULTURE (February 3, 2023)

The death of PadmaShri K Vishwanath ends one of the most glorious chapters of Indian cinema. In a cinematic era constantly diverging from our traditions and culture across the country, Vishwanath’s films, firmly rooted in the best of what Indian culture could offer, came as a cool invigorating breath of fresh air. Each film of Vishwanath was a classic and the songs in each film remain etched for posterity in golden letters. His contribution to cinema is far greater than anybody probably acknowledged and he stands right at the top along with other giants like Satyajit Ray, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Adoor Gopalkrishnan, and V Shantaram. His packaging of serious messages in a popular format which a person of any age could enjoy and appreciate is perhaps his unique contribution to the cause of Indian cinema with few parallels. It is a remarkable achievement that he could combine the so called ‘art’ and ‘commercial’ formats of cinema into a single mould. Each Telugu person might have a favourite movie or song of K Vishwanath. Sankarabharanaman might be common to all, but my personal favourite is a movie called Swathi Kiranam where Mammooty gives one of the most brilliant performances of his life as a music maestro who gets jealous of his prodigious disciple played by a young Manjunath. The movie, the songs, and the direction represents the best of Vishwanath. His legacy can never die, and we hope some of the present generation of directors take inspiration from his kind of films which never derooted and deracinated Indians.

THE PROBLEM WITH INDIAN SECULARISM (January 27, 2023)

Subhashini Ali, CPI member, declared that secularism is absolutely essential to keep the people and country together (Midnight’s Children, THI 27^th January). Ignoring the historic role of communists in persistently trying to break the country, this view represents a poor political thinking which unfortunately cuts across all ideologies. Has any major discourse even wondered why ‘fundamentalism’ is increasing in the country despite a vigorous implementation of ‘secularism’?

It is wrong to associate the present-day people with crimes of their so-called historical ancestors. One cannot use history to extract revenge. However, Indian brand of secularism did weaponize history. It whitewashed the past wrongdoings done in the name of Christianity (the Goa Inquisition for example) and Islam in a tacit acceptance of the idea that the contemporary Christians and Muslims are somehow related to the past brutalities. The same charity did not apply to Hindus as the social sciences and humanities simply continued with the colonial missionary narratives. A ‘pure’ Vedic religion which degenerated into the present caste and atrocity ridden ‘Hinduism’ through a vile patriarchal ‘Brahmanism’ remained the only understanding across centuries from the earliest traveller reports to present day academia. Secularism in this sense became an abuse of the majority where it told the Hindus that it will ‘never forget and never forgive.’ It became an appeasement when it told Muslims and Christians that it forgets, forgives, and blanks out its history too. That has been a terrible solution for post-independent India.

Secularism was specifically for Christendom of Europe at a particular time of its history when the multiple denominations were fighting each other on their individual doctrines. Each party knew what God or Christ meant in the background when secularism separated the Church from the state. It was not a solution for non-Western pagan cultures. Even European secularism today faces severe problems with the influx of Islam into its society. Indian traditions are not religions and understanding this as a first step would go a long way in harnessing solutions. Secularism is a disaster for non-Christian cultures which do not have religions in the definitional sense but only various traditions and whose solutions for co-existence are entirely different. We were dealing with our multiculturalism in a far better way but the fascination for the west superseded rational political thinking post-independence. Today, everyone is surprised at the intolerance and the rise of ‘Hindu fundamentalism’ but many serious thinkers have shown that it is precisely the Indian brand of secularism which is the problem. Converting Indian traditions into religions as a first step and then applying secularism as a solution to achieve harmony can never succeed.

The mischievous BBC (January 23, 2023)

Tariq Mansoor, Vice Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, has written a rebuttal in a national newspaper to a recent BBC documentary which raked up the ghost of 2002 Gujarat riots and Modi’s alleged involvement. He uses the phrase “white media’s burden” like the previous “white man’s burden” which gives them the self-acquired authority to create any discourse against an individual, person, or even a country they hold biases against. As he points out, the series shows utter contempt to the Indian judiciary which has investigated the matter at all levels and in great depth to give a clean chit to Modi. Is the BBC above India’s judiciary? Secondly, despite this continuing agenda, the people of the country have voted for him overwhelmingly in two elections and three times previously in Gujarat. Most importantly, he says the perception of Modi is not as negative amongst Muslim community as the media or the BBC would like everyone to believe. These narratives only perpetuate the Muslim victimhood story which vested interests are extremely eager to exploit for their own gains. It is also amazing to see how the Muslim world is engaging much better with Modi’s India.

The BBC represents the old colonial mindset which cannot now see a previously colonized nation doing much better than them. How much has the BBC focussed on the terrible colonialism which plundered the world and especially India? The British Raj systematically subverted each of the state machinery tools, like armies, censuses, bureaucracies, railroads, hospitals, telegrams, and scientific institutions to its profit by plunder and manipulation. In the entire 107 years from 1793 to 1900, an estimated 5 million people died the world over in all the wars combined. But, in just 10 years 1891-1900, 19 million people died in India due to famines alone. The famines were the biggest colonial holocausts and are right at the top of some of the most brutal inhumanities in modern times. These resulted from careless planning, Malthusian ideas, and highly racist leaders sitting in England. Churchill’s role in the 1943 Bengal famine places him right next to Hitler as a war criminal. The BBC would do well if it looked at Britain’s own history.

The BBC is a continuing colonial agenda. It becomes extremely important for anyone concerned for India, irrespective of political affiliations, to shun such divisive narratives and call its bluff. However, the decision to ban the documentary was a thoughtless move. Such bans rarely work and only strengthen the opponent’s position. Leaving it alone would have generated better debates on colonial rule and in exposing BBC’s agenda driven media coverage. As Tariq Mansoor says significantly, which all Indians want to work forward on, “The BBC has assembled 20 years of biased reportage, peppered it with outdated condiments and garnished it with loads of misplaced victimhood… We (Muslims) want to move on from the past — we do not live there anymore. We are looking ahead and are doing so with hope as well as anticipation.”

LANGUAGE, RACE, TAMIL, DRAVIDIANISM, AND THE UNITY OF INDIA (January 7, 2023)

‘Language is the life of a race,’ declares Stalinji, the CM of Tamil Nadu at a literary festival. Sociologists, geneticists, and scientists the world over have condemned race as a concept to the dustbins. If we want any semblance of unity in the country and the world, politicians and intellectuals of all hues, including those in the media, should simply drop the use of the word race. The Dravidian movement, initiated by EV Ramaswamy Naicker (Periyar), is singularly responsible for the most divisive narratives in India based on some wrong notions of race and the dubious Aryan Invasion Theory which turns most North Indians and Brahmins into descendants of the invading Aryans and Tamils as the indigenous Dravidians. Their political usage pits a “Dravidian culture and race” against the separate so-called “Aryan” culture.

Archaeology, epigraphy (study of inscriptions), numismatics (study of coins), literature (the Sangam literature) clearly shows that culturally the people of the South and the North were indeed one. The coins and the rich Sangam literature (300 BCE to 300 CE) show not only extensive references to Vedic sacrifices but a complete absence of any mention of a great clash between Aryans and Dravidians. Vedic and Puranic themes inextricably weave into the most ancient culture of the Tamil land known to us. Today, as is usual of most languages, Tamil language has assimilated and uses between 20-40% of the commonly used vocabulary from Sanskrit.

Surprisingly, there are no references to the word “Dravida” in Tolkappiyam- the oldest surviving work on Tamil grammar. The first use in Tamil is in the 18th century. In the Vedic-Puranic-Itihaasic literature, “Arya” denoted a noble person and “Dravida” was in a purely geographical sense. As one scholar shows, “Dravida” is not of Tamil origin at all because Tamil grammar neither provides for a word beginning with a sonant (hence cannot begin with d) nor with a half-syllable. The word has most likely Prakrit or Sanskrit roots.

Without conflict, there was every sign of a deep cultural interaction between North and South. In reverse, the genius of Tamil land has contributed extensively by way of temple architecture, music, dance, and literature to the North and other South Asian countries too. “Dravidian” has a meaning either in the old geographical sense or in the modern linguistic sense; racial and cultural meanings are unscientific and irrational and are simply a manifestation of a divisive colonial mindset. In the Dravidian accomplishments developing to its own genius there was never a loss of the central Indian spirit and culture. As one people, we are prouder of Tamil language and culture than the Tamilians themselves.

Caste, religion, and Politics in Indian (December 13, 2022)

The Speaker of the Lok Sabha pulled up an MLA for mentioning his caste in the House (THI,13^th December). Apparently, people select them on the basis of ‘democratic norms’ and not caste or religion. One can only applaud such a blatant hypocritical statement. It cannot be ignorance or innocence- two qualities impossible to attach to our politicians at any level. Every single political fight starting from the village level divides people in the name of religion and caste. It would be foolish to expect that our all-too-human politicians forget their religious or caste identities once they enter the House. Their survival is precisely on those lines. Ironically, both ‘religion’ and ‘caste’ are alien ideas having no roots in indigenous traditions of India. The Dharmic traditions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism) are everything which do not fit into the definition of a religion and yet they are religions. Caste, a Portuguese word, has no equivalent in Indian scriptures. The superimposition of caste on our varna-jati vyavastha is responsible for the present mess. It was a complete failure of our social sciences after independence to change the colonial narratives. These social sciences lay the basis for the foundational understanding of the country; as a consequence, every single institution-law, politics, bureaucracy, media, or academia permeates with a poor understanding of the country. Collectively and individually these institutions only perpetuate faultlines in the great Indian civilization.

The Tricky Problem of Proselytization in India (November 15, 2022)

Conversions and anti-conversion movements are tricky issues all over the world including India. Jakob De Roover and Sarah Claerhout, scholars of the Balagangadhara school at Ghent, Belgium have deeply tackled the problem of religious conversion in their books and articles. At a fundamental level, the clash is on the meaning of ‘freedom of religion.’ For the proselytizing religions, it means a freedom to convert people into their faith; for the non-proselytizing ones, it implies a freedom from interference by outside religions. The root problem is in trying to understand the various indigenous phenomena (Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism) as ‘religions’ in the same mould as Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

Sanatana Dharma lacks all the characteristics that allow us to recognize and differentiates Christianity, Islam, and Judaism as religions: a fixed body of doctrine, an ecclesiastical organization or central authority, a holy book, etc. Hindu, Jain, Sikh, and Buddhist traditions and the religions of Christianity and Islam are phenomena of different kinds. When religion is a matter of doctrinal truth and different religions are rivals, the freedom to convert becomes of the greatest importance. Since false religion always implies immoral and unjust practices according to the Christian and Islamic viewpoints, conversion entails the escape from immorality and injustice. The secularization of Christian theology translates into the importance of the absolute right to profess, propagate, and change one’s religion.

Where religion means the ancestral tradition of a community, like in India and other pagan traditions of the past and contemporary times, the significance shifts to the freedom to continue one’s tradition without aggressive interference from the outside ripping the social fabric. The dominant liberal principle of religious freedom, even enshrined in the Constitution but which the Courts disagree with, privileges Christianity and Islam, because it involves the freedom to propagate one’s religion and to proselytize. It implicitly endorses the assumption that religion revolves around doctrines and truth claims, something unknown in traditional cultures. Neither anti-conversion laws nor the principle of religious freedom will do the job, since both privilege one of the two sides of the controversy.

Historically, Hindu traditions and Indian Islam and Christianity succeeded at living together in a relatively stable manner. India has a far better record of pluralism and multiculturalism in mostly peace than Europe and the western world anytime in their histories. We need urgent research to rediscover and reinvent some of the inherent mechanisms in Indian traditions responsible for this vibrant pluralism of India. Many scholars have pointed out that local Islamic and Christian traditions lost their aggressive proselytizing drive in India. Hindu attempts to impose anti-conversion legislation aggressively also seemed to be absent. The first and most important step would be to revise the understanding of our traditions as religions. The solution then would be in the direction of ‘traditionalising our religions’ rather than ‘religionising our traditions’. Religions say ‘I am true and you are false’; traditions say, ‘I am true, but you are not false.’ And therein is the difference.

The Negative Perceptions of Marriage (November 11, 2022)

The small news piece on director Atlee who had positive things to say about marriage which made him into a ‘man from a boy’ was heartening. For the contemporary generation, the perception of marriage is becoming extremely negative. They prefer to remain alone or are coming out of marriages at differences which to a generation back seem trivial. Either there is a fear or a disrespect towards the institution of marriage as a building block for a healthy society. The alarming trend against marriage is visible in western countries. In the USA, paradoxically with increasing welfare policies where the state takes the role of a father, nearly 45% of children in Black communities are born out of marriage to a single mother. Typically, in western countries, one cannot ask the name of the father in a newborn unit. This is one of the first explicit instructions for fresh doctors from India. Thankfully, the situation is not so bad in India. However, in the urban sphere and amongst the educated, questioning marriage and its need to have children seem to be on the rise. There might be endless debates on the need for marriage but statistically it is clear that both in males and females born of single mothers in the US, the social and civil problems like drug addiction, unemployment, violence is higher. So, the news item was nice and it would be appreciative if some of our celebrities make more positive statements about marriage. This generation tends to look at them more as role models than their ‘old generation’ parents!

RESERVATIONS AND THE CASTE SYSTEM- A COLLECTIVE FAILURE (November 8, 2022)

The biggest collective failure of post-independent India is the understanding of our social systems. Instead of decolonizing ourselves and getting rid of words like caste and ‘caste-system’ we have created an institutionalized hierarchy and a pathetic game of vote bank politics. It is the singular failure of our thinkers, social scientists, and politicians that today the only global image of India is its ‘caste system’. It never struck our thinkers that caste is an alien word and has no equivalent in any of the Indian scriptures.

The colonial narratives superimposed ‘caste’ (a Portuguese word) on our four-fold varna (representing equal categories) and the innumerable and constantly evolving jatis (the only social reality of India) in trying to understand an alien culture. There was extreme confusion following their caste schemes. However, we simply assumed the truth of reductionist colonial assumptions and applied it even more vigorously. We ourselves are singularly responsible in failing to redefine our varna-jati ideas in the light of traditional understandings. Untouchability, as understood in popular terms, was a weed which we rightly made illegal but paradoxically we created a huge group of 65 million people and 1200 jatis with widely divergent practices into a consolidated group on the single but tenuous criteria of an ‘ex-untouchability’ status.

The idea of addressing centuries of neglect and oppression is great but this almost permanent government policy of reservations (or positive discrimination) raises important questions about the nature of justice; the trade-off between justice and such other equally desirable values as efficiency, social harmony, and collective welfare; and the logic of making social groups bearers of rights and obligations. Reservations raises serious questions about the nature and extent of the present generation’s responsibility for the misdeeds of its predecessors and the meaning of social oppression.

Justice is generally an individualist concept; due to an individual based on his qualifications and efforts. Justice needs redefinition obviously in non-individualist terms if social groups are subjects of rights and obligations. We should also demonstrate continuity between the past and present oppressors and oppressed. Can we claim that the nature of current deprivation is a product of past oppression conferring moral claims on the oppressed?

Again, our constantly westward looking intellectuals draw parallels between America (Whites and Blacks relations) and India (relations between the so-called upper and lower castes) and equate affirmative action with our reservations. They are different paradigms altogether. Hardly anybody has bothered to challenge or articulate the theory of justice at the basis of reservations. Increasing reservations, as a part of ‘social justice’, represents a warped political strategy and poor liberal thinking. We should not be surprised if India attracts attention globally only for its ‘caste-system’ even as a balkanization happens on a constant basis inside the country.

THE SHOCKING BRIDGE COLLAPSE IN GUJARAT (November 1, 2022)

Maybe, it is a cynical statement but with all the powers vested in the political leaders, bureaucrats, and technical experts our governments at all levels irrespective of the party since independence have been a colossal failure. Without fulfilling the basic needs of its citizens, they could only see the construction of all civil projects and infrastructure like roads as a huge source of making money. It is time that all citizens rise and strongly demand from its leaders only good roads for the next decade or so. Any failure on their part should lead the citizens to take the leaders to task severely. Our judiciary and press have largely become indifferent to the citizen’s woes. In this regard, THI is doing a great job to highlight the state of our roads almost daily. It is a mockery of democracy today that liquor and cash flows abundantly during elections and later the roads and civil structures take a hit with poor quality. Deaths, collapses of bridges, potholes, accidents do not seem to shake the conscience of our leaders one single bit. Throw aside all developments and achievements; build proper and safe roads and bridges for our citizens, dear governments at the state and center.

The Difficulties In the Health Systems (October 16, 2022)

‘Managing rapid changes in the medical field’, a thought-provoking article in THI (16^th October 2022), does not consider the doctor’s perspective at all unfortunately. Health consists of both individual health and societal health (public health). The latter is initially cost ridden but eventually reduces health care cost. We definitely need a health pyramid where doctors occupy a small space at the top. The broad base consists of measures like good roads, sanitation, covered drainage, mosquito control, a good water supply, and an effective organization of the health delivery system starting from the Primary Health Centers to the tertiary level hospitals. Specialists should indeed play a small role in both public and individual health. Unfortunately, in both private and public medicine, the pyramid has simply inverted.

The reasons for collapse of the public health system lie elsewhere which should ideally be a moment of introspection. The whip unfortunately falls on the doctors. Today, the pressures from ‘perfect and extensive’ documentation, excessive patient expectations, the insurance driven protocols at variance with rationality, the intense legal and media scrutiny, the excessive regulations (which surprisingly does not seem to exist for the unqualified quacks), and the readiness of society to violently hit the doctors when things go wrong, are all taking their toll on the doctors. The rot in the medical systems involves doctors, regulatory bodies, judiciary, press, politicians, administrators, bureaucrats, medical companies, drug policies, and the patients too. Greed, ambition, expectations, pressures, stresses, lethargy, inefficiency, and incompetency strike each of the factors at varying levels. It is too simplistic and reductionist to blame the doctors alone in this situation.

POOR LANGUAGE POLICIES A BANE OF SUCCESSIVE GOVERNMENTS (October 13, 2022)

Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Germany, France, Russia, Germany, and Israel using exclusively their own languages blow the myth of a connection between English medium and economic prosperity. Apart from only 4 (who use English), the top 20 richest countries in the world do not use a language for higher education and official business different from the native language of the general population. Regarding language for a medium of instruction, our successive governments at all levels since independence have shown a remarkable lack of clarity and vision adding only to a cultural destruction of the land. Today, on the one hand, we have state governments trying to make English medium compulsory right from primary school; and on the other, we have now central governments trying to make Hindi as a medium of instruction in institutes of higher learning. It is sad that seventy-five years after independence were not enough to apply a good language policy in our diverse country. The ideal would have been to make Sanskrit at the time of independence as a national language. We lost that opportunity and today India stays greatly damaged due to the colonial mindset deeply permeating our intellectuals thanks to the English language. A far thinking policy would be such that it allows any citizen of India to reach the highest levels of education (technical and non-technical) in the vernacular of choice. Without such systems in place, making Hindi as a language in higher institutes is clearly hegemonic and is a gross injustice to the other equally important languages of the country.

The anti-Hindu polemic of Neo-Buddhism (October 11, 2022)

It is strange that our political parties (especially the alleged ‘protectors’ of Hindus) choose to ignore neo-Buddhism. The vows for initiation into Buddhism from Hinduism, a farcical understanding of both Buddha and Buddhism, is simply the highest polemic against Hinduism, its deities, and everything which Sanatana Dharma stands for. Buddhism was just another tradition in the Hindu land where new traditions, sects, and gurus evolve all the time showing many paths to the final enlightenment. The concepts of Ignorance, Reincarnation, Karma, Nirvana, the lower knowledge related to the world, and the higher transcendental knowledge show a remarkable similarity in both Advaita and Buddhism. The final state of enlightenment is merging in the ‘Brahman’ (the Supreme Existence-Consciousness-Bliss) for Advaita, whereas Buddhism speaks of ‘Sunyata’- silence and nothingness. Debates yes but violent encounters on such issues are overworked imaginations.

Buddhist texts reveal that the Buddha, contrary to popular narratives, never rejected the varnas. Buddha, putting Kshatriyas at the top, himself considered Rama as his previous incarnation. The conversion of Dr Ambedkar along with thousands of his followers in 1956 strengthened the retrospective anti-Hindu program of Buddha initiated by Western scholars. Conversion, implying a rejection of all previous beliefs, is a typical religious concept prevalent in Christianity and Islam. In traditional cultures devoid of such demands, one can embrace another tradition keeping the old view perfectly intact. Even Buddha would be uncomfortable with this brand of neo-Buddhism. Scholars like Koenraad Elst say simply, ‘Buddha was every inch a Hindu.’

Poor Understanding of Varna-Jati-Ashrama and Dharma (October 9, 2022)

Both the contradictory nature of Mohan Bhagwat’s statements and the resultant criticisms result from the basic failure of our intellectuals to truly describe India except in colonial terms. Our indigenous phenomenon is Sanatana Dharma, a huge conglomeration of traditions, based on rituals and with the essence of an indifference to differences. What came from alien lands were religions, inherently intolerant, with the idea of ‘My One True God’ against ‘Your Many False Gods’. The transformation of traditions into proper religions (Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism) and then applying the mantra of secularism, a solution for European Christendom at a specific time of its history, is the cause of so many problems, including the so-called Hindutva. The Indian solution to pluralism was ‘traditionalising the religions’ which allowed Sanatana Dharma to absorb any number of faiths. ‘Religionising our traditions’, in reverse, remains the single biggest failure of our academic-political-legal systems. Varna-jati-ashrama is a civil societal system which allowed India to survive brutal invasions from across centuries. Of course, untouchability was a terrible weed which we could address from within. Colonial-missionary narratives with a purpose to break India superimposed Caste, a western idea, on varnas and jatis and then made them into an ‘idolatrous’ religious phenomenon fit for condemnation. Our discourses and counter discourses have not deviated a single bit from the colonial narratives.

TERMINATIONS-ETHICAL ISSUES (September 30, 2022)

The routine use of ultrasound and other machines in pregnancy management has allowed the diagnosis of many conditions in the foetus. The legal age for termination from 20 to 24 has certainly eased the pressure on medical practitioners dealing with many foetal anomalies where the window of 20 weeks was just too narrow for anybody’s comfort. In the west, political ideologies, religious affiliations, and socio-cultural factors (50% unwed mothers in the USA) all play a role in vigorous debates on terminations. The whole range of ethical, moral, social, and legal issues is presently complex and confusing. Two lives entangle as one unit and a clash sets up between the autonomy of a vociferous mother and the silence of the dependent foetus. Unfortunately, the idea and essence of motherhood disappear in the discourse even as foetal rights makes its entry. At the crux of western debates is the consideration of when does life begin? At conception, birth, or at some point in between? Some scholars interestingly propose a 24 week limit based on some research showing well-formed foetal brain waves ‘typical’ of humans declaring the transition of a fetus to a human. The Supreme Court seems to have come to that figure circuitously as the primary consideration was the safety of the mother while carrying the terminations. This is not the final word of course since the ethical and legal issues are going to only increase in the future as more diseases enter the domain of pre-delivery diagnosis, more newborns survive earlier stages of gestation, unwanted conceptions increase, and marriage becomes more disdainful.

PFI and the Silence of the Muslim Moderate (September 17, 2022)

The internal insurgency by PFI is extremely disturbing. The zeal emanating from the clerics has mostly been in favour of a Pan-Islamic brotherhood transcending nationhood. After the British broke the back of Mughal rule in 1857, it was later an appeasement policy with regards to Muslims to counter the Hindus in a deadly game of divide and rule. Starting with the Khilafat agitation in the early part of the 20^th century, Congress, the supposedly Hindu political party took the path of minority appeasement to win favours. Unfortunately, the Congress took the same route of appeasement in the name of secularism for many decades after independence; a policy which finally consolidated the Hindus, further alienated the Muslims, gave BJP its power, and made Congress almost irrelevant. However, the attitude of the clerics did not seem to alter a bit after independence. Political Islam made it a lifelong commitment to project their grouses against the dominant ‘Hindus’ never ever trying for integration, harmony, and upliftment of their community.

Looking at Muslims as a vote bank, the Congress with the left-dominated academia (the latter inherently anti-Hindu) whitewashed the brutal Islamic history and unfortunately associated the present-day Muslims with past Islamic invaders. This was a gross injustice to both Hindus and Muslims. Socio-culturally Muslims and Hindus were integrating at all levels right from the beginning but the politico-religious strategies from all sides never helped the cause of unity. The Muslim moderate simply disappeared from the arena having little say in reforms. All reforms come from within. The Hindu politicians and intellectuals addressed most of the evils of Hindu society. This has been a failure from the Islamic side as the major role of intellectuals, and the moderates appears to only defend the more aggressive political-religious stances detrimental to the cause of harmony in the country.

The Tricky Issue of Reservations (September 22, 2022)

With our honourable CM proposing to increase the ST reservation quota to 10%, the reservations go beyond 50% of the total. Is this allowed? The percentage for other groups cannot change as it might raise angers. It is a sad failure of our political-academic- intellectual scholarship in post-colonial India that we could draw a better understanding of our varnas and jatis in the light of our traditions. Not only we accepted the colonial superimposition of the word ‘caste’ (which has no Indian equivalent) on our social systems, but we successfully created a whole lot of groups and perpetuated the story of a ‘caste-system’ in India.

Reservations unfortunately have become the most potent political tool in India with much collateral damage. We are perhaps the only country with an extensive Constitutional programme of ‘positive discrimination’ (seats reserved in assemblies, public jobs, and professional academic institutes) in favour of deprived groups to integrate them into mainstream and address centuries of neglect and oppression. A permanent government policy now, not the original intention of our Constitution makers, positive discrimination raises important questions about the nature of justice; the trade-off between justice and such other equally desirable values as efficiency, social harmony, and collective welfare; and the propriety of making social groups bearers of rights and obligations.

It also raises questions about the redistributive role of the state, the nature and extent of the present generation’s responsibility for the misdeeds of its predecessors, and the meaning of social oppression. Justice is generally an ‘individualist’ concept; the due to an individual based on his qualifications and efforts. Justice needs redefinition obviously in non-individualist terms if social groups are subjects of rights and obligations. We should also demonstrate continuity between the past and present oppressors and oppressed. We must also analyse the nature of current deprivation and that it is a product of past oppression conferring moral claims on the oppressed.

Scholars like Dr Bhikhu Parekh say these questions are important in India where positive discrimination has no roots in the indigenous cultural tradition and is much resented. There are few studies either challenging or articulating the theory of justice at the basis of reservations. Some work however relies on American literature, without appreciating that the historical relations between different Sanatani groups bear little resemblance to those between the American whites and blacks.

Sri Survaram Sudhakar’s packaging of history (September 17, 2022)

The detailed article by the former secretary general of CPI (THI, 17^th September) on the Telangana struggle is a typical example of Communist doublespeak and self-aggrandizement. As examples of their uncomfortable history, they betrayed the nationalists by acting as informers to the British agencies in the 1942 Quit India movement; they supported the British authorities during the Bengal famine caused by Churchill; they were second only to the Muslim League in creating Pakistan; their brutalities on the hapless people of Telangana were equal to the Razakars and Nizams; they continued to fight the Indian state after liberation (which the author calls the second phase) in the hope of creating a Communist nation within India; and they painfully prolonged the Ayodhya issue with the flimsiest of arguments. Right from the days of MN Roy, the Communists worked with orders from China and Russia representing foreign interests in India. However, with a helpful ideologically driven academia on their side, they could distort the narratives. The greatest contribution of Gandhiji, their public enemy number one, was that he prevented their large-scale entry into India.

Narratives of Tribals as ‘true indigenous Indians’ are mischievous (September 16, 2022)

Descriptions of tribals as truly ‘indigenous’ people of India are wholly divisive narratives separating them from ‘mainstream’ Hinduism. The neologism Adivasi (adi, original; vasi, inhabitant) of the 19th century is a pure colonial construct which became the most successful disinformation campaign of modern times. In settler colonies (America, New Zealand, Australia), ‘aboriginal’ made sense to distinguish the European settlers from the natives. However, in non-settler colonies like India, the term ‘aboriginal’ in intellectual narratives now pits the majority dominant Hinduism (originally foreign invaders) against the ‘original’ inhabitants (now minorities). The majority, by implication, are simply the pre-European colonizers of the tribal minorities. Koenraad Elst writes that going by the historical definition, tribals are Indian pagans (or Hindus) simply because they are not prophetic monotheists. The examples of many ‘tribal gods’ in the country (Sammakka-Sarakka in Telangana, Jagannath Puri cult) clearly unite the equally pagan Hindus and the ‘tribal’ communities into one large whole. They have many elements in common: by distant common roots; by the integration of tribal elements in the Sanskritic civilization; and by the adoption of elements from the Vedic-Puranic Tradition in the tribal Traditions. As one scholar rues, anthropologists spent about 100 years attempting to get rid of a pernicious and incoherent concept like ‘tribe’ only to see it sneak back in, via Indology and other social sciences, into the Indian Constitution, Indian legislation, and their administration.

RAHUL GANDHI’S QUERIES AND THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM OF RELIGIONS (September 12, 2022)

There was a controversy recently when Rahul Gandhi met and raised questions with a Christian pastor on the nature of Christ and God. We can ignore the past anti-Hindu statements of the pastor as representing a fringe phenomenon hardly representative of mainstream Christian thought. Assuming Rahul as an innocent genuine seeker, on a broader perspective, the questions and answers reflect the entire problem of understanding religions and traditions in India. Christianity (also Islam and Judaism) as a religion has a specific concept of ‘one real and true God’ and ‘many false gods’ (commonly existing in pagan traditions). Accordingly, a belief in Jesus as a true God is a fundamental doctrine of Christian thought.

Balagangadhara Rao (Ghent University, Belgium) shows that the branches of Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism) are not religions in the definitional sense as Christianity, Islam, or Judaism but are traditions. Traditions typically consist of many devas and devis; they also typically deify nature and the feminine quite unlike the religions. One of the major problems in the intellectual understanding across centuries has been to translate the devas and devis as ‘gods’ in the Christian theological sense. In such a framework, the devas and devis become false and the only way one can attain salvation is to reject the false and turn to the one true God. Thus, the framework of Christian and Islamic theology has to see the devas, devis, shaktis, and other such entities as simply false.

So dominant has been this framework that even Hindu intellectuals fighting against conversions accept this theological framework of ‘multiple gods’ existing in Indian traditions. In a traditional world, which is mainly about paths to moksha, all devas and devis are equally true for the person on that path. This includes Jesus or Allah too and hence a typical Hindu has no qualms in accepting both as equally valid for their believers. There is an incomprehension for a Hindu when someone claims an exclusive status for a single God or a single messenger. That is simply not how traditions function.

The superimposition of Christian theological frameworks to understand Indian traditions is the basis for long-standing confusion and ‘religious’ friction. There cannot be a solution unless there is a radical revision of our understanding. Very briefly, there are traditions in India and not religions. Traditions say, ‘I am true, but you are not false’; religions say, ‘I am true and you are false.’ The Indian solution to pluralism and multiculturalism was to ‘traditionalise the religions’ where the latter lost focus on proselytisation and made attempts at genuine cultural syncretism at various levels as is true of a traditional world. This involved accepting ‘gods’ of other traditions and cultures too. Christian evangelists and Islamic madrasas fight against this syncretism precisely.

Instead of continuing this process, we have been converting in reverse, by exclusively relying on western descriptions of India, our traditions into proper religions (by way of specific doctrines, books, temples, and so on). This process is paradoxically increasing the intolerance and the so-called ‘Hindu fundamentalism’ with the passage of time. The present understanding of Indian culture is going to only increase the strife in the future. Secularism was a solution for Christendom at a specific time of European history; making it a solution for India after first making our traditions into religions is a sure recipe to disaster. Our social sciences have a serious task for the future.

A Relevant Message by the Honourable President (September 6, 2022)

The President calling for teaching in mother tongues is very relevant for India today. The implementation of English at a higher level has been a bane to the country. Though the country could produce high quality people in arts and sciences, the best they are doing is either to provide services to western countries or parrot simply whatever the west tells about us. It is a severe injustice to all fields today that while the best thoughts come in the vernacular, the expression must forcibly be in English. This has unfortunately alienated the best talent in the country from making useful contributions to either the sciences or the humanities. Before the colonial times, our knowledge production was prodigious in almost every field and in every language. Sanskrit was the mother language having a vibrant interactive connection with all the rich vernacular languages. Many brilliant minds simply collapse when they enter higher education and give way to lesser minds simply because of an improper grip of the English language. Swami Vivekananda said that colonial education made Indians fit to become only clerks in their offices or lawyers and nothing else. The present English based education is an iron cage preventing India from creating original knowledge as was true before colonialism. Instead of allowing a student of India to reach the highest levels of arts and science in the chosen vernacular, we are implementing a policy of introducing English as a medium of instruction right from primary level, a sure way of killing the vernacular and the culture which it expresses. A fact: most advanced countries in the world do not have English as the medium of instruction and the poorest countries in the world are the previously colonized countries who use English instead of the local language. India has done well despite many obstacles, but we have the potential to do better. Our history is proof of that.

Religious Polarisation in India (August 20, 2022)

The polarisation on religious lines seems to be increasing on a daily basis in India. We have now a sickening spectacle that one community rejoices on the beheading of an ordinary citizen and the other celebrates rapists after release from jail. Pakistan was supposedly a solution to solve the Hindu-Muslim problem in India before independence. Unfortunately, a Pakistan based on religion went down on a spiralling path of failure; fortunately, Indian democracy holds much better. However, religious divisions threaten to rip the social fabric of India. Indian thinkers failed brilliantly when they thought that ‘secularism’, a solution for Christendom of Europe at a certain point of their history, was appropriate for India too. Intellectuals continue to believe the colonial story that India has ‘religions’ in the form of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism and so on when they are simply traditions branching from the tree of Sanatana Dharma. Religions in the proper definition are Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism. Religions say that ‘I am true and you are false’; traditions say, ‘I am true, but you are not wrong.’ The proper Indian solution for harmony since centuries was to ‘traditionalise the religions’ so that they integrate into society. However, we are turning our traditions into religions leading to hardening of stances and crystallisation of the so-called ‘Hindu fundamentalism’ too. We need to go back to the drawing board.

Hinduphobia in the Country (August 7, 2022)

Timur (1336-1405), of Turco-Mongol descent, attacked India but went back but not before killing 100,000 Hindu prisoners captured till that point. His soldiers plundered Delhi over three days taking back slaves and immense booty. Yet our celebrities snook a thumb at the entire majority and proudly name their child Timur. It is an extraordinary privilege which exists amongst some people who can use any narrative to divide the Hindus or insult the majority sentiment by cordially meeting the enemies of the country or depict our sacred symbols with a harshness amounting to almost hatred in their artistic outputs (movies, paintings, or literature). Amazingly, any reaction becomes an occasion to play the victim card or hide under the banner of Freedom of Expression which cannot of course exist for the Hindu community without invoking the rise of ‘Hindu fundamentalism’. It is unfortunate that Hindus have to remain silent at all the potshots taken against them in a grand application of secularism. Agreed, one should delink the ideology of the main actor from the worth of his film; but in his public comments and attitudes, Amir Khan becomes impossible to defend.

The Problem of Democracy (August 2, 2022)

The editorial on August 2, 2022 on the decay of democracy in both the USA and India is disturbing but not surprising. Across centuries, political philosophers and intellectuals have seriously questioned democracy as the best way to govern the country. The search has always been on to find the ‘wisest and the best’ to guide the country to an ideal of maximal individual liberty under the umbrella of minimal state interference and maximal state security.

Plato (3^rd century BCE) believed that democracy ruins itself by excess of its basic principle of an equal right of all to determine public policy. Oratory skills and the ability to garner votes become important to win power rather than ability even as nepotism, corruption, general incompetence, and finally tyranny becomes widespread in a democracy. Plato’s pupil Aristotle thought that democracy is based on a false assumption that those who are equal in one respect (like the law) are equal in all respects, including governing. In Francis Bacon’s ideal world, the government is of and for the people but by the selected best of the people. Spinoza was clear that democracy had still to solve the problem of selecting the wisest and the best to rule themselves. Yet, over the centuries, democracy has become the norm all over the world.

Sri Aurobindosaid that the evil of democracy is the decline of greatness in humanity. Indian traditions, a mix of both ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ values had evolved a way of an enlightened monarchy, a decentralised polity, and free citizens ages back. Indic wisdom focussed on the duties at all levels from the king to the ordinary citizen unlike western rights-based traditions. Thus, alternatives to democracy thrived without affecting trade, travel, agriculture, literature, and sciences in the Indian civilization, at least five thousand years old. Colonial consciousness accepted western political philosophies to solve problems for us even as many of the ideas do not simply make sense. Problematically, democracies seem to be failing both in the western and the Indian world. This is perhaps the best proof of what philosophers have always been saying- democracy in the present form is not the best form of governance.

BREAKING INDIA ARYAN-DRAVIDIAN DEBATES (July 8, 2022)

The Aryan-Dravidian debate has the unfortunate consequence of a false division in the country either by intention or by ignorance. It was simply a colonial narrative which our unthinking intellectuals have carried forward. The entire Dravidian politics, based on condemned concepts like ‘race’, creates unnecessary fissures in the great Indic civilization, an amalgamation of many cultures and traditions. Unlike the recorded history of migrations and invasions in places like America and Africa, ‘Aryan’ Indo-European languages arriving and driving the ‘original’ Dravidian inhabitants base themselves on speculations and cherry-picking of data. The Aryan proponents use selective evidence and convenient interpretations to deny the civilization roots of the country.

The Aryan theory has been responsible for vicious narratives of race and caste. Indic civilization, an inseparable mix of both Vedic and non-Vedic cultures, is an unbroken continuity for thousands of years. India is an amorphous homogenous mix of different cultures, subcultures, and traditions. Everyone of this land is a part and inheritor of this great culture irrespective of what tradition or religion they may be following. Instead of accepting our common and great civilizational past, the Aryan proponents are keen to show that some groups are ‘foreigners’ and perennially exploiting some other ‘indigenous’ groups.

Selective and convenient application of archaeological and genetic findings; torturing Vedic texts to find racially themed discourses on Aryans and Dravidians; selective linguistic analyses; closed circle of academic scholarships disallowing alternative voices; ad-hominem attacks; and prominent power positions have all helped in perpetuating this account of the Aryans across centuries. Selective genetic evidence now propagates for the Aryan theory even as archaeology solidly rejects the Aryans. In fact, equally valid genetic evidence shows a reverse migration to other parts of the world from India. Problematically, the Aryan theory has constructed a super edifice over decades, and if the foundational base rips out, the entire edifice collapses. Therefore, there is a huge resistance to discard the theory.

Scholars like Talageri, Michel Danino, Koenraad Elst, and Marianne Keppens show extensive evidence against the Aryan theory. They also show that the Aryan linkage to the ‘caste system’, propagated by political concerns mainly, are faulty and bogus. Today’s persistent conflation between race, language and culture is misleading and dangerous for the country. British anthropologist Edmund Leach (1989) sums it all up: ‘Even today, the Aryan invasions of the second millennium BC are still treated as if they were an established fact of history… The details of this theory fit in with racist framework. The origin myth of British colonial imperialism helped the elite administrators to see themselves as bringing ‘pure’ civilization to a country in which civilization of the most sophisticated (but ‘morally corrupt’) kind was already nearly 6,000 years old. The Aryan invasions never happened at all…’ And yet we continue with the divisive narratives as we reach the 75^th year of our independence.

AN URGENT NEED TO TRULY UNDERSTAND OUR SOCIAL SYSTEMS (July 22, 2022)

It is a matter of great pride and happiness that a deserving candidate has become the President of this country. It is an appropriate time that we redefine what ‘caste’, ‘varna’, ‘jati’, ‘tribes’ mean in the Indian context. The colonials superimposed ‘caste’ which grew in the western contexts on the varna and jatis of India to create a most obnoxious ‘caste-system.’ The only reality of India is the various ‘jatis’ which have constantly evolved, grown in number, merged, and even dissolved across hundreds of years. The social, political, and economic dominances have fluctuated for various jatis across time and space in India. Varnas, always four, have been perhaps more of an ideal. A one-to-one correlation for the jatis to the varnas has almost been a forever impossible task. Our social sciences not only failed to question the colonial narratives but kept providing ‘data’ to further the narrative.

The colonials understood the country in the divisive frameworks of castes and tribes. Unfortunately, identifying groups as ‘Hindu’ and ‘tribals’, implying a difference, encouraged an artificial divide in the country. Scheduled Tribes in India constitute 8.2% of the total population (Census 2001). The criterion to identify a tribe: primitive traits; distinctive culture; geographical isolation; shyness of contact with the community at large; and backwardness are subjective, ambiguous, and many times circular. Similarly, the Indian Constitution is yet to clearly define the word ‘Hindu’. It is still essentially a negative definition of anyone in India who is not a Muslim, Christian, Jew, or Parsi.

Adivasi (adi, original; vasi, inhabitant), a word coined in the 19th century is hardly a self-description of the tribals. The Aryan Invasion Theory, propagated by the colonials, claimed that the Aryans came to India in the middle of the second millennium BCE and pushed the original Dravidians (to the south of Vindhyas) and the tribes (into the forests and the hills). In settler colonies (America, New Zealand, Australia), ‘aboriginal’ made sense to distinguish the European settlers from the natives. However, in non-settler colonies like India, the term ‘aboriginal’ became a pure colonial construct where the urban and the agriculturally advanced peoples became the ‘majority’ group. This imaginary division of the Indians as ‘natives’ and ‘invaders’ is a permanent colonial legacy.

The concept of race and tribe are in the dustbin of the western social sciences even though getting rid of them has proved difficult. The impossibility of defining the term ‘tribe’ and its broad usage is responsible for its incoherence as a category. Scholars feel that ‘tribe’ is a key but obsolete concept from anthropology’s early history that usually served colonial, administrative, and ideological purposes to mainly paint the local groups as “primitive” or “backward”. In the post-colonial era, even international forces like the ILO strengthened the idea of a distinction between ‘dominant national communities’ and ‘indigenous/tribal peoples’ introducing an internal coloniality and a permanent faultline. The ‘minority tribal communities’ become racially and culturally distinct from the ‘majority national communities.’

The ancientness of the Hindu religion itself to the pre-Aryan times makes it as ‘aboriginal’ as the tribal populations. The similarities between Hindu traditions and the tribal traditions in their fundamental polytheistic nature and a paganism (deifying the feminine, nature, and animals) show them clearly distinct from the prophetic-monotheistic religions. Interestingly, anthropologists deny that the tribals of Jharkhand and North-East are even the ‘original’ inhabitants. Tibeto-Chinese speaking communities (Northeast India) and Austro-Asiatic speaking ones (East India) immigrated to India in ancient historical times and met with existing indigenous Indian populations living already on their migration routes. Hence, the historical data do not support the division of India’s population into ‘aboriginal tribals’ and ‘non-tribal’ invaders.

The Indian political-bureaucratic-education systems used these divisions only for gathering votes and fissuring our society. Varna-jatis of India prevented the disintegration of civilization in the face of a constant onslaught for hundreds of years. Untouchability was a noxious weed rightfully attacked and reformed from within. It was a dangerous colonial narrative carried forward by some of our own intellectuals which says Hinduism equals caste system which equals untouchability and the solution for untouchability is destruction of Hinduism. What needs urgent dissolution are the words like caste, sub-caste, tribes and all the divisions going in their name by politicians and agenda driven academics. Indologists use discredited theories from earlier social sciences to put across outlandish claims regarding our culture. A scholar rues that the anthropologists spent about 100 years attempting to get rid of a pernicious and incoherent concept like ‘tribe’ only to see it sneak back in, via Indology into the Indian Constitution, Indian legislation, and their administration. Can we attempt a serious understanding of our social systems instead of simply parroting western narratives?

THE ROARING LIONS ON THE ASHOKA PILLAR (July 14, 2022)

People make a fetish of himsa and ahimsa even on simple issues like the installation of the lions on the Ashoka pillar in a more aggressive format. The opposition seems to have run out of issues. With all due respects to the great man, Gandhiji’s ahimsa was a peculiar philosophy which made our nation weak. Sri Aurobindo, a severe critic of Gandhiji, used to say that ahimsa and non-violence were tools for personal transformation and spiritual attainment, but they are extremely damaging when applied to the dharma of the nation fighting many internal and external adversaries. Sri Aurobindo replied to Gandhiji’s son on a question about non-violence, ‘If Afghanistan decides to invade India, how would non-violence help?’ There was no answer. It is plain naivete to expect that by disarming oneself, the enemy would also do the same. However, this was precisely the attitude of Gandhiji which endeared him to the British authorities and the Muslims of that period. Ahimsa is the dharma of a seeker for moksha or nirvana, but it is not the ideal of a Kshatriya fighting inimical forces and protecting the country. We have had enough of this wrongly applied ahimsa. The ‘new’ lions are simply the rediscovered ideal of the nation.

DEPICTION OF KALI AND VIOLENCE ON SANATANA DHARMA (July 8, 2022)

Recently, a poster of the film ‘Kaali’ directed by a Canadian Indian raised outrage. The poster showed a woman dressed as goddess ‘Kaali’ smoking and holding an LGBTQ community flag. Freedom of expression is all fine but cannot descend into insulting Sanatana Dharma where blasphemy is unknown. When Western Indologists like Wendy Doniger eroticise Hindu gods and scriptures or use Freudian lenses to evaluate Ramakrishna Paramhansa, there is a tremendous intellectual violence on a culture, but we are never able to formulate a response.

Distorting and trivializing Tantrik traditions by seeing them as an infringement of moralities is a recurring theme in Western media, film industry, or academia. As Nithin Sridhar points out, depictions like ‘hot’; ‘a monstrous mother with a penis’; ‘representing male transsexual fantasies’; ‘a castrating female’; ‘a prostitute’; ‘having many affairs’, and such, are highly sexual and perverse interpretations of Goddess Kali. These are completely alien to Hindu worldview and iconography. It is unfortunate that many Hindus internalize these descriptions. The iconography of Kali represents many ideas in the Tantric traditions, but the underlying theme is moksha by cutting us free from bondage and ignorance. But such iconography and ideas do not mean anything to people who refuse to engage with the traditionalists to further oneself. Rather, they are keen on ‘interpreting’ and distorting our devas and devis with their own frameworks rooted basically in an Abrahamic worldview of One Single True God and many ‘false’ gods.

Balagangadhara Rao says that such descriptions trivialize, distort, and deny the experience of another culture towards its saints and gods. Western culture and those taken by it insist on looking at other cultures from their own perspective believing that it is the only experience possible in the world. This is the root of the feeling of wrongness: someone else’s experience of the world makes our experiences inaccessible to us by trivializing, denying, and distorting them. Some protest by various forms (physical almost never) because Indians feel that this situation is morally wrong. But these protests face the ever-present threat of the label of ‘Hindu fundamentalism’. There is a sense of cognitive wrongnesstoo. But the reaction is in the form of complete silence as one simply does not know how to counter-express. Such descriptions not only deny the existence of Indian traditions as alternatives to Western discourses but yields a caricatured, distorted version of the competitor.

At a fundamental level, scholars trying to place Indian traditions into the straitjacket of religion profoundly miss its nature. These traditions exist with the fundamental idea of an ‘indifference to differences’ which transcends the standard secularist discourses for harmony- ‘tolerance’ or ‘mutual respect’. Sanatana Dharma has any number of offshoots and branches- Vaidika and the Tantrika; Buddhist and the Jain; Shaiva and the Vaishnava; Shakta and the Sikh; Arya Samaj and Kabirpanth; worshippers of Ayyappa, Doni-pollo, Sarna; and so on.

Hindu society majorly consists of two parallel religious systems- Vaidikam and Tantrikam. The practices of the latter are clearly Siva-Sakti worship. The Tantric practices range from simple Grama Devata (village deity) practices to more esoteric ones. At the extreme end, there might be practices that can offend one’s sensibilities as they involve uninhibited sex, alcohol, blood, and meat. The interface between the Vaidikam and the Tantric methods has been ranging from indifference to a mutual give and take, to a complete shunning (as in the extreme Vamachara practices). At no point perhaps, there was a violent suppression of one by the other. This mutual give and take are typical in a traditional pagan land.

The colonial-missionary understanding of the Siva-Sakti traditions finally led to a narrative of Dravidianism, demonolatry, untouchability, and a detachment of many groups from the main body of Hinduism as Sudha Mohan shows in his book Sivasya Kulam. Proving them to be oppressed non-Hindus or non-Aryans was a useful strategy for both conversion purposes and creating a huge faultline in the Hindu society. The distortion of non-Vaidik traditions led to many disastrous consequences- Dravidianism being the most glaring, along with pushing traditional medicine into the realm of the ‘primitive.’ Many Buddhist practices were based on Tantrik rituals, demonstrating a clear mutual exchange of practices and an inherent harmony. The colonial enterprise of pitting Buddhism as standing against Hinduism has largely been a successful one. In summary: depiction of the Mother Kali in any way one pleases is a singular attack on our culture and is ‘not OK’. Barring physical violence every other response remains justified. Enough is enough.

TERMINATION OF PREGNANCIES- COMPLEX ETHICAL CONUNDRUMS (June 29, 2022)

Abortion, a raging issue in the USA, which the Supreme Court makes it harder now to obtain, is one of the trickiest areas of ethics. Two lives entangle as one unit and a clash sets up between the autonomy of a vociferous individual and the silence of the dependent other. Unfortunately, the idea and essence of motherhood disappear in the discourse even as foetal rights makes its entry. Many factors converge on the debate, especially in the west. Political ideologies (right wing- pro-life, ‘no right to abort’ versus the left wing- pro-choice, ‘right to abort’); religious affiliations (strict anti-abortion ranging to free abortion); and socio-cultural factors (50% unwed mothers in the USA) all play a role in this vigorous debate where law, ethics, medicine, and human rights make for a heady cocktail. Unwanted conceptions arising out of wedlock does not make much sense in a country like India though their numbers may slowly increase in the decades to come.

Essentially, the debate is regarding a contradiction between the two fundamental properties of a liberal life: the freedom to choose and the right to live. The legal guidelines following the famous Roe v. Wade casefor terminating a pregnancy was a pragmatic view and not on any moral, ethical, or religious ideas. The right to live (for the fetus) was the consideration in the later part of pregnancy and the freedom to choose (for the mother) in the early part. It did not address the slippery slope when each of the arguments goes to the extreme and demands either the freedom to choose or the right to live in all stages of pregnancy.

At the crux is the consideration of when does life begin? At conception, birth, or at some point in between? ‘Survivability’ of the fetus outside the womb is a problematic stand. With improving technology, a fetus is surviving earlier births. Carl Sagan says, ‘a morality that depends on, and changes with, technology is a fragile or even unacceptable morality.’ He interestingly proposes a 24 weeks limit based on some research showing well-formed waves ‘typical’ of a human in the foetal brain declaring the transition of a fetus to a human.

The Indian MTP act, formulated in 1971, made the legal limit to 20 weeks purely on the consideration that after this age, terminations can be unsafe for the mother. Recently, it has gone up to 24 weeks to allow a wider timeframe and relieve the pressure of a narrow window to diagnose many serious fetal anomalies. Specifically in the Indian context, the conflation of the MTP Act (for safe and legal abortions) and the PC&PNDT Act (to prevent gender based selective abortions) has many implications on access to safe abortion services for women. Were our shastras silent on this? Nitin Sridhar (Abortion: A Dharmic Perspective) using extensive ancient Indic sources (Dharmashastras) shows how ancient Indians set the limit for legal abortion at 16 weeks but with a different reasoning taking the notions of the individual Jiva, Karma, Dharma, Adharma, and Prayashchitta into consideration. Abortion after 16 weeks involved legal punishments and abortion before 16 weeks involved a Prayashchitta (a voluntary imposition for repentance) procedure for 12 years.

Across time and cultures, abortion to save the life of the mother has been generally unambiguous. Antenatal diagnosis comes with its own baggage of ethical issues in this complex mix. With technologies probing increasingly deeper into the foetus, one must almost ‘prove’ that the foetus is normal. The readiness to abort babies with many genetic and structural anomalies is with the essential philosophy that prevention of birth would save money when compared to care of these handicapped children. This is more of a rational-economic thinking than anything else. Technology has enlarged the category of ‘unacceptable abnormality’ and narrowed the range of ‘acceptable normality’. Primary medical ethics demand that ‘life or no life’ is never an option for any disease. But in foetal medicine, abortion is a very vibrant option. Is it in the interest of the foetus, mother, or society? Thus, the disturbing problem of foetal screening along with selective abortion is that one cannot eliminate the disease many times without eliminating the subject. Down’s syndrome is a prototype where there is a singular attempt of technology to ‘search and destroy.’ The ethical justification in aborting a Down Syndrome baby (or any other malformation) because it is going to be a burden on the family is disturbingly ambiguous, because the same logic can apply to a female child causing a great disturbance to the social life of some mothers. Some ethicists-controversial certainly, say there is no difference in such scenarios between female infanticide and terminating for Down Syndrome.

The ethical, moral, legal, medical, and social dimensions in solving these paradoxes need a more detailed and nuanced discussion. The ethical issues are going to only increase in the future as more diseases enter the domain of pre-delivery diagnosis, unwanted conceptions increase, and marriage becomes more disdainful. These are disturbing issues for the society, but finally, is it a healthy society which does not accept any abnormality outside its definition of norms? Some claim strongly that the assessment of maturity of a society is by how it deals with its members who cannot contribute anything-the handicapped, the old, the diseased, and even the animals who are useless. Are we going in the direction of immaturity despite the scientific progress? In India, as is usual with many areas, despite a respect to law, the trajectory of termination practices is often indifferent to it. However, Indians have a remarkable readiness to accept western discourses for application to Indian culture. This promises to make termination issues noisier in the future.

DEMONIZING DOCTORS ON CAESARIAN SECTIONS (June 22, 2022)

The softest target in the country and the easiest to demonize has to be the medical profession. Caesarian Sections are the commonest means to do this. The political-bureaucratic pressure seems to have come hard on the Caesarian sections. A news item (THI dated 21^st June) mentions the Collector proclaiming that thanks to the measures initiated by them, the Caesarian section rates have come down from 98% to 90% in private hospitals and from 77% to 67% in government hospitals. How ethical is it for the governments to concentrate on the technical aspects of individual surgeries when clearly, they are not qualified to do so? This, instead of focusing on the more important duty of providing health care access to all.

Without discounting commercial motives, most debates on Caesarian Section rates show a tunnel-vision. Some government teaching hospitals, where commercial motives do not perhaps stick, show CS rates of almost 80% and up. Caesarian Section is rising the world over: China (47%), Italy (36%), Australia (33%), United States of America (32.2%), UK (26%), and New Zealand (26%) are some examples. Also, the proportion of Caesarian Sections is increasing every year in all countries. Is India an exception (at 17.2% in 2015–16)? Yes, because it best meets the much quoted 10%-15% WHO criteria of an ‘ideal’ CS rate where less than 10% implies that the health standards for the country are poor and more than 15% implies unnecessary surgeries with risks outweighing benefits. However, these figures reflect something else too. Despite the ‘obviously evident’ high Caesarian Sections all around in the country, an overall figure of 17% points to pathetic health delivery standards of the country, averaging the country’s figure to such a respectable figure. It actually reflects poor healthcare access across the country. The governments should be highly reflecting about its own performance over decades based on these numbers.

The financial, legal, and technical reasons for CS increases are manifold: Increasing maternal age; increased numbers of multiple births; higher rates of obesity and Diabetes; medical-led view of pregnancy and birth leading to higher rates of interventions; fear of birth and labour pain; concerns about genital modifications after vaginal delivery; fear of medical litigation; low tolerance of anything less than the perfect birth outcome; Polycystic Ovarian Disease (PCOD) growing in epidemic proportions; infertility treatments leading to multiple gestations; increased incidence of big babies; increased incidence of abnormal pelvises in mothers; and so on. Cultural and horoscope considerations play an important role in countries like India and China.

Due to the complexity of all these scenarios and the interconnected factors, interventions to reduce unnecessary CS have only shown moderate success to date. The World Health Organization Statement, reiterated by the Indian Obstetrician’s body FOGSI, emphasizes that every effort should be to provide Caesarean Sections to women in need, rather than striving to achieve a specific rate. Even if charges for normal vaginal delivery become equal to Caesarian Section charges (as some suggest as a solution), it is highly doubtful that such a strategy would reduce the CS surgeries. The debate requires more nuance and not bias on the part of our intellectuals.

TIME TO RETHINK ABOUT RELIGIONS IN INDIA (June 16, 2022)

Intellectuals, thinkers, and common people who make the reassuring and feel-good claim that no religion teaches hatred are like the proverbial ostriches. They are ignoring the entire panorama of the violent history of religions in the western and the middle eastern worlds in the last two thousand years. The destruction and conversion of cultures and civilisations was not by individuals who did not understand religion but by people who specifically drew inspiration from their religions.

A troubled India holds on to some very divisive narratives concerning religion thanks to a sustained poor scholarship after independence which did not disband the colonial narratives. Intellectuals like Bankim Chandra had an inkling but it is Dr Balagangadhara Rao (Balu) in recent times who has most clearly articulated a better understanding of India with some real solutions. His claim about religions at the most basic level goes like this: India is a land of traditions and not religions. If Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism are religions in their true definition (consisting of A Book, A God, A Doctrine, A Temple), then there are no indigenous religions in India.

The biggest problem of the world, cutting across all ideologies, is the continuous understanding of traditions as religions. Dr Balagangadhara clearly shows that Hinduism was more of an ‘experience’ of the colonials trying to understand an alien culture. In this sense they ‘constructed’ a religion based on their own frameworks and a total belief that there can never be a culture without a religion. The puja, the Sandhyavandanam of the Brahmins, the Sahasranamams, the Purushasukta, our notions of dharma and adharma, all exist. The West did not provide a false or wrong description of the social and cultural reality in India. But problematically, the unity they created by tying these things together is a unity only for them. They could not understand us otherwise.

This different but cognitively superior description of Indian culture perhaps confirms to the lived experience of most people. However, we need to first reject the present framework based completely on Western scholarship. Calling oneself a ‘Hindu’ for the sake of convenience is simply a continuation of ancestral traditions. A traditional land has the characteristic feature of dealing with pluralism and that is an ‘indifference’ to differences. This transcends the classical notions of ‘tolerance’ and ‘mutual respect’ maximally achieved by secularism. While calling oneself a ‘Hindu’ might be convenient, the danger is in trying to develop ‘doctrines’, ‘theologies’, ‘catechisms’ and our own ‘Ten Commandments’ so that we could identify people that follow a religion called ‘Hinduism’. Intellectuals, in India and in the West, are transforming some of the multiple Indian traditions into a single ‘religion’ called ‘Hinduism’. The problem does not lie in trying to unify diversity into a unity. Rather, it lies in trying to fit traditions into the straitjacket of ‘religion’.

Even though we assume that a set of practices from time immemorial transmits; in principle, there is no way of establishing the truth of this belief. Only certain knowledge such as the Vedas and mantras might have faithfully come down in their pristine form. Dr Balu says, today, we are not yet able to make sense of the presence of these two properties: (a) the enormous flexibility in belonging to a tradition and the sharpness with which the boundaries exist between traditions; (b) the possibility that any element could be absent from a tradition and yet it could maintain identity and distinction. Contrary to popular understanding, traditions are neither variants of either religion or philosophies. They are what they are- traditions.

How do we then understand Christianity and Islam in India? Dr Balu says that the simple answer is that when these religions entered India, they met with an already formed culture. These religions adapted to the existing culture to survive. Thus, Indian Christianity and Indian Islam remain Indian irrespective of their religious beliefs and practices which had a space to flourish as one of the many diversities present in Indian culture. In this process, these religions undergo modifications in how the believers live their daily life which does not affect the content of their beliefs or their places of worship. It is exactly this kind of adoption and adaptation to Indian culture that many Madrassa schools and evangelical Christians militate against. Whether such ‘resistance’ has any effect at all or not depends not on their militancy but on the vibrancy of Indian culture.

India’s practical solution since ages, instead of the inappropriate and noxious secularism, was to traditionalise the religions so that they lost focus on proselytization and made some genuine attempts at cultural syncretism. In reverse, our thinkers are trying hard to convert our traditions into religions. As secularism drives Hinduism into a proper religion, we typically see the rise of intolerance and fundamentalism and begets the accusation by others of what they have been guilty of for hundreds of years.

ENGLISH MEDIUM AND THE DESTRUCTION OF CULTURE (June 4, 2022)

The ill-thought introduction of English medium in primary schools would be a great blow to the already tottering Telugu language and culture sadly. A ‘colonial consciousness’ believes English as naturally superior to any vernacular language for higher education and economic prosperity too. Arguing for a vernacular language would be either ‘regressive’ or a false sense of ‘nationalism’. Sankrant Sanu (The English Medium Myth) argues that an English language-based class separation hurts the people by privileging a foreign culture over the native culture; by disconnecting the general population from the intellectual and policy discourses where the thinking is in vernacular language but the expression has to be in the colonial language using a colonial worldview; and by creating a ceiling for progress in academia for those educated in the native languages. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Germany, France, Russia, Germany, and Israel using exclusively their own languages strongly disprove a connection between English medium and economic prosperity.

Thiong’o, a Kenyan writer, calls English a “culture bomb” for other cultures which annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities, and ultimately in themselves. He can as well be speaking for India. Cultural denigration and destruction manifest itself clearly in the attitudes of our intellectual elites, bureaucracy, academics, journalists, and authors writing in English. By trying to make English compulsory at primary level instead of allowing an Indian to reach the highest levels of arts and sciences in any vernacular language of comfort, our state policies are only hastening the demise of the great Indian culture and becoming a continuing colonial project.

One Sided Discourse on Menstruation May 28, 2022)

Recently we celebrated Menstrual Hygiene Awareness Day. Menstruation is one of the most basic human physiological processes related to the propagation of our species. And it is fascinating that over thousands of years, a perfectly physiological process finds itself intricately linked with a whole set of cultural, social, and religious beliefs. The entire discourse of menstruation has now changed to that of hygiene and rights- purely biological, nothing sacred, nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing impure about it. In the social context, again the western paradigm of rights has taken over the narrative. The dealing of menstruation is a completely private affair with sanitary pads as a tool to declare equality by ‘not missing any action’. All spheres, including the commercial, focuses specifically on the twin issues of menstrual hygiene and independence.

As Nithin Sridhar details meticulously in his book, Menstruation Across Cultures, the social and cultural practices many times, go far beyond these straightforward modern narratives and it would be useful to understand some of them before condemning them outright. Anthropology is the study of human customs and beliefs; and which finally show us why we are humans. The two concepts of sacredness and impurity are the main issues which make menstrual understanding so interesting. In Hindu traditions, there are many deities and goddesses associated with fertility and menstruation. These deities are the manifestations of the primary Shakti. Hindu traditions clearly consider menstruation as a sacred and a positive process worthy of respect, worship, and even celebration. Unfortunately, nowadays the practices surrounding menarche and menstruation have strong negative connotations either by blind mechanical restrictions or completely throwing them off as taboos by the ill-informed families combined with a secular discourse in the environment.

The sacred aspect and the Asaucha are complementary- two sides of the same coin. This period of temporary state of impurity or ‘Asaucha’ is a time where the Rajasic energy is pent up in the body. This places certain temporary restrictions and lifestyle modifications which includes physical isolation from the rest of the house, avoidance of physical activities, avoidance of kitchen work, and abstinence from sex. These restrictions neither degrade women nor make them inferior by any stretch of the imagination. However, menstruation most importantly is a self-purification process at the physical, mental, and spiritual levels. There is no connotation of inferiority, degradation, or subjugation.

Yogic literature and Ayurveda look at menstruation as a physiological process deeply connected with the Vayus or forces in the body. The impurity aspect has more to do with a temporary state of heightened Rajasic energy and Dosha imbalances in the body, which needs countering by a period of physical and mental rest along with dietary modifications. The modern narrative regarding this practice has been consistently that of subjugation.

All the Abrahamic religions subscribe to the categories of purity-impurity and all of them have menstrual restrictions, but the foundational principles are different. Menstruation in Hinduism is a state of heightened Rajas; in Abrahamic religions, it connects with Original Sin. Purity-impurity attaches to vitality and competence in Hinduism, whereas it associates with virtue and sin in the Abrahamic religions. These are some clashing elements between the Hindu and the Abrahamic view of menstruation. Greco-Romans, Mesopotamians, and the Egyptians of ancient times show many similarities to Hinduism with respect to the sacredness and purity/impurity of menstrual practices.

Menstrual practices across cultures have been an interesting phenomenon and to understand them fully is the need of the hour. The modern Hindu women pulled in opposite directions by the sacred traditions on the one hand and the contemporary scientific narrative on the other becomes confused even as courts deliver judgements related to religious issues based on ideas of gender discrimination. Unfortunately, the non-physical aspects have become ‘taboos’, reducing menstruation to negative notions of pains, cramps, and a hindrance in the way of progress. Now, the whole conversation of menstruation is hygiene and independence. Anything else is discrimination or sadly, a superstition.

INDIA WAS NEVER A NATION? (May 26, 2022)

The editorial (Our politicians should stop deriding India abroad) on 26^th May raised an important point which many Indian politicians are guilty of when travelling abroad. Their petty internal anger makes them paint the country in unfavourable colours causing immense damage. As a specific point, ill-informed Indians follow the line of scholars used to the modern definition of a nation-state and declare that we were ‘never a nation’. The idea that India is somehow the creation of the West has a significant and continuing intellectual history. The resistance to ideas of India’s unity embeds in post-colonial thinking too unfortunately. Standard western theories (Hobsbawm, Gellener, Anderson) trace the origins of nations in institutional, economic, and technological transformations. Apparently, the democratic state and its elite ‘create’ nations through a cultural homogenization by invoking symbols and ‘inventing’ traditions (national anthem and a national language). Industrialization through a homogenizing educational policy; ‘print media’ by uniting people into an ‘imagined political community’ are some other mechanisms for creating nations.

Taking this line forward, our own scholars at JNU believe that India is incoherent, fragmented, and marked by foundational differences. Other dangerous indigenous narratives include branding as ‘right-wing’ (hence bad) any objections to love for other countries; attachment to the land of India as troubling; Kerala as not ‘really’ belonging to India; and ‘Tamil nationalism’ as resting on linguistic pride and official antipathy for Hinduism (though 88% of Tamil Nadu called themselves Hindus in the 2011 census); India as an oppressor occupying Kashmir illegally; and so on.

These scholarships only enlighten us on the emergence of modern ‘governmentality’ to attain greater efficacy but not nations and nationalism, says scholar Saumya Dey. The Greeks, English, and the French were an ancient ‘felt community’ much before printing presses, democracy, or industrialization. ‘Nation’ does not do justice to India’s expression of oneness. India is an ancient ‘felt community’ because it does not emerge through deliberate cultural or linguistic systematization. It functions and forms through a sense of belonging to the land disseminated through symbols. This process manifests itself as ‘culture’ working autonomous of the state. Thus, people could belong to the same set of meanings and land, despite differences in languages, by perceiving the same symbols (swastika, the lotus, the Devatas of temples, the tirthas, Sanskrit language, and so on) as a great unity. Indians, denizens of Bharata, have been a ‘felt community’ for thousands of years exactly like this.

Bharatvarsha clearly exists in the oldest scriptures as the land south of Himalayas and north of the oceans. India was Sapta Sindhu, the land of seven rivers in olden times. The name appears in Zend Avesta too. The Greeks called the land India or Indika, which also derives from the word Sindhu. India was Sindhu Sthana which later became Hindustan. Mahabharata, Ramayana, Vishnu Purana describes ‘Bharata’ Varsha with deep clarity in the various travels of its characters across the land. Ramayana and Mahabharata in fact became the major tools for integration. The references to the great epics are all over the country and even places like Indonesia where local traditions link in some way to the two great epics. A united India based on multiple traditions, rituals, mythology, and customs existed for thousands of years. A dense network of holy places and temples created a ‘sacred geography’ of the country and a strong tradition of pilgrimages in the country. The 12 Jyotirlingas, the 52 Shakti Mahapithas, and the 26 Upapithas spread over India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan became the defining point to draw the boundaries of the country.

There was perhaps no political unity in the European definition of nation though there was early political unity like the Mauryan Empire covering most of India. However, a united geo-cultural India existed for thousands of years about which we should all be rightfully proud of. One should directly reject the terrible narrative that the British ‘united’ us. That we were never a nation was a colonial construct (carried forward by post-colonial scholars) to break our country. What emerged as freedom in 1947 was simply the expression of an ancient ‘felt community’ and not an elitist or colonial construction.

The Changing Face of the IAS (May 19, 2022)

The article by Mohan Kandaji on the changing face of IAS is an interesting read. It is true that the political interference has increased over the decades but the public attitude towards the IAS remains of respect born out of fear only. They have joined hands with the politicians and have become mostly corrupt and inefficient. Pockets of quality are only exceptions which prove the rule. It is a matter clearly for everyone to see that despite holding unbridled power for decades after independence, most of the government systems are working at extremely low levels of inefficiency. Our roads reflect the political-bureaucratic nexus the best in the country. It is still a challenge to see a 5-kilometre stretch of road (not a highway) without potholes across the country. Does a road exist which remains intact beyond two monsoons? It is a terror experience for an ordinary citizen to deal with any government body, including the judiciary, without going into severe physical, mental, emotional, and financial trauma. For the IAS, it is a time to introspect more than anything else on how they have gone absolutely wrong in handling the country when they were supposed to provide the intellectual guiding force. It is a sad part that the fate of every single technical department has now slipped into the hands of the mostly non-technical IAS officers and the judiciary. As an aside, the latter’s judgements in recent times have only become a reason for more worry about the country’s future.

DENYING THE ISLAMIC HISTORY OF INDIA (May 17, 2022)

The ‘gyaanvaapi’ mosque and the Taj Mahal issues are challenging our secularism today. Germany traded peace with its past when the Nazi history became a part of its textbooks. After independence, our planners ignored thinkers like Sri Aurobindo who had a far more nuanced understanding of traditional Indian culture and also modern ideas like secularism or nationhood. The colonised west-looking politicians and the left-leaning academia could never fathom the nature of Indian past and simply imbibed western frameworks. This has only left a trail of disaster in our country where people stay divided in the name of anything and everything-mainly religion and caste.

A distorted writing of our history after independence failed to look at more profound solutions to deal with the clearly documented destroyed or altered temples. The philosophy of ‘secularism’ allowed the invaders to become benign and benevolent when all the invasions were brutal, inflicting great physical, cultural, and intellectual damage to India. Sadly, the solutions for preventing ‘communal strife’, for not offending the ‘minorities’, and encouraging ‘national integration’ was to dilute Hindu history and glorify or whitewash Islamic history.

To please or protect, our thinkers in all relevant fields inappropriately associated the present-day Muslims to the past Islamic invaders when it was quite unnecessary. The textbooks went against a huge body of contemporary descriptions of the invasions by chroniclers and historians. Our thinkers could have set a narrative by detaching the present Muslims from the crimes of the past Islamic invaders. In this far better method, there would have been no need to falsify our history and at the same time carry the country forward with better harmony. The dishonest approach caused immense damage to both Indian Hindus and Muslims. The Hindu now seethes in anger when he comes to know the historical narratives beyond the textbook teachings and the Muslim goes into a protective mode trying to defend the indefensible. Muslim intellectuals, especially the Aligarh school of historians, played a key role in this exercise.

Starting from the early 8^th century, the Islamic rulers successively attacked India till finally in 1210 CE, they settled in Delhi and became ‘natives’ as per our secular historical narratives. However, Muslim rule was a prototype of the succeeding British rule. No Muslim ruler ever learnt or spoke an Indian language except in the last days when Muslim power had almost collapsed. Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and later English had the pride of place. The positions of power and privilege were always for Muslims of Arabic, Turkish, Persian, or even Abyssinian descent, as they were for the white men. Their whole lifestyle had as little of the Indian in it as the lifestyle of the latter-day British. Muslim rulers of India perhaps have no connection with our Muslim brethren of today. Muslims, considering themselves as the descendants of those Muslim rulers, are only distorting history.

Muslim historians of medieval India left detailed accounts of destruction, killing, slavery, and iconoclasm which are available in original in libraries all over the world. Will Durant says that the Islamic conquest of India was the bloodiest in history. For example, Tuzuk-i-Baburi, Akbar-Nama, and Badshahnama respectively provide lurid details of Babur’s, Akbar’s, and Shah Jahan’s iconoclastic adventures and the killing of innocent citizens. Aurangzeb was the most brutal of them all. He was responsible for the destruction of temples in thousands perhaps as the listing in his official documents appear unending. ‘Hindu Temples: What happened to Them’ has a detailed and uncomfortable list of hundreds of mosques built on Hindu temples, based primarily on the books of Muslim historians of the period or inscriptions found on mosques.

India is a land of traditions and not religions. The characteristic feature of traditions is an ‘indifference to differences.’ Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and various others are simply traditions which the colonial understandings converted into proper religions. The post-independent thinkers did not question this misrepresentation, and they perpetuated the story of many religions, sometimes even conflicting with each other like in the western world. At a basic level, religions divide and traditions unite. The different traditions always evolve by mutual give and take. The solution to multiculturalism in India was to ‘traditionalise’ the religions and not secularism, the latter applicable to the Christian European world at a specific time of its history. Presently, we are not only stopping this process but doing something more disastrous- to convert our traditions into religions and generating intolerance in the process.

We should be looking at solutions for the present scenario of claiming mosques and temples from this traditional philosophy. Mutual give and take and an honest acceptance of the past would be great starting points. But would our leaders (political and spiritual) and the intellectuals (academia, media, or judiciary) even try to break away from the colonial understandings of India in the first place? Muslims can well identify themselves with Indian traditions rather than trying to deny or justify the crimes done in the name of Islam by unrelated people. Muslim intellectuals choose mostly to defend the problematic documented history of the past. And as ‘Hinduism’ becomes more of a religion, the hard stances arise which makes the solutions difficult. There are many mosques which have a problematic history on the basis of documented records and archaeological findings but at some point, the Hindu and the Muslim groups have to sit together to decide which claims need acceptance and which to let go. The country deserves peace and the onus is on both Hindu and Muslim intellectuals; arguably a wee bit more on the latter who have largely remained mute to radical Islamic claims for decades.

COMMUNISTS HAVE BEEN ONLY DAMAGING TO INDIA (April 23, 2022)

With reference to the article, Lenin lives on in Kolkata by Jayanta Roy Chowdhury (THI 23^rd April 2022), it is worthwhile to consider how Marxist-Communist ideology in our academia and politics has been most detrimental to the cause of India and Hindus since decades. Other political parties are not paragons of virtue, but this specific one has been the most damaging. Marx thought that Hinduism was the ideology of the oppressive and he thought British colonial rule was correct for India as our primitive country was incapable of handling itself.

In the 1942 Quit India movement, they betrayed the nationalists by acting as informers to the British agencies. During the second world war, this transition happened because Germany attacked Russia and Britain was an ally of Russia. Later, the Communists were second only to the Muslim League in creating Pakistan by supplying many intellectual arguments for a separate country. They sided with China during the 1961-62 war period acting against the interests in India. It is amazing that they had no problems in taking orders from foreign masters (Russia, China) to take their stances related to Indian matters. It is equally amazing how they distort the narratives later on to present a different picture. It helps when academia is on your side.

They claim to have fought the Razakars and the Nizams, but they were equally brutal in inflicting violence on the hapless people of Telangana and Andhra. Their joining the Congress and fighting the Nizams had a larger and complex dimension emanating from Russia to make Andhra-Nizam area into a separate Communist nation within India. For a few years after the integration of Hyderabad, the Communists were still fighting the Indian state, and it was only in 1951 (again from Russian orders) that they stopped it. The final straw has to be the Ayodhya controversy where the Muslim party was almost convinced for a peaceful resolution when the Marxist intellectuals stepped in to supply a set of ill-formed and deficient arguments to prolong the issue for a great length of time.

At a political level, the damage which the Communists did to Bengal and Kerala is too massive to even imagine. Their academic hegemony for decades also ensured a free run of Marxist ideology in a whitewashing of uncomfortable history along with pushing the glories of Hindu history into the footnotes. The only paradigm for them to view Hinduism became an exploitative hierarchical society in their binaries of exploited and the exploiter. Their ideas have only perpetuated a colonial view, despite being a ‘critique’. Today, in the declining political presence, our Universities are indulging in Cultural Marxism which inexorably fragments society and culture. By employing various terms, there is no end to the discovery of fresher victims and an endless atomization of our country. They have caused an immense intellectual and physical damage to our traditions and heritage which stays at par with all the colonial invaders.

On Urdu and the divisive narratives (April 20, 2022)

The article by Asad Mirza in THI dated 20^th April 2022 (Urdu: Whose language is it?) is a wonderful reminder of the unfortunate divisive narratives in the country based on religion. The post-colonial Indian thinkers and politicians with their narrow understanding of India and its traditions managed to cause equal havoc, if not more, than the colonial rulers. Ramayana, Mahabharata, Gita, Rama, Krishna, and the thousands of Indian scriptures belong to the Indian heritage of thousands of years. Each citizen of India is an equal heir to traditional India with its rich contributions in the fields of philosophy, science, astronomy, architecture, medicine, arts, literature, engineering, and so on. Somehow, all these became ‘Hindu’ in a twisted narrative of the intellectuals based on the alien concept of secularism. Just as there is an unrequired antipathy to the idea of Urdu by the majority of Hindus, there is an unfortunate antipathy and a disowning of all representing a glorious ancient civilization which survives despite severe attacks over millennia. Ironically, the post-colonial intellectual attack on India seems to be more intense and damaging than the colonial one which was both intellectual and physical.

Portuguese Rule as a model for New India (April 5, 2022)

Few are aware that the Portuguese ruled Goa for 450 years (1510-1961) and yet had a poor economy. Portugal was a ‘pioneer in expansionism’, motivating other sea faring, ship building neighbours to explore, conquer, loot and plunder. Yet it was one of the backward countries in western Europe in terms of GDP and per capita income. This was mainly due to short-sighted economic policies when it failed to outgrow its initial mercantile objectives of extracting maximum profits with minimal investment.

Agriculture, mining, infrastructure, industry, and higher education stayed quite static during their rule in Goa. Literacy remained at very low levels (11-13%) even after hundreds of years of an uninterrupted rule. Trade, commerce, tariffs, and other dues remained its major source of revenue with poor investment in production. Lotteries and excise duty generated great income. There was a silent encouragement of smuggling and illegal sales of Indian goods to generate the much-needed Indian currency. Banco Nacional Ultamarino, the only bank, had the dubious distinction of accepting deposits but offering no interest and advancing loans at what was probably the highest rate of interest in the world. In 1939, around 20-25% of total income consisted of excise tariffs, second to customs as the greatest source of state revenues. Portuguese India hence gained the dubious distinction of being the ‘most intoxicated’ country in the world. Portugal did not know unfortunately how to exploit the way the Britishers could.

The Portuguese should now be happy that many states are following their economic model where excise taxes form a major part of their revenue. We are now allowing the bars to remain open the whole night too without worrying about the risk of collateral damage to innocent citizens because of late night drunken driving. It is sad that Excise becomes an important part of revenue and the governments apply targets to achieve. Apparently, the department becomes jittery on the ‘no drink’ days as it makes exceptions for a few places to sell liquor. On the other hand, there are the hypocrisies of ‘prohibition states’ where liquor flows in equal amounts as any other state but the revenue goes into personal pockets.

DOCTORS SUICIDE AND CLOSURE OF HOSPITALS- DOCTORS AS SOFT TARGETS (April 1, 2022)

The softest target in the country and the easiest to demonize has to be the medical profession. This manifested clearly in the unfortunate suicide of Dr Archana Sharma and the recent closure of private hospitals in Nirmal district for allegedly performing excessive Caesarian sections. No other profession perhaps faces this form of intense scrutiny and backlashes from every member of society starting from the man on the road to the most educated person sitting in high offices. Expecting more may be a factor but a doctor would always aim for the best result and a prompt resolution of the patient’s agony. This is unlike any other profession in the public or private sectors where greed and corruption thrive on delivering incompetency, inefficiency, and unconcerned with a quick resolution of anybody’s agony.

Caesarian Sections are the commonest means to demonize the doctors. Without discounting commercial motives, most debates on Caesarian Section rates show a tunnel-vision in understanding the problem. Is there a serious statistical study to compare the CS rates in government and public hospitals? The numbers might reveal a different picture. Some government teaching hospitals, where commercial motives do not perhaps stick, show CS rates of almost 80% and up. The second issue is that the Caesarian Section is rising the world over, and India is no exception. Recent statistics from 150 countries show a global Caesarian Section rate of 18.6% of all births. China stands at 47%, Italy at 36%, Australia at 33%, and the United States of America at 32.2% to name a few. Canada, UK, and New Zealand have figures around 26%. Also, the proportion of Caesarian Sections is increasing every year in all countries.

The financial, legal, and technical reasons for such increases are manifold: Increasing maternal age; increased numbers of multiple births; higher rates of obesity and Diabetes; medical-led view of pregnancy and birth leading to higher rates of interventions; fear of birth and labour pain; concerns about genital modifications after vaginal delivery; fear of medical litigation; low tolerance of anything less than the perfect birth outcome; Polycystic Ovarian Disease (PCOD) growing in epidemic proportions; infertility treatments in the latter and other conditions leading to multiple gestations; increased incidence of big babies; increased incidence of abnormal pelvises in mothers (CPD or Cephalopelvic Disproportion); and so on. Cultural considerations and horoscope considerations also play an important role in specific contexts, common in countries like India and China. Considering solely medical factors in this complex scenario is likely to be a futile effort. Factors associated with women’s fears; and societal and cultural beliefs are very likely contributing to the increase. The reasons for increasing CS rates go much beyond the simple binary of ‘greed or no greed’. Due to the complexity of all these scenarios and the interconnected factors, interventions to reduce unnecessary CS have only shown moderate success to date.

The much-quoted World Health Organization figure of 10%-15 % as the ideal Caesarian Section rate needs an Indian perspective as well. Apparently, less than 10% implies that the health standards for the country are poor and more than 15% implies unnecessary CS, with risks outweighing benefits. The USA has a CS rate around 35%; and India (17.2 % in 2015–16) looks better here. However, these figures reflect something else too. Despite the obviously evident high Caesarian Section rates above 50% (and sometimes touching 90%) all around in the country, an overall figure of 17% points to pathetic health delivery standards of the country, averaging the country’s figure to such a respectable figure. It reflects poor healthcare across the country. The governments should be highly reflecting about its own performance over decades based on these numbers.

The World Health Organization Statement, reiterated by the Indian Obstetrician’s body FOGSI, emphasizes that every effort should be to provide Caesarean Sections to women in need, rather than striving to achieve a specific rate. Even if charges for normal vaginal delivery become equal to Caesarian Section charges (as some suggest as a solution), it is highly doubtful that such a strategy would reduce the CS surgeries. The debate requires more nuance and not bias.

Let us call out the bluff of Communist propaganda (March 23, 2022)

If there is one academic ideology and one political party which has been most inimical to India and Hindus, it has to be Marxism and the Communists, respectively. Marx thought that Hinduism was the ideology of the oppressive and he shared the distaste of most Europeans for India and Hindu practices. He thought British colonial rule was correct for India as our primitive country was incapable of handling itself. Like the English, he believed that India was merely a stretch of land with a meek conglomerate of peoples passively waiting for the next conqueror. For him, the question was not whether it was right to colonize India, only whether British colonization was better than the Turks or the Russian Czar. Marx’s Indian followers across decades have not deterred from this view.

It has been a history of Marxists and the Communists in the political (receiving their orders from their Russian and Chinese masters) and academic arenas to be working constantly against the interests of the country and especially the Hindus. In 1942 Quit India movement, they betrayed the nationalists by acting as informers to the British agencies. During the second world war, this transition happened because Germany attacked Russia and Britain was an ally of Russia. A friend of a friend became a friend despite the fact they were tyrannising and ruling over us.

As Venkat Dhulipala explains in detail in his book, the Communists were second only to the Muslim League in advocating and creating Pakistan. They supplied the intellectual arguments for a separate Pakistan. They sided with China during the 1961-62 war period acting against the interests in India. It is an amazing facet of their almost fanatical ideology that they had no problems in taking orders from foreign masters to take their stances related to Indian matters. It is equally amazing how they distort the narratives later on to present a different picture. It helps when academia is on your side.

They claim to have fought the Razakars and the Nizams, but they were equally brutal in inflicting violence on the hapless people of Telangana. Their joining the Congress and fighting the Nizams had a larger and complex dimension emanating from Russia to make Andhra-Nizam area into a separate Communist nation within India. This would be the first step in the dream of making India into a Communist nation. For a few years after the integration of Hyderabad, the Communists were still fighting the Indian state, and it was only in 1951 (again from Russian orders) that they stopped it. The final straw has to be the Ayodhya controversy where the Muslim party was almost convinced for a peaceful resolution when the Marxist intellectuals stepped in to supply a set of ill-formed and deficient arguments to prolong the issue for a great length of time.

At a political level, the damage which the Communists did to Bengal and Kerala is too massive to even imagine. It is not that the other political parties are paradigms of virtue, but the Communists have been the nastiest in its attacks on India and the Hindus, perhaps equal, if not more than the Islamic and the European imperialists. Their academic hegemony for decades also ensured a free run of Marxist ideology in a whitewashing of uncomfortable history along with pushing the glories of Hindu history into the footnotes as if it never existed. The only paradigm for them to view Hinduism became an exploitative hierarchical society in their binaries of exploited and the exploiter. Two generations of Indians after independence grew up internalising this discourse and now most of us have only shame with regards to our country and the internal religious and social wounds have only festered deeper. In the garb of an anti-colonial critique, they have only perpetuated a colonial view of the country and have caused an immense intellectual and physical damage to our country by their poor understanding of Indian culture.

Democracy may or may not be the best solution for the country; all political parties may belong to the devil, but the country can do very well without the Communists and their academic partners. Of course, in the declining political presence, our Universities are now indulging in Cultural Marxism which inexorably fragments society and culture. By employing various terms (which they are very good at), there is no end to the discovery of fresher victims and the endless atomization of victimhood in our country. Indian academia craving for prestige by its association with the west become the willing and conscious allies of the Western academia in its quest of disrupting the cultural coherence of the non-western societies.

The English Medium Destruction of Culture (March 14, 2022)

Telangana government taking cue from the neighbouring Andhra plans to introduce English medium in primary schools from the next academic year. Language in post-independent India took a peculiar form under a dominant Marxist ideology permeating our academic and political worlds. In a linear view of history, the Indian past became ‘primitive’ and its future goal became the ‘golden’ West. Sanskrit and the local languages became redundant and the state policies went for an exclusive English based education, especially in institutes of higher learning. Over seven decades, an exclusive reliance on English- a deliberate state policy, has created a clear-cut social hierarchy placing a select few knowing English fluently above those who are not comfortable with English as a mode of expression. An English language-based class separation has become a severe axis of discrimination by privileging a foreign culture over the native culture; by disconnecting the general population from the intellectual and policy discourses where the thinking is in vernacular language but the expression has to be in a colonial language using a colonial worldview; and by creating a ceiling for progress in academia for those educated in the native languages, says Sankrant Sanu in The English Medium Myth.

Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Germany, France, Russia, Germany, and Israel using exclusively their own languages blow the myth of a connection between English medium and economic prosperity. By making English compulsory in schools and colleges as a medium of instruction, there is a destruction of culture and a deracination of its citizens. By trying to make English medium compulsory at primary level instead of allowing an Indian to reach the highest levels of arts and sciences in any vernacular language of comfort, our state policies are only hastening the demise of the great Indian culture based on Sanskrit and a huge number of vernacular languages (equally or more advanced than English). A destruction which even our colonials could not achieve.

On the Degeneration of India and an irresponsible opposition (March 5, 2022)

Ramu Sarma has written a bold piece in THI dated 5^th March 2022 where he analysed the pathetic response of the opposition towards the Ukrainian student crisis. It is now the unfortunate polarisation around the single point of Modi and the BJP that hatred for them translates into hatred for the country. This is a time, as the editorial rightly points out, that the opposition should get its act together and offer solutions instead of resorting to criticisms using the social media platforms. On the same page, as a double whammy, the main editorial highlighted the depressing degeneration of the country in the seventy-five years of independence where ‘region, caste, and religion’ have become the most important reasons for major discord. Where have our politicians, intellectuals, academia, and thinkers gone wrong? Why is everyone in the country unhappy for their social identity and go around with feelings of persecution and discrimination?

In the garb of rejecting the colonial narratives, the post-colonial academia, heavily infiltrated with a hegemonic Marxist ideology, completely misunderstood Indian traditions. In a deep symbiotic relationship with political leaders, they managed to distort every single framework of Indian society even more disastrous than the colonials themselves. An evil caste ridden Hindu society forever having a communal problem with the Muslims became the backbone of all scholarly output on India. Band aid solutions like whitewashing documented histories became the methods of achieving secularism. An excellent opportunity to understand India in a better framework never materialised from our social sciences which remained trapped in ideology. The social sciences continued to look at India and the world the way the west looked at India and the world. These universities nurtured many influential intellectuals who became our bureaucrats, politicians, and the media. The colonial view of India never disappeared.

Are there solutions? Yes, there are, if we radically reject the old theories and give place to intellectuals like Balagangadhara Rao and many others who are struggling to give an alternative viewpoint of our country and culture which stood strong for thousands of years against all attacks. Similar civilizations have simply melted away in the face of such onslaughts. Caste and sub-caste grew in the western contexts; varna and jati grew in Indian contexts. Is there a possibility that there is an inappropriate application of a western framework to understand our social systems? Every single social understanding has undergone radical alterations with new knowledge, but the supposed core idea of ‘Brahminism’- an exploitative divinely sanctioned system, permanently etched into Indian society from the days of early 17^th century European travellers and missionaries to present day Indologists. One of the most complicated, dubious, and confusing discourse on social structuring in India has been to correlate the varnas and the jatis. There never has been a one-to-one correlation. There is a selective but constant quotation of the scriptures since the colonials landed in India (a distorted translation of the Manusmriti or a single verse in the Purusasukta). There are other equally important and valid scriptures that note a reversal of hierarchy and equal authority for all varnas, yet those remain ignored in the narratives. Is our understanding of varna and jati faulty at some level?

As Dr Balagangadhara strongly proposes, ‘Hinduism’ is a huge conglomeration of many traditions, rituals, local practices, and philosophies with a core characteristic of an indifference to differences. This transcends the concepts of both ‘tolerances and acceptances.’ Hinduism as a ‘religion’ became an experience of the West which saw religions wherever it went. They saw the multitude of traditions in the great tree of Sanatana Dharma and constructed religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism (sometimes even fighting each other). Do religions even exist as defined in the Abrahamic mode? The biggest problem of the world (colonial, post-colonial, modern, post-modern, and so on), cutting across all ideologies, is the continuous understanding of traditions as religions. For reasons we cannot grasp now, Christianity and Islam took the character of traditions like other traditions in India; they lost the fixation on distinguishing between the true and the false and the resulting proselytizing drive. This was the Indian solution to multiculturalism and pluralism. Instead of exploring our own solutions, we imported secularism for our ‘communal’ harmony, a solution for European Christendom at a specific point of its history.

An enlightened monarchy with decentralisation and individual autonomy was the key to Indian culture. A centralised Parliamentary democracy was never our route. The regional parties today are, no surprise, winning. Central parties try to make them allies one way or the other. However, most regional parties focus on narrow issues invoking parochial interests, but they seem to have forgotten a core civilizational essence which defined and united Bharatvarsha in the past. Yes, there are solutions; only it needs strong work in the next few decades.

Hijab issue and secularism (February 15, 2022)

Secularism was a solution to European Christendom at a specific time in its history to deal with various factions fighting for ‘truth values’ of individual doctrines. It is hardly an ideal or a universal solution as demonstrated by the huge problems creeping up with the influx of Islam into Europe. Transfer of this solution to the plural world of India is even more problematic. Secularism ends up causing more religious friction paradoxically. It badly hits the Hindu traditions converted inappropriately into ‘proper religions’ by an extremely poor understanding on the part of our politicians, academics, and intellectuals. The Churches stress on the Constitution and secularism for allowing conversions, intensely antithetical to a traditional world like India, as a part of religious imperative. Similarly, Islamists talk about the Constitution and secularism for their demands but refuse the Uniform Civil Code to honour the Sharia. Secularism has failed brilliantly in our country and will continue to do so. It is important at this stage to invest some resources on developing alternative models to deal with the cultural diversity in the ever-shrinking world. Across centuries, the Indian solution to diversity and multiculturalism was in ‘traditionalising the religions’ and making them indifferent to each other. Instead, we are insisting on ‘religionising our traditions’ making them hard and increasingly intolerant.

Neural Tube Defects, Folic Acid, and Prevention Strategies (February 2, 2022)

NTDs (neural Tube Defects) are one of the most distressing conditions in a newborn child. Defects in the vertebral column and the spinal cord lead to a spectrum of disabilities which includes lower limb weakness and paralysis; loss of control of bladder and bowel movements; and accumulation of water in the brain (hydrocephalus). It would be a rare lucky child who does not have many neurological complications and who requires only a single surgery for correction. Most of them undergo multiple operations and almost a lifetime of care involving a multidisciplinary approach (Paediatric surgeons, Paediatricians, Neurologists, Neurosurgeons, Orthopaedic surgeons, Physiotherapists, Rehabilitation therapists, and so on). The physical, financial, emotional, and psychological burdens on the patient and the family are heavy beyond the imagination of a layperson and beyond a methodological calculation. In fact, so grave is the burden to the patient and the caregivers that it is almost a norm and an accepted protocol across the world to terminate the pregnancy if detected in the early part of the pregnancy.

At a very conservative estimate of 4.1 live births of this condition per 1000 births, almost 100,000 babies are born annually across India afflicted with Neural Tube Defects. To gain a perspective about the financial burden, the lifetime costs for a baby with NTD in the US is approximately $791,900 (translating into 5,85, 34,000 rupees per baby). Even if medical care costs are one hundredth of US in India, it still is a significant financial burden to the primary wage earner of the family. Dr Ravindra Vora and Dr Asok Antony, in a well-argued editorial (Journal of Indian Association of Paediatric Surgeons, January 2022) show a brilliant solution to this distressing problem.

It is amazing that many times the simplest reason is the root of the most complex problems. The cause of Neural Tube Defects is a deficiency of Folic acid in the mother during the time of conception. Worldwide, there is a confirmation of the fact that this humble vitamin given prophylactically to women planning to conceive reduces the risk of NTD to almost 80%. One of the best preventive programs would be to supplement folic acid to women of childbearing age. The US tried first by recommending and supplying this in tablet form, but poor compliance led to the policy of fortifying wheat flour with the correct dose of folic acid. The annual rate of NTDs came drastically down.

Authors Dr Vora and Dr Antony suggest a simple but practical solution in India. Differences in eating practices and methods of procuring the food material would make a central fortification scheme difficult for women in the remote villages. They suggest fortifying tea, commonly used across India, and generally with central production distributed peripherally, with folic acid and Vitamin B12, both found deficient in Indian women of childbearing age. Interestingly, this deficiency is irrespective of the food habits. The Indian non-vegetarian food is ‘near’ vegetarian, in fact, the authors write. This is perhaps a simple and safe solution to an extremely difficult problem taking a heavy toll on the afflicted patient, the families, the healthcare professionals, and the governments too. In their pilot studies, they have found this method to be extremely effective in Maharashtra. Though the authors are communicating with the central planning agencies and the tea boards to make this feasible, it is perfectly possible for individual state governments to start the program on a smaller and more manageable scale. It would also be a great idea if tea marketing and mainstream advertising incorporates this idea of supplying tea bags fortified with folic acid and Vitamin B12 specifically targeting potential mothers.

It would be a sincere request for the media and the honourable health minister of our State to seriously consider this proposal of tea fortification and take it forward in what could be a cheap and effective preventive strategy. The vitamins are non-toxic in the doses recommended and being water soluble, the kidneys handle any excess by simply throwing it out in urine.

SUBHASH CHANDRA BOSE STATUE CONTROVERSY (January 26, 2022)

There has been a controversy about the installation of Subash Chandra Bose’s statue recently in Delhi. The opposing camp questions Bose, in his struggles, seeking support from fascistic Hitler and Japan. European countries had complex power struggles which sucked other countries into their wars. Hitler initially had good relations with Stalinist Russia and England. Later, he turned to attack Russia and the second world war polarised countries with the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, Japan, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria) on one side and the Allied powers (U.S., Britain, France, USSR, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Greece, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, South Africa, Yugoslavia) on the other. The fluctuating relations between countries also reflected in volte-faces in India too. The Communists, for example, fought the British initially; later they became a friend as Germany invaded Russia (a strong friend) and England declared war on Germany (an enemy now). Post-war, of course, Russia and the US went on a confrontationist path.

In a typical scenario of victors writing history, the winners became the good people and the losers (specifically Hitler), extremely bad. The Nazi rule under Hitler was cruel and brutal. The Nazi regime murdered six million Jews and more than five million non-Jews (Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, blacks, the physically and mentally disabled, political opponents, Slavics, dissenting artists, the resisting clergy, and so on). However, to gain a perspective, there were 31 famines in 120 years of British Raj. As Shashi Tharoor (An Empire of Darkness) states explicitly, in just 10 years (1891-1900), 19 million people died in India due to famines alone. The famines, the biggest colonial holocausts, are at the top of some of the most severe inhumanities in modern times. Under the British Raj, India suffered countless famines. The first of these was in 1770 (10 million deaths), followed by severe ones in 1783, 1866, 1873, 1892, 1897 and lastly 1943-44. The regular Bengal famines were the result of careless planning, Malthusian ideas, and highly racist leaders sitting in England looking the other way. Churchill hated the Indians and thought that they bred like animals. He also wondered why Gandhi did not die in the famine. In the 1942-1945 WW2 Bengali Holocaust, the British starved to death upto 3 million Indians for strategic reasons with Australian complicity. All these apart from 62000 and 87000 Indian soldiers who died during the first and second world wars respectively; a war without any personal stake or honour, except for the reason that we were a colony of the British.

The British also divided us politically into two countries using religion; caused social disruptions by their caste-system narratives and pernicious Aryan theory frameworks; converted traditions into religions; stripped us economically; fed their industrialization by raw material produced from India; made India a market for their finished products; destroyed agriculture by converting large tracts of land for cash crops or for their opium trade; and levied heavy taxes. As Dr SN Balagangadhara proposes, the most unfortunate violent consequence of past colonialism is the present ‘colonial consciousness’- an altering of our intellectual frameworks but much after the colonials have left. The colonized refuses to understand any other narrative except the colonial ones.

Hitler undoubtedly was bad; however, Winston Churchill and the British were equally cruel and brutal. But our colonized minds exonerate the latter. Subhash Bose had an equal role, arguably even more than Gandhi, in gaining our independence through the Indian National Army, the INA trials, and the subsequent Naval Mutinies. He was a great patriot and was playing Chanakya Neeti in the art of warfare by approaching the enemy of the enemy to gain what he desired from the core of his heart-the independence of India. As Balagangadhara says, in seeking the Nazi support, it is possible that Bose was expressing our experience of colonialism; as colonial subjects, there was no difference between the British and Nazis in terms of their cruelties. The criticism of the statue by the naysayers is unwarranted and represents a homage to our past colonial discourses by colonized minds.

ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND STATE MEDIATED CULTURAL DESTRUCTION (January 20, 2022)

Language in post-independent India took a peculiar form under a dominant Marxist-Communist ideology permeating our academic and political worlds. In a linear view of history, the Indian past became ‘primitive’ and its future goal became the ‘golden’ West. Sanskrit and the local languages became redundant and the state policies went for an exclusive English based education, especially in institutes of higher learning whether law, medicine, engineering, humanities, social sciences, or management. It also became a requirement for Civil services. Over seven decades, an exclusive reliance on English- a deliberate state policy, has created a clear-cut social hierarchy placing a select few knowing English fluently above those who are not comfortable with English as a mode of expression. This unique policy has excluded a vast majority of the country from the talent pool to make useful contributions to the country.

This ‘colonial consciousness’ believes English as naturally superior to any vernacular language for higher education and economic prosperity too. Arguing for a vernacular language would be either regressiveness or a false sense of ‘nationalism’. Sankrant Sanu (The English Medium Myth) argues that an English language-based class separation hurts the people by privileging a foreign culture over the native culture; by disconnecting the intellectual and policy discourses from the general population where the thinking is in vernacular language but the expression has to be in the colonial language using a colonial worldview; and by creating a ceiling for progress in academia for those educated in the native languages. This becomes a severe axis of discrimination, says Sankrant.

The examples of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Germany, France, Russia, Germany, and Israel using exclusively their own languages are enough to blow the myth of a connection between English medium and economic prosperity. The top 20 richest countries in the world do not use a language for higher education and official business different from the native mass language of the general population. Again, only 4 of the top 20 richest countries have an English-based system. On the other hand, Sankrant Sanu points out that 19 out of the 20 poorest countries were colonies of exploitation by European powers and today, more than half of these countries do not even recognize the common language as an official language (generally a colonial language). The so-called English advantage to India’s software industry became questionable when Israel’s software exports, with a population less than Delhi, stood at 2.5 billion dollars as against total India’s exports of 6.5 billion dollars in 2001.

Language is important for communication and as a carrier of culture. About its role in facilitating communication, there is no problem. One can learn as many languages as possible. However, by making English compulsory in schools and colleges as a medium of instruction, there is a destruction of culture and a deracination of its citizens. This is all painfully evident in India which started, in fact, with the colonials. We cannot blame the colonials now. The colonials, by introducing English forcefully, created an elite having a distorted view of the Indian past; not only that, but they also destroyed a thriving indigenous Indian education system. Thiong’o, a Kenyan writer, calls English a “culture bomb” for other cultures which annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities, and ultimately in themselves. He can be speaking for India. Cultural denigration and destruction manifest itself clearly in the attitudes of our intellectual elites, bureaucracy, academics, journalists, and authors writing in English.

In a crucial Parliament debate, Sanskrit lost to English as a medium of instruction by only one deciding vote. A near perfect language carrying all our intellectual, academic, cultural and artistic heritage receded into the background; with newer Indological narratives, Sanskrit has even become ‘exploitative’, ‘patriarchal’, and ‘oppressive’. English learning became premium. The colonial violence simply continued, but in a different timeframe, by altering our intellectual frameworks. The maximum impact of this has been in the social sciences which simply rehashed old colonial theories without providing a better understanding of India causing immense damage to our social fabric. Also, the last political theory which came in India was Kautilya’s Arthashastra as we continue looking at the ill-fitting western ‘Parliamentary liberal democracy’ as the ideal solution for us. By trying to make English medium compulsory at primary level instead of allowing an Indian to reach the highest levels of arts and sciences in any vernacular language of comfort, our state policies are only hastening the demise of the great Indian culture, something which even our colonials could not do.

Is Democracy Really a Good Idea? (January 11, 2022)

The article by Madabhushi Sridhar (THI 11th January 2022) on a failing political system made for a distressing read. Land and property settlements; commissions on every conceivable deal; acquiring money and property beyond all possible means; pumping unimaginable money and liquor before elections; subversion of government machineries; and protecting criminal behaviour of relatives and friends have become almost the expected behaviour for politicians across the country. Nobody even bats an eyelid when the same politicians who derive power from people they go begging to before elections become completely deviant, untrustworthy, and unapproachable after coming to power. A recent popular movie showed how an MP is a part of the syndicate of sandalwood smugglers. Such depictions do not even remotely trouble anybody. The shattered roads across the country are perhaps the most glaring manifestation of our failed parliamentary democracy.

Nehru’s seven principles of a new ‘modern’ India to bring it out of stagnation (national unity, parliamentary democracy, industrialisation, socialism, scientific temper, secularism, and non-alignment) completely rejected the indigenous past to some disastrous consequences. Parliamentary Democracy with universal adult suffrage, fair elections, separation of powers, and constitutionally guaranteed basic rights was the only way to hold together a diverse, vast, and divided country. Alternatives like ‘communitarian’ and ‘organic’ democracy advocated by thinkers like Vivekananda, Gandhi, and Aurobindo did not appeal to Nehru. Are modern civilisations morally superior? Civilisation, self-contained wholes, are not amenable to comparative evaluation. Modernity constituents such as rationalism, individualism, liberal democracy, the state, technology, scientific worldview, and such are not logically related, and they came together in Europe because of historical factors. Some of them could even go in other cultures. India could have developed its own distinct model.

India could have opted for a more decentralised and participatory planning different from both capitalist and communistic forms, as eminent political theorist Dr Bhikhu Parekh says. Surprisingly, post-independent India failed to define traditional ideas on subjects like social justice, the specificity of the Indian state, secularism, legitimacy, political obligation, citizenship in a multicultural state, the nature of the law, the ideal polity, and the best way to theorize the Indian political reality. Political theory taking the state as its starting point and understanding society in relation to it replaced traditional social theory concentrating on the social structure with the government as one of its many institutions. Like ‘secularism’, ‘parliamentary democracy’ as a western solution transposed on Indian soil may be the cause of problems rather than solutions. Barring continuing work on Kautilya’s Arthashastra, there are no major reconstructions of ancient or medieval Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist texts on politics and discuss how Indian thought differs.

The search in western traditions was always present in the ideal for maximal individual liberty under the umbrella of minimal state interference and maximal state security. Seeking that harmony has created ‘isms’ of the most bewildering variety. Colonial consciousness again allowed narratives of western political philosophies to permeate into Indian thinking even as many of the ideas do not simply make sense. As a basic example, the labels of ‘right-wing’ or ‘left-liberal’ to political parties are more words of abuse revealing ignorance of the longstanding and inherent traditions of India.

Indian traditions had evolved a way of an enlightened monarchy and free citizens ages back. Arthashastra and other texts like Ramayana, Mahabharata (especially the Shanti Parvan), and Tirukkural focussed on duties rather than rights of both the rulers and the ruled. Our foundational texts emphasize on the four core human values: Dharma (right living), Artha, Kama, and Moksha. This diverges from the western rights-based individualistic philosophy. In traditional Hindu kingdoms, the polity and the social order were inseparable. The king’s dharma consisted in preserving and enforcing the varna and jati based social structures. Neither the modern concept of democracy nor its parliamentary articulation has a parallel in Indian thought. Karma determined an individual’s birth and natural endowments and thus fully deserved; the modern notion of group justice has no analogue in much of Hindu thought.

Indian civilization, at least five thousand years old, apart from a high quotient of personal happiness, had a thriving economy with highly evolved arts, literature, education, sciences, spirituality, architecture, and so on. Alternatives to democracy did thrive without the necessity to invade and colonise other countries. Maybe, the decentralised structure allowed invaders to plunder us. Unfortunately, popular discourses made this an example of our ‘weakness’ glossing over the brutalities of invaders and colonials. Most educated Indians get confused with the hard right-left divide of the West as our traditional problem-solving mechanisms are a mix of both. We have lost many decades and now we cannot change the system perhaps. The best way is to make our political-bureaucratic system more accountable. But why and how will an animal lay the trap for itself?

2021

THE TRICKY PROBLEM OF CONVERSIONS IN INDIA: IS THERE A SOLUTION? (December 22, 2021)

Proselytization seems to be generating controversy in Karnataka presently. Conversion, and its variants, seems to be the core problem of all plural societies across the world and especially India. Conversion is a radical, sudden change of belief, where one discards old associations because of a new theological outlook. How can such models encompass non-Christian religions and cultures where the concepts of belief, practice and membership are profoundly different? Sarah Claerhout and Jakob De Roover, in a brilliant article (Conversion of the World: Proselytization in India and the Universalisation of Christianity) trace the roots of why conversions lead to such heartburn and strife. By consensus, the structure of religious conversion and proselytization is competition regarding the gain and loss of adherents generating inter-religious tension, conflict, and violence. The common solution offered is that all societies should respect the principle of freedom of religion. Each citizen has the right to choose freely between religions and a liberal neutral state ought to safeguard this freedom.

In the entire debate and understanding of conversion three basic assumptions play a most important role: the variety of Indian cultural traditions are religions; these religions are rivals and each wants to increase their respective numbers; and they are rivals because truth predicates apply to them. These assumptions, though appearing as common-sense facts, are problematic. These ‘facts’ are a set of theological claims of Christianity shaping today’s received view of the cultural diversity of humanity. In Indian society, two groups of cultural traditions coexist that seem to be of a very different nature: the Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, and Jain traditions on the one hand, and Christianity and Islam on the other. Christians, Muslims, and secularists claim the right to propagate and change one’s religion is part of the freedom of religion. In contrast, most Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain groups claim conversion violates the Indian social fabric at its heart.

Theological assumptions spoke about traditions as false religions in India; the secularized versions drop the word ‘false’ but place traditions as ‘religious rivals’ even as the theology fades in the background. Hinduism lacks all the characteristics that allow us to recognize and differentiates Christianity, Islam, and Judaism as religions: a fixed body of doctrine, an ecclesiastical organization or central authority, a holy book, etc. The diversity in India from the perspective of Hindu, Jain, Sikh, and Buddhist traditions shows that the assumption of rivalry is alien to them. Hence the Christian and Indian traditional views are mutually exclusive: one looks at the diversity of the Indian society as a rivalry of religions and the other sees it as a co-existence of traditions. The conclusion is inevitable: conversion becomes a vital problem of religious diversity, if and only if one looks at the world the way Christianity and Islam do.

When religion is a matter of rival doctrinal truths, the freedom to convert becomes of the greatest importance to humanity. The secularization of Christian theology translates into the importance of the absolute right to profess, propagate, and change one’s religion. Thus, the dominant principle of religious freedom reproduces theological assumptions about the nature of religion. Where religion means the ancestral tradition of a community, like in India and other pagan traditions of the past and contemporary times, the significance shifts to the freedom to continue one’s tradition without aggressive interference from the outside. Thus, religious conversions disintegrate communities and families by drawing individuals away from ancestral traditions. The dominant principle of religious freedom, then, must necessarily favour one of the two sides of the Indian equation. The liberal principle of religious freedom, as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the Indian Constitution, privileges Christianity and Islam, because it involves the freedom to propagate or manifest one’s religion and to proselytize. It implicitly endorses the assumption that religion revolves around doctrines and truth claims.

The link between conversion and freedom of religion, then, is a theological legacy from the Christian West. The secular intelligentsia of the subcontinent defending a theological perspective as though it were a neutral scientific truth fail to develop solutions for India. Unfortunately, the Hindutva movement is part of the same development of the narrative when it transforms certain attitudes and practices of these traditions into proper doctrines. The supposed Hindu doctrine, ‘all religions are equal’, would become equivalent to religious suicide for Christianity and Islam. The deadlock is that secularists, Christians, and Muslims insist that religious freedom entails freedom of conversion; the advocates of Hindutva maintain that it grants the freedom from conversion.

Neither anti-conversion laws nor the principle of religious freedom will do the job since both privilege one of the two sides of the controversy. Without the risk of romanticizing the past, looking into the history of the subcontinent, it is striking that, in several regions, the Hindu traditions and Indian Islam and Christianity succeeded at living together in a relatively stable manner. There must exist some mechanisms in Indian traditions responsible for this. For one, many scholars have pointed out that local Islamic and Christian traditions lost their aggressive proselytizing drive in India. Hindu attempts to impose anti-conversion legislation aggressively also seemed to be absent. We need to re-examine the nature of Indian culture and its traditions, including Indian Islam and Indian Christianity. We require alternative frameworks that will reflect upon India’s experiences of the last five centuries.

The Balagangadhara school maintains that the problem of religion in India arises when we insist on converting our traditions more into religions. As a corollary, the solution lies in making religions more into traditions. Religions can maximally tolerate and accept the other, but traditions transcend these with their characteristic indifference to differences. This was the solution of a multicultural and plural India historically and we must apply more study to rediscover these inherent mechanisms in Indian society. Religions say, ‘I am true and you are false’; traditions say, ‘I am true, but you are not false’. And therein lies the difference.

BE WARY OF INDOLOGISTS (December 18, 2021)

There was an interesting news item on an online seminar held on Dharmashastras by Mahindra University school which had a prominent American Indologist speaking. There might be a few genuine exceptions, but we simply need to be careful of Indologists who study India without involving the traditional scholars of the land. Indology looks superficially flattering to us but whether it was German Indology of the past or the American variety of the present, there remains always an element of deconstruction and undermining of the cultural integrity of the country. Scholars, from Herder through Schlegel and beyond, accepted the Enlightenment legacy of identifying the living heathens with the ancient pagans. Writers repeatedly stressed that the ancients, living in another part of the world, represented the childhood of Man and India was the cradle of world civilization. It is no credit when it can only mean that those who live in this culture are still in their cradles – and have been there during the last thousand years, unlike their European counterparts. The main reasons: the geographical climate; the psychological character of the Hindus; the characteristic property of that race; or the social structure. For a twentieth-century liberal (or Marxist) the choice boils down to the social structure as a cause for the stagnation- the ‘caste system’, of course, sanctioned by a primal religion which dominates all aspects of human life.

The evolutionist conception of the history of religions (from ‘heathenism’ or polytheism, through Judaic monotheism, to Christianity and then peaking in the Protestant variety) operated in the background for scholars across centuries. This authorized a critical interrogation of any text from any tradition as to which elements are ‘reaching forward’ and which ‘reaching backward.’ Adluri and Bagchee show how German Indology, with racism ruling supreme, was more to define Germany’s own intellectual history, philosophy, politics, and religion. Today, Indologists in American Universities and their followers in India produce complex theories in dense language attacking our stories, cultures, and traditions. The mutual give and take; the patting and applauding of each other in a closed circle of researchers; academic posts; travel grants; and granting of awards give an eerie resemblance to the dreadful scholarship of German Indology. The discourses of Aryan-Dravidian divide; the caste-system with the evil priests at the top; the existence of religions in India with later morphing of ‘Hindu’ into ‘Hinduism’ or ‘Hindutva’; the falsification of history to exonerate past invaders; the persistent bashing the so called ‘forward-castes’ has not changed across centuries of Indology.

Living pagan Asian civilizations showed a persistent unity of philosophy and religion which had brought forth unsurpassed intellectual achievements impossible for Westerners to suppress entirely. These vast nations were able to sustain their cultural integrity in the colonial encounter to a degree that indigenous peoples in many parts of the world could not. Their suppression, therefore, had different means. The modern disciplines, Indology among them, accordingly, worked to tame these traditions through their texts. Dr Balagangadhara says: ‘Indologists use discredited theories from earlier social sciences to put across outlandish claims regarding a culture about which they are ignorant. Contemporary social sciences draw upon these ignorant claims to put across equally outlandish claims about human societies and cultures, again in ignorance of what the Indological claims rest upon.’

The western narratives have become true descriptions of our world in many areas. The Indologists, Sanskritists, and the social scientists depending on each other deserve credit for accomplishing this incredible feat of making ‘the’ caste system synonymous with ‘discrimination’ and ‘oppression’ and so effortlessly supplant the British ‘class’ hierarchy, American ‘racial’ inequality, the ‘apartheid’ policy, the Nazi ideology, and so on. Indology is not a viable route for improvement of the different domains (anthropology, sociology, political science). Each exacerbates and aggravates the other’s problems by importing ‘facts’ from each other. Anthropologists spent about 100 years attempting to get rid of a pernicious and incoherent concept like ‘tribe’ only to see it sneak back in, via Indology and other social sciences, into the Indian Constitution, Indian legislation, and their administration. It becomes impossible to see ignorance coming as knowledge with the form of presentation involving moralizing talk and a normative language. ‘Inequality’, ‘discrimination’, ‘injustice’, and such other notions determine the alleged talk about society, culture, and people by Indologists of all hues. Adluri shows what is ultimately at stake in their entire rebuttal of Indology: freeing the ancients from being subjects of interrogation and permitting the ancients to question us moderns instead. We just need to be wary of ‘scholars’ and ‘intellectuals’ at American Universities indulging in India studies. Exceptions only prove the rule.

INVITING STALIN TO INAGURATE YADADRI (December 15, 2021)

It is unfortunate that our respectable Chief Minister chose to invite Stalin to the reopening ceremony of Yadadri. Stalin is a known atheist, and his party has a background of not only strict atheism but a definite antipathy to the Hindu traditions which it ‘others’, wrongly and unfortunately, through the prism of a strict Dravidian ideology. Secularism and liberalism in India carry a peculiar flavour amongst the intellectuals and the politicians. It means to appease the minorities and abuse the majority, respectively. This large-heartedness was a consistent policy since independence. Nehru’s state claimed all the rights of a ‘Hindu state’ in its relation to the Hindus. He took liberties with the Hindus like objecting to the President inaugurating the rejuvenated Somnath temple; objecting to Bande Mataram because of religious connotations; allowing Hindu Code Bill which included state temple management; insisting on debating religious issues as the Hindu personal law and ban on cow-slaughter in secular terms. But he dared not touch the Muslim personal law despite his anxiety to have a Uniform Civil Code. In claiming the rights of a Hindu state, the Nehru government’s refusal to accept the obligations of defending and promoting their religion incurred charges of inconsistency and disingenuity in applying secularism.

Our founding fathers concluding for a secular India remained muddled on the meaning of secularism. The Indian state wanted to deny the dominant and distinct Hindu ethos from the beginning. No government has fully explained why India should be a secular state in its current sense; the arguments are unimaginative and derived from Western history. Most leaders have argued falsely for secularism as necessary for religious tolerance and harmony. A secular state is not necessarily tolerant (Soviet Union during the Communist rule) and a religious state is not necessarily discriminatory against minority religions (traditional Hindu kingdoms in India, Muslim kingdoms in the Middle East and most of the time even in India). Secularism, with no Indian vernacular equivalents, does not even make sense in the Indian context where the private and public life clothes in many rituals and traditions on a constant basis.

Even pure atheism is not bothersome in Indian traditions unless it indulges in iconoclasm. Atheism, making sense only in a theistic ‘religious’ world, can be a route to enlightenment too in a traditional India. Materialism and atheism were known in Indian traditions since ancient times as Charvakism or Lokayata. Jains, Buddhists, and even some orthodox traditions either reject God or do not demand a belief in God for enlightenment. Most of Indian traditions are not even ‘theistic’ the way Judaism, Christianity and Islam are. Indian ‘atheisms’, ‘asuras’, or the ‘immorality’ of the devas do not rob Indians of their traditions the way atheism robs a believer in the West.

However, the Dravidian antipathy is difficult to understand. It is the racial Aryan-Dravidian theory, proposed first by the colonial and German Indologists, which caused havoc with Indian social and political life including the nonsensical North-South divide we see in our country. The evidence for Aryan invasion or migration is weak from literary, archaeological, anthropological, or genetic disciplines. The persistent conflation between race, language and culture is misleading and dangerous. Political uses of the Aryan scenario, wholly illegitimate and unnecessarily divisive, are an extension of the colonial agenda. As scholar Koenraad Elst says, the many social-political applications of the racially interpreted Aryan theory, which needs dismantling at the earliest, include the ‘caste-system’ (Aryans upper castes; Dravidians as tribals as lower castes); anti-Brahminism; Dravidianism; and Ambedkarism (lower castes as the aboriginals subdued by the Aryan invaders though Ambedkar himself strongly opposed the Aryan theory).

Indic culture is an amorphous mixture of Vedic/Sanskritic culture, Sangam culture of the south, and the rich ethnic (mainly tribal) strands of culture. Alien religions entered and absorbed into this culture creating a unique multicultural world, a solution for the world to deal with pluralism which it seems to be distinctly incapable of. Indian culture is a melting pot of six language families (Indo-European, Dravidian, Austric, Sino-Tibetan, Burushaski, and Andamanese). Over millennia, the unique Indian cultural unit has been a rich and complicated mixture of many elements. It is unfortunate, senseless, and even dangerous to try and separate the individual elements, but our politicians are creating havoc using these dangerous theories to divide the country and pit one against the other. It is perhaps with good intentions that the Telangana CM has politely invited a neighbouring counterpart to inaugurate a Hindu temple but in the background of the strict beliefs of the person and the party behind him, it is another great example of taking the Hindu believers in the country for granted.

The Indian Judiciary and Cultural Issues (December 11, 2021)

Even a basic reading of the collegium system for the selection of judges in the high court and supreme courts leads the unaware to realize the arbitrariness and opaqueness of the Indian judicial system. The unbridled powers of a select group of justices led by the Chief Justice are hardly inspiring for the delivery of an efficient legal system. As Dr SN Balagangadhara says, superimposing Western law on indigenous culture with their own ways of law and justice lead to severe distortions which we face today.

There is a need for further studies on how law and culture relate and how we can evolve better legal systems. The rhetoric goes about the great British law as a ‘gift’ to us. British society and law were corrupt to the core in the 18^th and 19^th centuries when they were ruling a great part of the globe. Their neighbors, allies, and cultural relatives saw them as corrupt, contemptible, hypocritical, and immoral. The British in India did whatever pleased them, but the judges and bureaucrats clothed these acts in a legal language and many non-existent laws. Ironically, there was hardly equal justice in British India. Local European communities did not allow Indian judges and law officers to try them, and they got away with the most brutal crimes through lenient European judges.

Indians, as cultural beings, believing the British law and institutions to be the ideal, mixed them with their own ideas relating to justice, truth, persons, and so on. The notions of truth and falsity play a crucial role in Law. These notions root in Christian theology. In Indian culture, there is a clear semantic distinction between lies and deception. Falsity, in its core meaning, is to be in error. The socialization process in Indian culture involves even learning to lie. Thus, lying under oath loses its reasonings of law (ratio legis). Yet ‘perjury’ remains a punishable offense in the Indian legal system.

In western culture, it is the fair, objective, and impartial law that judges and not the person of the judge. In contrast, the Indian judiciary sees itself as the ‘embodiment’ of justice dispensing ‘justice’, often completely independent of, or even oblivious to, legal provisions and statutes. Even for many people going to the court, the judge represents justice embodied and personified. This attitude helps us understand the massive corruption of the judiciary in India. Law in Western culture tries to reduce arbitrariness and capriciousness in settling disputes. But the imposition of the Western institutions in India encourages precisely that arbitrariness which law is supposed to prevent. The figure of the ‘judge’ now uses the legal institution, which gives him the power to do what he does, to make arbitrary pronouncements because of the culturally specific notion of the judge. In indigenous cultural institutions, reasonableness prevails because the judge faces the community directly and owes explanations. In modern courts, such constraints of reasonableness are absent.

Politics and law in Western culture are meant to further the general interests of society but not that of any single community, group, or individual, especially corporate interests. In India, the notion of ‘interest’ makes no sense. Strikingly, Dr Balagangadhara says, Indian culture does not have a vocabulary to understand any kind of discourse on interests- whether institutional, private, public, general, or social. If such is the case, legislations are meant to explicitly favour specific groups which would give them votes. The Parliament’s reasons, in implementing the laws, are not in the general interests of society but are as narrow as the reasoning of an individual who contemplates his own benefit. The British made laws that favoured British interests but cloaked them in the language of ‘general interest’ and ‘interest of the empire’. Protecting the British ‘interests’ later took the form of the ‘protection of minority interests’ in the Indian Constitution.

When the State promulgates laws that only favour and further narrow interests, citizens end up using such laws mostly retributively. Seeking personal vengeance (dowry, atrocity, and so on) becomes the major if not sole goal of the citizenry when they go to the courts. Thus, when implemented in India, the institutions of Western law encourage just the opposite of what such laws are meant to do: a vengeful, spiteful, and ‘selfish’ citizenry. Instead of promoting a cohesive society, such laws encourage divisiveness and conflict in society. This is what we get when we superimpose Western law on indigenous frameworks. Our legal systems need a lot of deep thinking even as our judges are spreading out further in their extra-judicial activism and moral judgements on practically every institution in the country without looking into the mirror first.

Human Rights Activism (December 10, 2021)

The article on Human Rights on 10^th December in THI by Dr Padmaja was nice and illuminating. However, the paradox about human rights activism is very difficult to understand. It seems to have a maximum voice where human freedom is also maximum. The activism is vocal in free democratic countries but becomes increasingly silent as the governments become less democratic. In strict communist countries, they become almost silent. The activism is something like the reporting of rapes. The incidence of rapes is highest in the countries where the reporting and documentation is robust. Draconian laws should go definitely; the military should not get involved in civilian affairs; and the weak should have protecting agencies to stand up against autocratic governments. There is absolutely no problem with these ideas and are desirable, but the entire functioning of the human rights agencies is that of a stupendous hypocrisy. For all the noise and hype created, the public perception of human rights activism is simply as ineffectual with some nuisance value and sometimes even providing entertainment. In India, human rights, a few times, is a front for fighting the government for their own agendas rather than protecting the weak individuals. There is also a need to know how exactly these organizations work and how they get their funding too in national interests.

MICROCOSMOS AND PANICS AT VIRAL MUTANTS (December 3, 2021)

It is a characteristic human trait to create panic at the slightest hint of a threat as the new variant of Omicron amply demonstrates. Humans look at the microworld composed of bacteria and viruses as essentially hostile, threatening their survival. The fight is always ‘on’ to suppress them and keep the humans at the top of the evolution charts. Nothing can be more foolish than this false sense of being at the pinnacle of evolution starting with the ‘lowly’ bacteria at the bottom as Lynn Marguilis and Dorion Sagan show in their fantastic book, ‘Microcosmos’. The microcosmos has been around for almost 4 billion years and are likely to go on for billions more. The horizontal transmission and mixing of genes are responsible for almost an infinite immortality of the species. The individual bacteria may divide but collectively, it is forever living. In fact, the rapid transfer of genetic material across the entire species almost calls for a definition of a global ‘super-organism’ instead of single units. Humans are perhaps one small way of spreading viruses or bacteria. They can do very well on their own without requiring human agency.

Constantly fed on the Darwinian concept of ‘survival of the fittest’, we are simply not aware, as Lynn Marguilis points out, that symbiosis too is a very important process in evolution. Life is a complicated web of interactions. The amazing fact of the human body is that only 10% of all our trillions of cells are ‘human’; 90% are bacterial cells. Not only that, but the mitochondria in each cell are also a foreign bacterium incorporated into all the eukaryotic cells at some remote time in the past and helped in the utilisation of oxygen. Similarly, the chloroplasts in plant cells, vital in photosynthesis, is in all probability an incorporated bacterial DNA. Today, life depends on the ability to utilise oxygen, the most important source of which is plant life. An interesting speculation is consciousness itself may be because of the quantum jiggling of microtubules in the brain which in turn may be of spirochaetal origin! It is a humbling thought.

So, there is an entire paradigm shift from competition to co-operation in the process of evolution. Survival in strict Darwinian terms is fecundity, that is the amount of progeny one produces. In this regard, humans are distinctly at a disadvantage. The most rapid reproduction is in the bacteria which divide once every 20 minutes and the rapid exchange of DNA in a horizontal method ensures almost a super-organism spread across the globe. Viruses are not as hostile to the bacterial world as they are perhaps to the human cell. There are also some ideas theorizing that a major part of human DNA might be viral DNA incorporated again at different times in a remote past benefitting both the human body and the virus in a symbiotic relationship. The only thing which is popular about human reproduction is that it happens to be pleasurable, but apart from that, there are no survival advantages in the human mode of reproduction.

Anyway, the important thing is that can we be effective in really stopping the spread of viral and bacterial mutations by putative measures like travel restrictions? How much would a strategy of ‘complete elimination’, if such is ever possible, really going to help in our survival when ‘we’ are by ‘them’ mostly? The point is that bacteria and viruses have been mutating for billions of years and that is how they have survived and will survive long after we are gone. We should seek solutions to stay in harmony instead of making the entire microworld into a rogue nation. Panic at every detected mutation is perhaps a wrong way to deal with our survival.

PENDENCY OF CASES IN OUR COURTS (November 28, 2021)

Our honourable CJI seems to be very keen on improving the legal services in India. This is commendable and gives some hope for the beleaguered citizens of the country squeezed by the weight of our legal systems especially in the delays involved.

He has rightly assessed that the pendency of cases is a multi-faceted issue and the Parliament is also responsible in some ways. The Parliament does not seem to assess the impact of its laws, he says. Maybe true, but as an ordinary citizen of the country, why cannot the important pillar of democracy be made into an essential services?

Today, including the Sundays and the vacations, the courts do not work for almost 130- 135 days of an year, a whopping amount of official holidays (almost 30-35% of the year). Is it any wonder why the backlogs run for many decades in many cases? Why cannot the courts run like all other essential services like electricity, railways, hospitals, all days of the week? There can be provision to deal with the cases after hours and on Sundays by emergency rotations of the judges like they do for doctors. Increasing the number of judges, which our articulate CJI seems to be batting for, is a good solution, but only a partial one. We need more working hours.

The courts and judges are very quick to make moral judgments on rest of the society, but it would be nice if they reflect on their working pattern and also address the extreme corruption rampant in our courts at all levels. Justice and Law, a legacy of colonial system foisted on our indigenous law systems, has only generated corruption, inefficiency, and arbitrariness leading finally to confusion and anger on part of its citizens. An ordinary citizen of the country does not look at law or the judiciary as bodies of protection but only as agencies to be extremely scared of. Our learned and concerned judges should give a thought to address these fears too of its ordinary citizens.

The English law was a very corrupt system, and our own legal systems had great strengths. Yet we thought nothing was better than the colonial system in a classic case of colonial consciousness persisting strongly even today, decades after independence. Our legal systems are a complete mess, and we need fresh thinking at the root level instead of addressing some superficial issues. Increasing the working hours would be the first step in the right direction.

Comedians and Cultural Marxism (November 19, 2021)

Vir Das, a stand-up comedian, is in the news in recent times for his speech on ‘two Indias’ in a foreign country. The proponents of freedom of speech are supporting him while many do not agree that it can cross the limits to abuse one’s country. The short speech was hardly comedy; it was also large on rhetoric and low on facts. At a larger level, this idea of an individual’s freedom to say anything is a New Left phenomenon. ‘Cultural Marxism’, an offshoot of this, perpetuated in hallowed academic institutes like the JNU basically have a constant anti-state slant where the nation-state is a bourgeois fraud played upon the masses. The rejection of any expression of national unity like in cricket or even Republic Day Parade is almost a normative behaviour at some institutes. Accordingly, the Indian nation-state is ‘Brahmanical’ and ‘patriarchal’; is ideologically rooted in multiple ‘evils’ of the Hindu social order; and is fundamentally inclined towards the oppression of women, Muslims, and Dalits. This evolved into an oppressor-oppressed binary and spawning of the victimhood industry, with everyone claiming to be a victim of some oppressor.

An ‘anywhere mindset’ characterizes these cultural Marxists- an attitude which places a high value on autonomy, mobility and novelty and a much lower value on group identity, tradition, and national social contracts (faith, flag, and family). They are ‘just individuals’ and ‘the personal is political.’ The individual’s political life is an extension of one’s preferred identity by race, gender, sexual preference and so on carrying the potential of infinitely fragmenting politics. Thus, there is no end to the discovery of fresher victims and the endless atomization of victimhood in our country. Indians, craving for prestige by its association with the west, become the willing allies of the Western academia in disrupting the cultural coherence of the non-western societies. No wonder Das speaks about Pakistan, and the colours of saffron and green to hint subtly at the narrow attitudes of the majority.

Colonial consciousness has not left academia, despite the talk of post-colonialism ironically. The social science disciplines (history, political science, economics, sociology) as we know them today originated in the west. This makes it impossible for a social scientist in a non-western society to speak with reference to traditions of knowledge indigenous to it. Our top academics, intellectuals, and public speakers (now comedians too), consciously or unconsciously, are eager to describe their country in terms supplied by the west to gain legitimacy. The implications of our academics viewing the Indian traditions of knowledge as being ‘truly dead’ are indeed serious. The cow must be food since it is so in the western hemisphere. It hits hard and hits fast at our civilizational roots.

The progressives have a habit of throwing abuse on anybody who does not agree with them and often calling them ‘fascist’. By a strange logic, any call for unity in the name of patriotism also becomes fascistic. Respecting the flag becomes fascistic; national anthem played out in cinema halls becomes a fascistic move; and questioning of flag-burning and anti- India slogans become a new Nazism. One prominent left thinker, Dworkin, says that the right to speech exists to protect the dignity of the dissenters. Thus, the more silent and the more law-abiding your activities, the less you may protest the provocative utterances of those who do not care anything about your values. The voice of dissent is the voice of the hero. In other words, a truly sincere government, after having passed a law, will be lenient towards those who disobey it.

Being critical of family, institutions, society, culture, and the country is important but there should be a sense of time, place, and consequences before doing that. In this matter, it is equally wrong on the part of both Vir Das now and our Prime Minister in the past when he made critical remarks on Indian doctors on an international platform. It is perhaps a happy thing that colonial consciousness might be diluting a bit. At independence, our intellectuals spoke of a single bad India; now comedians talk about two Indias- one good and one bad. Some relief!

BOOK BANNING (November 16, 2021)

Madabhushi Sridhar has written a relevant and thought-provoking article (THI, 16^th November 2021) regarding the right to read books. Book banning has a long and illustrious career in India, and it is ironically one of the best ways to increase the readership of a book. In the present times, book banning is, in fact, extremely irrelevant too. A book is easily available online in most cases. Access to the readers is never a problem and banning increases only the publicity. Beyond that, it does not make sense. Anyway, reading habits also appear to have gone down considerably with attention spans of the upcoming generations fit only to read social media messages and reflect on them. Few have the time and energy to read books of some length. Most book bans concern hurting religions, but it is the maturity of the society to allow books to come into the market without resistance. India has a great tradition of ‘vada’ or debate and the best way to counter intellectual violence is by intellectual responses. Wendy Doniger wrote a (in)famous book ‘Hindus: An Alternative History’ where she applied discredited Freudian theories to many Indian stories, legends, and gods. Vishal Agrawal wrote a book countering Wendy’s book page to page and paragraph to paragraph showing that her book was more of an alternative for history. The Freudian theories were perhaps more applicable to the author herself as Vishal shows. That is indeed the proper way to address intellectual violence instead of indulging in physical attacks like in the case of Taslima Nasreen. Whatever be the intentions or the level of scholarship of the authors, banning a book is never a solution and neither is physical violence of any kind.

Hindu, Hinduism, Hindutva (November 12, 2021)

Salman Khurshid compares Hindutva to radical Islam in his latest book on Ayodhya and has generated the expected controversy. It is a sad fact that our understanding of the terms ‘Hindu’, ‘Hinduism’, and ‘Hindutva’ remain feeble and ambiguous even after many decades of independence. The proponents of Hindutva see it as a component of Hinduism which defends or is simply the kinetic component of Hindu Dharma. The opponents see Hindutva as a disturbing force extending to even ‘fascism’, a word to beat any opposition into silence. The proponents look at Hindutva to preserve self-respect; and the opponents pontificate, ‘Hinduism is good; Hindutva bad.’

‘Hindu’ originally started as a geographical and historical entity for people on the other side of the Indus or Sindhu River by the Persians, or Arabs, or the Greeks. This later assumed the identity of a group of people standing separate from Muslims and Christians. ‘Hindus’ crystallised in the face of the Islamic invaders, colonial rulers, and the local population to identify a group standing separate from Muslims and Christians. Then, the colonials constructed a certain framework to understand the multiple Indian traditions rooted in their own Christian religious framework. This led to the formation of ‘religions’ called ‘Hinduism’, ‘Buddhism’, ‘Sikhism’, ‘Jainism’, and so on, with even internal fights like the Catholic-Protestant encounters. As a manifestation of colonial consciousness, the country has collectively believed the idea that religions exist in India when, in fact, they do not, as the Balagangadhara school strongly propagates.

Through the early Brahmo and Arya Samaj movements, the pre-independence Congress policies of Muslim appeasement (especially acute in the Khilafat agitation), the perceived extra-territorial loyalties of Muslims in pre-independent India, Savarkar’s writings, the fallout after Gandhi’s assassination, the political rise of the Hindu movement after independence with several issues cropping up (Uniform Civil Code, Shah Bano case, MF Hussain nude paintings , Temple control and so on), Hindutva was primarily a defence mechanism of the Hindus against what they thought were an attack (cultural. physical, and political) on themselves. Equating it with the radical religious ideas of either killing or converting by force is a gross injustice either by intent or ignorance on the part of the scholars. It betrays a poor understanding of Indian culture and the historical contexts of such movements.

The confusion on semantics has been severe which even our Supreme Courts have not been able to address. In an indirect manner, through some related acts, the Constitution does try to define the Hindus but leaves gaping holes in the interpretations. As all legal entities, Constitutional, and academic scholarship act in concert to make traditions into religions, friction rises in society as an outcome. The words- ‘Hindu’, ‘Hinduism’, and ‘Hindutva’, themselves are capable of a wide variety of interpretations from extremely positive to extremely negative. Each word now means religion, philosophy, culture, tradition, heritage, practices, or simply a word of abuse depending on the context and the user. They may all mean the same thing too.

We have simply traditional systems in the country with multiple ways of going about in life. Traditions go beyond the standard ‘acceptances’ and ‘tolerances’ which the ill-suited secularism can maximally achieve and have the important characteristic of an indifference to differences. This has been our greatest strength in dealing with multiculturalism. A superimposed narrative of Hinduism as a religion and a later Hindutva, by force of circumstances, is responsible for the friction, anger, and debate on all sides today. The biggest strength of Indian pluralism is the acceptance of others without feeling threatened about one’s own. The Abrahamic religions in India also become a part of the hundreds of such sampradayas. We should relook at all our social sciences and all our textbooks to first decolonize ourselves. Sanatana Dharma is the overarching philosophy of Indic culture which transcends and permeates Hindu, Hinduism, and Hindutva and can even accommodate the other conventional religious systems of India. The Indian solution to deal with Abrahamic religions was to traditionalise them; we however are insisting to turn our traditions into religions making them hard and intolerant. Understanding the genesis of Hinduism, Hindutva, and other related terms, we should realize that our great country is in the trap of false semantics. Hinduism (as a religious phenomenon) and Hindutva are the same; both exist and dissolve together.

Thin is Beautiful (October 30, 2021)

I recently saw a wonderful English movie where a fat girl enters a beauty contest and faces many problems, mainly disbelief, from all around. The mother, who is a previous winner of a similar contest, is shocked that her daughter even thinks of entering the contest. It is unfortunate that being thin has become such a normative ideal. Many people, especially the growing children, do not confirm this and are fat for many reasons. There are many factors involved and it is not a simple equation of excess diet added to a lack of exercise. The advertisements, brandings, models, movies, celebrities, and the society almost bombards on a constant basis that being thin and fair is the only way to be beautiful. What would explain celebrities endorsing fairness creams and slimming agencies? The whole society stacks against many young growing minds with this propagation of what beauty is as per normative standards. Is it really a responsible society? A healthy society and a healthy individual are what we are seeking. It is important to understand the difference between ‘being fit’ and ‘being healthy’. One can be extremely fit and yet be having major blocks in the blood supply of the heart. There have been many cases of athletes and fit individuals who have collapsed suddenly. It is true that sedentary lifestyles, excessive indulgence in digital devices, unhealthy eating habits, and easy access to junk foods by a click on the app, are all responsible for causing problems of obesity and overweight. There is an urgent need to address these issues on a larger scale where everyone in the society needs to get involved one way or the other. However, it needs a massive readjustment at many levels to stress that being beautiful is not being thin and fair. We need a shift from the message, ‘Beauty is Fitness and a Fair Tone’ to perhaps ‘Health is Beauty.’

Colonial Consciousness of our Education Systems- Indian and Western Philosophy (October 21, 2021)

‘I feel, therefore, I am alive’ by Mohan Kanda (THI, 20th October 2021) gives an interesting philosophical view of the world and the process of perception but it is strictly a materialistic or ‘scientific’ view which has caused deep troubles to the western philosophical world to date since the beginning of the 20th century. Indian thinkers and philosophers had a far more understanding of the process of perception which they covered in their treatises almost a thousand years back. It is the most unfortunate debacle of our education systems after independence, a continuation of the colonial legacy, that they ignored teaching the growing generations the richness, depth, antiquity, and sophistication of Indian philosophy.

Western philosophers have been either ignorant of Indian thought or perhaps thought that the East had nothing to contribute to philosophical thought. The separation of theology and philosophy did not happen in Europe itself until the Reformation. When we accuse Indian philosophy of being ‘religion,’ it is an application of a post-Reformation prejudice (religion- a matter of faith; philosophy- for self-reflection or critique and nothing about God, the soul, and the universe). Hegel, the German philosopher originated this prejudice and largely fashioned the Western image of India. The standard themes were: India only developed an abstract Absolute; it lacks a historical sense; it does not know of concrete individuality; and so on. Once Hegel sent Indian philosophy to departments of Religion and Indology, Philosophy never reclaimed it.

The Indian philosophical system classifies into orthodox or non-orthodox depending on whether they accept the Vedas or not respectively. The orthodox systems include the six systems called Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaisesika, Mimansa, and Vedanta. The non-orthodox systems are Charvakism (materialism), Buddhism, and Jainism. Philosophy was never a dry intellectual exercise in Indian traditions but has a ‘soteriological’ power-the power of intense individual transformation from ignorance and bondage to freedom and wisdom. There is never a sacrifice to reason and experience, but what distinguishes Indian philosophy is that there is no extreme reverence to science.

When it comes to perceiving objects in the external world, the standard Western paradigm is that light falls on an object first. This reflected light enters the eyes, falls on to the retina from where neural impulses travel via the nerves to a region of the brain. Here, the image gets a reconstruction, and the person ‘sees’ the object. The same sequence is true for all the other senses too. This is the ‘stimulus-response theory of perception,’ a stimulus of some sort evoking a response inside our brains through an intermediate causal chain. Of course, there is a little difficulty in explaining how an internal image inside the brain projects to the outside world.

Hence, in effect, what we perceive in the external world are not as they really exist, but how the interpretation occurs in our brains depending on our endowed senses. It is an indirect form of reality. In Kantian philosophy, the original unknown is the ‘noumenon’ and the known constructed reality is the ‘phenomenon’. This forms the basis of both philosophy and neuroscience. However, this is incoherent in explaining the ontological status or reality of the world. If there is an unknown ‘noumenon’ and a representative ‘phenomenon’, then every object in the causal chain from the external world to the perceiver, including the intervening medium (even the brain) is unknowable.

Very briefly, in contrast, Indian philosophy for thousands of years has been clear on its stand of a ‘Natural Realism’ or ‘Direct Realism’. All the systems with some minor variations propound an active theory of perception where the perceiver is central in the scheme of things. The perceiver goes out and reaches the object in the world. This is the ‘contact-theory of perception’ of Indian philosophy. Contact with the object by the perceiver gives direct information of the world as it exists. Hence, the external world as seen or heard is an actual world in its reality and not a construction. Perception is never a valid source of knowledge in western traditions, but it is the most important source of knowledge in Indian traditions.

In the Indian tradition, the cognizer (purusha) and the cognized (prakriti) belong to two distinct categories with essential characteristics of sentience or consciousness (chaitanya) and inertness (jadatva) respectively. Perception, an inside to outside process, is thus a composite process in which the self, the mind, and the sense organs together participate to establish a contact with the object. Western philosophy stays subservient to science and ties itself in knots in trying to explain the reality status of the objects in the world. Proving Indian thought from western perspective and the other way around too remains difficult due to the incommensurability problem, but Indian philosophy seems to give far better explanations of reality and the world than western philosophy. If only our education systems could teach this too.

HISTORY AND THE SENSE OF PRIDE (October 19, 2021)

Madabhushi Sridhar has written a wonderful article on Krishnadevaraya (THI 19th October 2021), a great king of India who contributed much to Indian culture and language during his reign. Sadly, our history books turned him and others like Marthanda Varma, Lachit Borphukan, the Cholas, the Pandyas, the Sikh Gurus, and the Marathas, to name a few, into footnotes while we imbibed the Delhi-centric history with great passion and vigour. The most obscure and transient rulers of Delhi go deep into our conscience as we can rattle off their names decades after we finish our school.

Following independence, it was unfortunate that the history given to our school children was heavily controlled by the Nehruvian Congress which had a distorted sense of Indian past and heritage. The dominant philosophy was equating the Indian past to primitive and not worth emulating even as the vision fixed to a ‘golden’ future represented by Europe. The left-liberal brand of politicians and powerful academicians writing our textbooks, in a great symbiotic relationship, completely distorted the historical narrative as at least two generations consumed and internalised this history. The country’s up and coming generation came to be ashamed of themselves as truth took a severe beating.

For India after Independence, history should have served a specific purpose. When we are at our lowest in confidence and self-respect, there was a need to teach something positive and uplifting about ourselves. The teaching should have been that we were one of the richest and the most culturally advanced countries in the world with wonderful achievements in various domains. The purpose of history, finally, for children is to instill a sense of pride and respect for the country. Perhaps, only the Germans chose to clearly depict their Nazi past in the history books after the war. The Britishers went one step further by obliterating their colonial history. European countries like France, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark Spain, sparingly mention, if at all, the colonial brutalities. The Americans did not stress too much on the atrocities perpetrated on the native American Indians. A huge positive spin allows a youth growing up in these countries to feel that his or her country is the best in the world. It is a different kind of whitewashing, but the citizens believe that they are the best in the world.

We, on the other hand, just grew up being ashamed of our country, its religion, its culture, and its arts. Today, there is a disconnect in the youth with the idea of India. In fact, a twisted ideology is out to convince people that any idea of patriotism is fanatical. Sadly, in the darkest chapters of post-Independent India, the academia simply continued with the colonial story about India and continued the discourse of shame. Sanskrit became an exploitative language; Ramayana and Mahabharata were trivialised; and Indians, of course, became misogynistic, casteist, socially exploitative, and hostile. Indian kings were wicked if at all they got a mention. Of course, all this on a background of a popular liberal discourse that India did not ‘really exist’ before the colonials. The depiction of the evils of indigenous people or the benevolence of foreign invaders finally projected through the prism of religion. Hinduism was a template to show that everything was wrong in Indian culture.

The history writers achieved this by using every trick in the book for brainwashing: lies, appealing to authority, appealing to prejudice, cherry-picking, disinformation, euphemisms, exaggeration, glittering generalities, guilt by association, half-truths, intentional vagueness, labelling, loaded language, oversimplification, third-party technique, unstated assumption, thought terminating cliché, and so on. A crucial period of two generations entered colleges and built their lives believing sadly that nothing good came from our country.

Our history became a history of invaders (the mythical Aryans, Islamic rulers, the Europeans, and the British in succession) instead of the land and its people. There was never an elaboration of reasons why greedy rulers needed to come to India in the first place when the reverse never happened. The distorted philosophy of ‘secularism’ allowed the invaders to become benign and benevolent. All the invasions were brutal, inflicting great physical, cultural, and intellectual damage to India. The ‘colonial consciousness’ infecting most of our educated elite today is a continuation of intellectual violence. Hence, there is a persistent refusal to acknowledge Indian heritage and contributions (unless of course, a Westerner acknowledges and validates it). We grew up ashamed of our history and have ended up even hating ourselves. Today, our country has deep divisions and fissures. There is no feeling of nationalism or a sense of genuine pride. Every single individual and community feel alienated with a sense of injustice.

The purpose to not offend the minorities in the name of secularism led to complete whitewashing of facts. The Hindu contributions to Indian historical narratives became footnotes even as Islamic positives soared high. To please or protect, our thinkers in all relevant fields inappropriately associated the present-day Muslims to the past Islamic invaders when it was quite unnecessary. The textbooks went against a huge body of contemporary descriptions of the invasions by chroniclers and historians. Our thinkers could have set a narrative by detaching the present Muslims from the crimes of the past Islamic invaders. In this far better method, there would have been no need to falsify our history and at the same time carry the country forward with better harmony. The lies and whitewashings of the past caused immense damage to both Indian Hindus and Muslims. The Hindu now seethes in anger when he comes to know the true facts and the Muslim goes into a protective mode trying to defend the indefensible. Both the responses are unnecessary.

Unfortunately, the Muslim intellectuals also became a part of this exercise, especially the Aligarh school of historians. Falsifying and distorting the history of the Islamic invaders has damaged both Muslims and Hindus; the fissures have only deepened across decades. The ruling class for a long period could not see any justice in the Hindu consciousness of its pre-Islamic past, nor any injustice in the Muslim insistence on glorifying an inglorious period in Indian history. Sadly, the inappropriate solution for preventing ‘communal strife’ and encouraging ‘national integration’ was to dilute Hindu history and glorify or whitewash Islamic history.

We were the richest and the most prosperous country in the world. India and China were contributing more than 50% of the world GDP for 17 centuries from the start of the millennium. The UK was contributing 2% of the world GDP when the East India Company landed in India and became 18% in a period of 150 years of sheer loot and plunder. India reduced from 30% to 2%. The exact numbers were not known for a long time but still, the facts were truly clear about the tremendous economic and scientific growth of India in the pre-invasion period of India.

There is an urgent need to tell the truth without trying to offend or please. The basic purpose of history should be to instill a sense of pride in ourselves. However, there is no need for false stories. India does not need it either. Unfortunately, any attempt to correct the truth meets with wholesale abuse and shouting, accusing of ‘saffronisation’ or ‘militant revisionism.’ The past needs telling as it is without ruffling the present feathers. It is an immense talent and art which was beyond the agenda filled immature minds of our textbook writers. Band-aid solutions do not lead to genuine bonding, integration, and pride.

WHY ONLY AIR INDIA? THERE SHOULD BE MORE PRIVATISATION (October 15, 2021)

It is amazing that a few rains come and ‘smart cities’ convert into ‘a city of lakes.’ Dengue and other illnesses make a vicious return even as the hospitals become places of intense chaos. Potholes, overflowing drains, stinking garbage, poor water supply, improper medical services are not an isolated phenomenon restricted to one state or region but are generally the story of our country. Irrespective of which political party comes to rule at any level, it is a sad fact that the political and bureaucratic machinery of the country gets low marks after independence for public services. Despite holding enormous power, even today the citizens do not have standard amenities by way of public infrastructure: roads, schools, hospitals, sanitation, and water management to name a few. We need to search hard for a five-kilometre stretch of road without potholes anywhere in the country. Efficiency and quality are still in the private sector of the country as the political-bureaucratic machinery equates only to corruption, inefficiency, and incompetence. This is not to deny the many brilliant politicians, bureaucrats, and public officials but they have always been individuals as the system stays intact.

Thomas DiLorenzo (The Problem with Socialism) says that every capitalistic and democratic society has some government owned monopolies like the post-office, railways, electricity, banks, police, firefighting, garbage collection, and so on. Experience and the numbers clearly indicate that they are always running in a loss. The ‘Bureaucratic Rule of Two’ holds that the ‘unit cost of government service will be on average twice as high as a comparable service offered in the competitive private sector.’ Profits, losses, and deliverance of quality manage the private sector. No such pressure exists for the government agencies which work solely on budgets and taxations coming from the people. In fact, the worse a government performs, the more it can claim from the budget. Indian citizens flock to private schools despite better salaries to the teachers in the government schools. What do we make of this? Ironically, the government employees always have a higher salary on average than their private counterparts despite the poorer services.

Yet the governments keep throttling the private bodies by innumerable ‘quality controls’ and even passing moral judgements when their own mirrors do not show a very pleasant face. Every single government office and every single law is an opportunity to make money over and above the salaries. The roads are pathetic and nothing exists like a proper traffic control in most places. There are no provisions for parking in most towns and cities, but the traffic police are very enthusiastic about taking photographs of all ‘illegally’ parked vehicles and collecting money from the e-challans which they now issue with irritating regularity. The best solution would be to devise vehicles which can float in air to prevent the irregular parking on the roads. Why airlines only and a few industries? There is a case to privatise many of the government bodies and departments to help and save the citizens of the country from the iron grip of the babus and the political leaders.

How did the Brahmins become villains? (October 1, 2021)

Further to the article on Brahmin welfare corporations on the editorial page (THI 1st October 2021), it is unfortunate that Brahmins have faced a strong antipathy for centuries. The basic Brahmanical account standing rock like from 17^th century European narratives to present day ‘scientific’ explanations is this: ‘As a priesthood, the Brahmins mediate between the devotees and their deities by sacrificial rituals. They are the creators of a four-tiered hierarchy of classes, assigning the highest status to their own priestly class and the lowest to the Sudra or servant class. Traditionally, the learned Brahmin is the recipient of many privileges. Lacking military prowess and political-economic power, the minority Brahmins drew on their ritual status to seek a special alliance with the warrior-ruler class. They reduced the lower castes to a state of subjugation by imposing many restrictions like denying access to the Vedas and treating them as impure or untouchable, and preventing upward mobility between castes.’

Our textbooks describe the Brahmins as oppressors, exploiters, and creators of the caste system. The left influenced academia with their theories of exploiter and the exploited, the missionaries, and the brainwashed intellectuals continued the British story post-independence. Brahmins were neither rich nor powerful at any point of time in history. The present social sciences just build up data to show the validity of previous truths; rarely, do they turn back to reflect that these narratives could be false too.

Dharampal (The Beautiful Tree) deconstructs the popular idea that education was the exclusive domain of high caste Brahmins, who denied education to others, based on reports commissioned by the British themselves. A survey from 1822 to 1825 in the Madras Presidency showed that the predominant castes in schools were the Sudras. In the Tamil areas, the composition of the school going children was forward castes, 13-23%; Muslims, 3-10%; and Sudras and other castes, 70-84%. In Malabar areas, the forward castes were 20%, Muslims 27%, and Sudras about 50%. Another report in 1825 showed that out of 1,88,680 scholars in Madras Presidency, Brahmins were 23% and Sudras 45%. In Telugu areas, Brahmins were between 24-46%, and Sudras between 35-41%. This is a problem for British historiography because the literacy rate when they left India was about 12%. It was not the outcome of the forward castes ‘denying’ others the access to education but the replacement of the traditional and classical education system by the Anglicized education.

Many thousands of Brahmins lost their lives in the Islamic invasions and the Goan Inquisitions as they were the primary target of the ire of the invaders. Francis Xavier made his position clear when he wrote to the king of Portugal, his patron, ‘If there were no Brahmins, all pagans would be converted to our faith’, calling them the ‘most perverse people.’ In many feudalistic excesses, many non-Brahmin communities as landowners were responsible for oppression of the deprived. Somehow, our social sciences ensured that Brahmins became the prime villains in society.

Meenakshi Jain writes that Brahmins were prominent in the freedom movement confirming the worst British suspicions of the community. Even though for centuries Brahmins and non-Brahmins had been active political and social partners, the fissures grew by the machinations of the British. Some British observers like Colebrooke concede that there was little difference in the condition of the Brahmin and the rest of the native population. The British census operations, especially that of Risley (1901), were determined to show race as the basis for the caste-system. The British census operations destroyed the flexible jati-varna system and raised caste consciousness to a feverish pitch, inciting animosities, and a general hardening of the system. Caste consequently became a tool in the political, religious, and cultural battles.

Post-independence, many studies have shown Brahmins to be in a continuous downward spiral mode. Land holdings have reduced. Traditional occupations like family and temple priesthood, recitation of the Vedas and practice of Ayurvedic medicine no longer prove remunerative nor command respect. A few decades back (1978), the Karnataka state finance minister stated the per capita income of various communities: Christians 1,562; Vokkaligas Rs 914; Muslims Rs 794; Scheduled castes Rs 680; Scheduled Tribes Rs 577; and Brahmins Rs 537. One study in the previous united Andhra Pradesh showed 55% of them living below the poverty line, 10% higher than other groups. The unemployment rate among them was as high as 75 per cent. Such is the deep antipathy to Brahmin community that despite consisting of hundreds of jatis, with no uniform rules of living and social interaction, a success is a result of ‘privilege’ and individual faults project to the whole community across the length and breadth of the country.

Academia, media, NGO activists, and intellectuals project the Shramana (Buddhism and Jainism) and Bhakti movements as egalitarian anti-caste revolts carrying a ‘millennial-long’ conflict with Brahmanism and the ‘tyranny of caste.’ This hypothesis places Buddha (Martin Luther of India) as the first reformer opposing corrupted Brahmanas and preaching the equality of man. Scholars have shown that Buddhists neither rejected Brahmanas nor did they fight against the ‘caste system’. Buddha and Buddhists considered varna divisions to be an appropriate dharmic grouping of society. Buddhism was just another tradition in the Hindu land where new traditions, sects, and gurus evolve all the time showing many paths to the final enlightenment.

Unbroken, this narrative about the wily Brahmins continues prominently in introductory works, encyclopaedia entries, and other sources as elementary facts about Indian culture and religion. The Balagangadhara school shows that Christian-theological ideas concerning heathen priesthood and idolatry; Aryan racial notions of biological and cultural superiority and inferiority; and anthropological speculations about ‘primitive man’ and his ‘magical thinking’ explained the role of Brahmins in Indian society till about three decades back. These concepts, crucial to the speculations about the Brahmin priesthood rise, reflected Protestant and philosophical critique of priesthood pervading 18th- and 19th-century Europe.

Imre Lakatos, 20th-century philosopher of science, characterized every research program as having three elements: a ‘hard core’ of basic theses and assumptions; a ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary hypotheses surrounding this core; and a ‘heuristic’ or problem-solving machinery.The protective belt allows it to cope with the problems by immunizing its hard core against falsification. Jakob De Roover says that the basic assumptions about the religion of the Brahmin are part of this program’s hard core, whereas the claims concerning the Aryan invasion, racial superiority, magical thinking, and the varna ideology are part of its protective belt. The British attacked Brahmins for many reasons, but it is sad that our politicians, social sciences, and society failed to look beyond what the colonials said even after seven decades of independence.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN INDIA (September 21, 2021)

One may call it cynicism or a clear understanding, but most citizens were sure that Pallamkonda Raju would be having an unnatural death. It is an amazing facet of Indian society that whenever such a gruesome incident happens, both the citizens and its leaders talk the language of ‘encounters’ and instant justice. The human rights activists, who seem to have plenty of voice only in free countries paradoxically, end up with just a raised voice. Clearly, they simply add colour to the proceedings with absolutely no ability to influence anyone in society. Every time an encounter happens and the society rejoices, it is simply the most severe indictment of the entire legal system of the country. The judiciary needs to introspect at every such death. What are the extraordinary reasons why the citizens have lost complete faith in the judiciary to deliver effective and quick justice? The instant solutions gaining popularity and causing questionable and generalized happiness is simply a mirror of the state of law in our country. It is also a distressing matter that our law enforcers become effective only when the perpetrator comes from not a privileged position. The law in the country unfortunately goes by the adage, ‘show me a man and I will show you a rule.’ We are also equally cynical about the Law offices and agencies making great fuss about the celebrities in the drug case. Except for some unknown persons, no celebrity is going to see the inside of a jail. The rape and murder of an innocent child is the most distressing thing in the world. The encounter of the accused however raises larger questions to our society and is arguably more disturbing.

PARLIAMENTARY LANGUAGE (September 17, 2021)

We grew up with the teaching that our language should always be ‘parliamentary’. This word always evoked a feeling of dignity and decency while conversing. However, the theory does not seem to match the facts of Indian politics. The recent episode of a Congress leader calling another senior leader of the same party a donkey is a graphic illustration of this. In choosing to exploit the recorded conversation, the opposition leaders also chose to give colourful epithets to the Congress leader. Is this ‘parliamentary language’ all about and is this the example our political leaders set to the growing generation of the country? The normalisation of such language which starts right at the top level of political leaders calling each other scumbags, criminals, donkeys, and such colourful epithets leaves one with a bitter taste about the nature of politics and politicians. At a deeper fundamental level, one begins to suspect the democratic form of governance as a gold standard. The parliamentarian language has become very unparliamentary. This distressing kind of language makes a huge case for the dictionary people across the world to remove the word and the idea of ‘parliamentary language.’ It seems extremely incongruous in the present times.

The ED and our celebrities (September 9, 2021)

There is certainly a huge hype created by the media on the ED grilling our celebrities. We see one ‘big’ name after another making a visit to the office with our faithful media channels prominently covering them. The agency also perhaps wants the attention to show that they are doing their job fearlessly and honestly by treating everyone at par. However, in our country, with decades of experience, the citizens have a right to be cynical about the outcomes. Most are sure that except some unknown ordinary people lower down in the chain all the celebrities are bound to go scot-free. The top-level people and the middle level consumers will stay safe as the axe will fall on some couriers. Nothing will ever happen to our ‘heroes’ and the fans can breathe easy.

However, the most important message here is for the youth of today obsessively crazy about these celebrities and making them role models. Playing some character on the screen and being a final projection of an army of writers, directors, producers, and technicians behind them does not make them heroes in any sense. Personal qualities like integrity; hard work; passion; empathy; love and respect for those who especially do not matter; and such, makes one a hero in the truest sense.

Indian traditions enumerating the four purusharthas (Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha) have made this clear since ages. Artha (money) and Kama (desires) never have a low position in the scheme of life but the foundational basis for realising these is Dharma. The final objective of the right living is always Moksha. That is why the heroes in Indian traditions have been people like Ramana Maharishi, Sri Aurobindo, Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa, or Adi Shankara. The life of our celebrities outside of their on-screen persona is hardly worth emulating and this message should become clear from the present goings on in the big ‘drug’ racket. There will not be any punishments and perhaps we have resigned to such outcomes. But the message from the sordid episode should be a revelation for our starry-eyed fans.

Reservations and Caste (September 2, 2021)

The opinion piece by Mohan Kanda (THI 2nd September 2021) on caste census makes some interesting observations on the problems of caste and reservation but there is an urgent need to explore alternative routes.

One of the biggest failures of social sciences and politics in independent India is its dealing with both caste and reservations. India has a unique and extensive Constitutional programme of positive discrimination (seats reserved in assemblies, public jobs, and professional academic institutes; lower cut-off marks) in favour of groups of people. The original and admirable idea was to integrate deprived groups into mainstream socio-economic-political life and address centuries of neglect and oppression. The short-term nature of such a policy went for a toss.

Eminent political theorist Dr Bhikhu Parekh says that positive discrimination raises important questions about the nature of justice; the trade-off between justice and such other equally desirable values as efficiency, social harmony, and collective welfare; and the propriety of making social groups bearers of rights and obligations. It also raises questions about the redistributive role of the state; the nature and extent of the present generation’s responsibility for the misdeeds of its predecessors; and the meaning of social oppression.

Justice is generally an individualist concept; the due to an individual based on his qualifications and efforts. Justice needs redefinition obviously in non-individualist terms if social groups are subjects of rights and obligations. We should also demonstrate continuity between the past and present oppressors and oppressed. We must also analyse the nature of current deprivation and that it is a product of past oppression conferring moral claims on the oppressed. These questions are important in India where positive discrimination has no roots in the indigenous cultural tradition and is much resented.

Regarding the caste system itself, the Indian ‘caste system’ appears to have adapted itself to many challenges over the centuries- Buddhism, Bhakti movement, Islamic invasions, British colonialism, and the integration into a world capitalist system. The so-called caste system exhibits enormous complexity, manifests order, and touches every occupation. And yet, as Dr Balagangadhara says, no Indian could tell you much about the ‘principles’ of this system, leave alone the dynamics of its reproduction. Theories about this social organisation are not within the Indian tradition. However, Indologists and intellectuals during the last two centuries have authored treatises theorising the caste system which we have simply internalised without questioning.

The word ‘caste’ is a Portuguese import and has no equivalent in any of the Indian scriptures to begin with. The only reality of Indian society are the Jatis and the four Varnas. There is a huge conflation of the categories of caste, the thousands of Jatis, and the four Varnas. The few Jatis initially have evolved into thousands based on various characteristics like endogamy practices (marriage rules), commensality (eating or food practices), rituals, gods believed in, occupation, place of stay, and even gender. Individual Jatis have gone up and down on the social, political, or economic scale. The one-to-one correlation of Jatis to one of the four Varnas has been the most difficult, dubious, and irrational exercises starting from the colonial times to the present.

The Varnas are categories; and a hierarchical ordering of the categories by cherry picking of selective literature has been the great disruptive contribution of colonial and Indological narratives. There are equally valid scriptures, but conveniently ignored, in the corpus of literature which show an equality of the Varnas and even a reversal of hierarchy. The description of Jatis was mainly ‘duty based’ in Indian thought. It turned into a ‘right based’ division in scholarly writings. Historically and in contemporary times too, Jatis belonging to Sudra Varna (or not from Brahmin, Kshatriya, or Vaishya Varnas) have been the most powerful socially, politically, and economically in most parts of India. The negative connotation of being a Sudra (despite categories implying equality) has been a persistent narrative since the colonial times.

As Jakob De Roover points out, Dalits or scheduled castes have been a political and legal creation since the beginning of the 20th century. 1200 Jatis with varied practices and customs and 65 million people merge into a single group based on the single tenuous idea of ‘untouchability.’ Scholars, including Ambedkar, could not define what exactly is untouchability. The definitions have been tenuous, circular, and vague; and scholars have included any practice as untouchability to fit the data into their preconceived notions. Many practices no longer exist and untouchability as a practice is illegal, yet a huge group exists where despite all positive discriminations (reservations, lower cut-off marks, legal privileges and so on), anger seems to be ever increasing.

Sufiya Pathan elegantly shows that the data for Dalit exploitation is methodologically faulty, has plenty of cherry-picking, and riddled with selective interpretations. Yet the intellectual dishonesty regarding the figures and the generalisation of prominent anecdotal reports do manage to give a massive negative image of India in national and international platforms. Much money, many agendas, many careers, both national and international, perpetuate and thrive on the continuing Dalit exploitation story in India.

The political creation of castes almost daily and classifying them as forward, backward (even sub classifying as A, B, C, D) is a sad understanding of our social systems which is continuing to divide the country. These creations have only encouraged false notions of superiority, inferiority, shame, anger, and helplessness. There is no denial of the elements which go in the construction of the system. But an overarching ‘system’ to explain all these evils needs more research and study as it may not even exist. Such discriminations and oppressions occur in all countries and cultures (slavery, colonialism, communist countries, religious imperialisms, capitalistic societies, European and Indian feudalisms). Seeing a caste system as an explanation of Indian evils but none whatsoever for other cultures is intellectual dishonesty, says the Balagangadhara group.

The political, legal, and academic perpetuation of the caste-system narrative is destroying the country. We need fresher narratives. The ‘caste-system’ was only an experience of the colonials who put a meta-narrative to their experience of Jatis in India. Three colonial ideas (the word ‘casta’; the racial Aryan- Dravidian theory; and the Protestant criticism of the priesthood of the Catholics and Jews) gave a structure to their experience of Indian social systems. This narrative superimposed on India to make the Brahmins as villains in the oppressive caste system.

Sadly, the academia in the post -independence period with strong Marxist hold, instead of questioning older narratives, continued this story of Aryans, of evil Brahmins, of exploitation, in tune with their exploiter-explored paradigms. In recent times, insurgent scholarship at some well-known institutions goes further in blaming Brahmins for everything wrong in colonial and post-colonial India by theorizing terms like ‘Brahminical’, ‘Brahmanical patriarchy’, and ‘Brahminism’. Even the so-called ‘rape culture’ and ‘fees hike’ in institutions reflect Brahminical attitudes according to the students at these universities.

Today, most Indian citizens are victims of colonial consciousness and would even refuse to believe that there can be an alternative story about Indian society. We need fresh narratives on Varna and Jatis to create unity and truly break the vicious anger generating ‘caste-system’. Despite all reservations and political attempts, the caste consciousness and deep fissures have only increased. Can our social and political systems devise better social understandings and solutions which result in unity and not disintegration?

SCIENTIFIC TEMPER AND INDIANS- DO WE REALLY LACK IT? (August 24, 2021)

Madabhushi Sridhar has written a thought-provoking article on scientific temper as a fundamental duty (THI 24^th August 2021). For Nehru, the west held all solutions for Indian problems. His obsession with the future made him reject the Indian past. His seven principles of a new India based on modernity: national unity, parliamentary democracy, industrialisation, socialism, scientific temper, secularism, and non-alignment, gained a supreme moral authority. Not questioning it has stunted the growth of political philosophy in India, says economist Bhikhu Parekh. Scientific temper desired the dogmatic, mystical, speculative, uncritical, inward-looking India to become a strong society like Europe by fostering rational and empirical reasoning, developing science and technology, and rejecting faith. Nehru and those following him held the Orientalist view strongly that science and technology was primitive in ancient India and one of the reasons for its colonisations.

As Dr Balagangadhara explains in his comparative studies on cultures how religion is the root structural model for Western culture. Religion, encouraged always by the ‘why’ question, searches for underlying explanations to connect unrelated and related phenomena to each other. Thus, the scientific attitude is contiguous with a religious attitude. This is the reason the natural sciences emerged in religious cultures. Further, when the ever-expanding sciences start threatening the limits of knowledge of religious doctrines, there is an obvious antipathy. The hostility of the Church to scientific theories is a consequence of this clash. Christianity ended up treating the scientific theories as rivals. In contrast, Indian culture (with innumerable traditions) structures on ‘rituals’ where the dominant question is ‘how’ or the performative ability. This also produces knowledge and science but in a different manner. The most obvious difference is the almost unknown ‘clash’ between the sacred and the secular in Indian culture.

The five groups of texts – Vedas, Upavedas, Vedangas, Puranas, and Darsanas with their thousands of texts laid the foundation for the knowledge and the wisdom of our heritage. These covered the concrete and the abstract, the secular and the spiritual. David Pingree estimates that India has at least 30 million surviving ancient manuscripts in Indian libraries, repositories, and private collections. They deal with a huge array of topics: philosophies, systems of yoga, grammar, language, logic, debate, poetics, aesthetics, cosmology, mythology, ethics, literature of all genres from poetry to historical tradition, performing and non-performing arts, architecture, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, chemistry, metallurgy, botany, zoology, geology, medical systems, governance, administration, water management, town planning, civil engineering, ship making, agriculture, polity, martial arts, games, brainteasers, omens, ghosts, accounting, and many more. The production was colossal and in almost every regional language. No student of India enters college internalising this kind of information about India unfortunately.

Western science emerged and thrived (and still does) on a strong idea that man is the peak of creation and the purpose of nature is to serve humans. These are ideas antithetical to Indian traditional values. Knowledge and science grow but it is more in harmony with the rest of creation and nature. The West, obsessed with order and chaos, hence produced philosophers, theologians, and scientists trying to make theories breaking away from practical life. The other type of culture (Indian or Asian) had invested its intellectual energies in creating, sustaining, and continuously modifying a social or practical order. Practical actions, like rituals, became sophisticated patterns of interaction.

The two cultures met in an unfortunate set of circumstances. The Asians were willing to learn, and the West thought it could only teach, says Balagangadhara. Later Indian intellectuals and politicians with a heavy ‘colonial consciousness’, go on implying that somehow Indians do not have a scientific temper which they need to inculcate as a ‘national duty’. It is only a profound ignorance of what Indian culture is all about and what Indian scientific achievements in the past have truly been. Our influential academia in the post-independent India infested with a single ideology of the ‘exploiter and exploited’ have in fact inflicted far more damage to the Indian intellect than the combined Islamic and colonial rule of hundreds of years.

THE TALIBAN, RELIGIONS, TRADITIONS, AND SOLUTIONS (August 19, 2021)

With the Taliban coming into power, the issue of religion takes a prominent place. However, there is always a hesitancy in intellectuals and a silence in political circles to discuss the issue of religion and fundamentalism. The Taliban philosophy, clearly taking the Sharia for inspiration, is a threat not only to Afghanistan but to the entire world. It will be hard times for us especially since India borders two hostile states friendly to Taliban. In a deadlock situation, the only hope for the world comes from India. Dr SN Balagangadhara’s thesis on religions and understanding the phenomenon in India would be a major input to achieve peace in the country (and in the world too). Most debates about religions in the country seem to degenerate into a verbal exchange of words. History and its ‘facts’ are inconvenient debating techniques and are hardly helping.

As Dr Balu says, there were never any religions in India but only traditions (sampradayas and paramparas in its widest form). The conversion of traditions to religions was a colonial exercise. It was not from any malicious intent at a larger level but they were trying to make sense of an alien culture from the ruler’s perspective. They saw a variety of phenomena, practices, and philosophies across the country and constructed the religions of ‘Hinduism’, ‘Buddhism’, ‘Jainism’, ‘Sikhism’, and so on. There were even religious encounters too between a Buddhism of 2000 years and a Hinduism of 200 years! The framework of all these experiential constructions were their own European internal debates between the Protestant, Catholic, and the Enlightenment thinkers. It is a long story but one of the basic driving forces in creating religions by the colonials was their own culture (rooted in religion) which believed that religion is a cultural universal. It was inconceivable to them that there could be cultures without religions.

Our Indian intellectuals swallowed the whole story which Dr Balu terms as ‘colonial consciousness.’ Only a few intellectuals questioned whether religions in the classic definitional mould of a single book, a single temple, a single doctrine, or a single messenger ever existed in India. Fertile intellectual minds sitting in the best libraries of Europe converted our traditions into religions with even ‘inter-religious’ encounters. Hinduism versus Buddhism was their legacy; Hinduism versus Sikhism today is a continuation of that legacy. These were like those which happened in the Middle East and the European world of medieval times.

Fundamentally, religions can never be a reason for peace. It divides the world into ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers.’ Under the impact of secularism, the maximum a religion can achieve are ‘tolerances and acceptances.’ Traditions thrive on multiplicity of practices, rituals, philosophies with the fundamental idea of ‘an indifference to differences.’ The concept of truth is as robust as in religions but traditions say, ‘I am true, but you are not false.’ Religion, in contrast, is clear when it says, ‘I am true and you are false.’

How did India deal with religions? They became traditions with a gradual indifference to other beliefs and yet pursuing their own paths. As is usual for traditional cultures, religions had cultural syncretism with the mainstream traditions, and they lost their focus on an aggressive proselytizing drive too. Muslims and Christians singing the highest devotional songs to Indian deities without fear of losing their personal faith or persecution from the hard-core elements are some examples. The Hindus also were never strong into implementing anti-conversion laws because essentially the idea of conversion with rejection of all previous beliefs does not make sense in a traditional culture. One can very well be a Hindu even if one does not believe in God and goes to the temple ‘purely for its architecture.’

It is another matter that the words ‘Hindu’, Hinduism’, and ‘Hindutva’ remain ill-defined in both our Constitution and Law manuals even after so many decades. Using the words as a matter of convenience, the indifference to differences is the Indian solution to multiculturalism and not the ill-baked and inappropriate idea of secularism, a solution for the Christian European world at a specific time in its history. India’s distorted political secularism became only ‘appeasement’ of ‘minorities’ rather than encouraging inclusiveness.

Unfortunately, as our traditions become more of religions, the capacity to absorb pluralism diminishes and fundamentalism arises. The so-called Hindutva and Hindu ‘fundamentalism’ is an outcome of such attempts to define traditions as religions with even core doctrines (like the supposed Hinduism claim that all religions are equal). The problem of India has been to convert traditions into religions by a continuous effort of our intellectuals, academia, and the politicians. This conversion takes us from tolerance to intolerance, from an indifference to hate, from an acceptance to rejection. The Indian solution to the world is to make religions into traditions. We should be pursuing this path. This is not ‘diluting’ a religion as some might want to believe. It would be surprising if the Taliban can ever bring peace to anyone in the world.

Enthusiastic Judges (August 16, 2021)

Our honourable Chief Justice of India seems to be a media-savvy and a media friendly person. He is getting great coverage for his statements almost daily. Today, he expressed regret at the present functioning of the Parliament. The degenerate present is apparently so different from the once great golden past when the Parliament was full of lawyers. Only lawyers and judges fill the judicial system, so why is the latter in such a mess? The huge backlog of cases, the frequent vacations, justice almost always delayed, the corruption, the selective justice to people based on their positions, the overenthusiastic judicial activism, and such, hardly paint a pleasant picture of our judiciary. Can the honourable justices do something about the rot in their own house before addressing the rest of the country at frequent intervals? Judicial activism is good; a strong judiciary is a pillar of democracy. But do our concerned judges realise that most citizens of the country fear the judicial system rather than feel protected by it? It would be appreciable if collectively our judges and the courts (filled exclusively with lawyers, I am sure) start overhauling the entire system to be citizen friendly and deliver justice effectively. The country needs urgently to get back its confidence in the judicial system rather than looking at it with utter fear and disdain.

Break in the Pulichintala Dam (August 16, 2021)

On the way from Tanjore to Trichy in Tamil Nadu is a wonderful ‘Grand Anicut’ or the Kallanai dam built on the river Cauvery. It is a stone dam constructed 2000 years ago by a Chola King. It is the oldest stone dam in the country still in use and the second oldest in the world. The dam is a wonderful sight and is a testimony to the idea that perhaps an enlightened monarchy is a better deal than democracy where only oratory, money power, votes by any means, and personal power counts. The Brihadishwara Temple or the Big Temple at Tanjore is an overwhelming experience where the architecture, inscriptions, and the mural paintings on the ceilings simply stun a visitor. A visit to most ancient and medieval temples, like the Ramappa temple in Telangana or the Adalaj Step-Well in Gujarat reflect the amazing civil engineering and architectural skills of the olden times.

Today, a brand-new road outside my house does not last beyond one rain. Potholes, the size of craters, rapidly cause terror to the numb citizens. Dams develop breaks and buildings collapse causing immense damage to its citizens; surely, the cause cannot be the construction material or building technologies. Our scientific and engineering progress has much to applaud for as today, in a big jump for humanity, we look to explore space and other planets.

The present break could have been due to a genuine problem of some kind which hopefully an investigation would reveal. However, the citizens have become extremely cynical. Construction and roadbuilding are the biggest money generators apparently for every single link in the chain. Unfortunately, if the stories need believing, the media at the ground level also gets its price to remain silent. The numb citizens have no one to complain as we continue to deal with poor roads, poor drains, rainwater flooding cities without any rivers, collapsing buildings, and disrupting dams. Why cannot we ensure quality in at least these vital infrastructures? The only way remaining is to appeal to the good conscience of the nation builders and protectors. It is only a question of willing. The fear of punishment or a public loss of face no longer neither exists nor worries anyone even as the helpless citizens struggle in a ‘glowing country’ where beautiful structures stand tall by the side of the beastly broken roads.

RIVER WATER SHARING (August 4, 2021)

Madabhushi Sridharji has written an informative article on the difficulties between the two Telugu states and the involvement of the central government on the issue of Krishna and Godavari rivers. Fresh water will be the reason for future conflict and violence across the world in the future. Timothy Clack, in his book ‘Ancestral Roots’, describes this as ‘War of the World’. Water ‘scarcity’ and ‘stress’ are less than 1000 and 1500 cubic meters of water per person per year, respectively. In the next three decades, fresh water coming mainly from rivers, would be a cause for severe fights unless we utilise our technology and environment in a proper manner. Fresh waters make up less than 2.9% of all water on the planet, and of this only 0.007% is accessible for use. An enormous pressure will arise for the world as stark predictions say that by 2050, water stress and scarcity will affect 7 billion people in 60 countries and 2 billion in 48 countries, respectively. Chillingly, the global population would be likely 9.2 billion in 2050, so practically there would be strife for the whole world.

River water control is a source of conflict from a district level to an international level. As an informed professor involved in water management tells, river water should be under a central scientific body; ideally one body for each individual river. Each river has a specific way for utilisation without degrading it and without causing an environmental damage. Many factors come into play apart from a simple flow. Though an important consideration, it is rarely an equation of saying that since 50% of the river is in one state, it should get 50% of the river water. That would be a recipe for disaster on a broader scale. The Mekong River Commission is one such example which guides the Mekong River utilisation flowing across six countries starting from China. We do have dedicated water resources scholars in various academic departments across the country who do a serious study of the river waters and give solid proposals. However, all their outputs become invalid as politics take over and neighbours start fighting for its share. The allegations against each other fly thick and fast on the issue of height of dams or the number of canals constructed.

It was perhaps a Constitutional error to make river waters a combined Central and State subject. All kinds of politics and not science now determine how we utilise the precious river waters. The political equations also play a role as the Center allegedly favours one state over another. Madabhushi gently alludes to this in the article. Narrow parochial interests take over the larger interest of the nation while managing water resources. River Jordan is a source of trouble in the Arab world even as China interferes with Brahmaputra, a potential issue in the future between not-so-friendly countries. Narmada, Godavari, Krishna, Cauvery are all causes of conflicts between districts, states, and regions in the country today. The fights over water are not surprising. However, the collective humanity does throw up surprises, and it may just come together to save the world from the potential ‘water bomb’ of the future, more serious than all previous bombs.

Congratulations (July 17, 2021)

Congratulations to the decade of wonderful performance by Hans India. In a world where print and visual media have become extremely biased and loud in their stands, Hans India stands out as a sane voice. Most amazingly, it maintains a balance between the so-called right and left wings by allowing all parties to have their say and let the readers judge. Sadly, this aspect is significantly absent in many newspapers. It gives much importance to its readers also and allows their voice without greatly editing them. This is another remarkable feature of the newspaper to allow discordant voices and allow opinions against the mainstream authors too. The newspaper has an ideal mix of information, entertainment, and news analysis without indulging in gossip and rumourmongering. The decency with which it reports on events and people is indeed heartening. Such newspapers are rare in these times. I wish the Hans India a very bright future and hope that they carry these journalistic standards and ideals for all time to come.

Dr Bharat Jhunjhunwala’s article (June 21, 2021)

Bharat Jhunjhunwala’s article on 21^st June dealing with the fleeing of the rich and the educated from the country puts a critical word about religions. Typically, he holds explicitly or implicitly mainly Hinduism as the culprit. A profound ignorance exists amongst Indian intellectuals right from independence which understands our traditions as religions. Going by the definition of A Book, A Church, A God, and A Messenger, all of which speak the only Truth, then only Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are religions. India is a land of traditions and not religions and the nature of both the phenomenon has mysteriously evaded most intellectuals of the country.

Religions historically have been a cause of strife and wars. The truth claims involving My True God versus Your False Gods leads to division and violence of both physical and intellectual types. The colonial understanding and literature based on Protestant frameworks converted a huge mass of Indian sampradayas, paramparas, and traditions into many religions like Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism without understanding the nature of the phenomenon of both religions and traditions.

India successfully dealt with multiculturalism and pluralism far better than any western society anytime in its history. Traditions base themselves on rituals which bring people together. The hallmark of a traditional culture is an indifference to differences which transcends the standard tolerances and acceptances maximally achieved by religions under the impact of secularism. Unfortunately, the post-independent academics, politicians, and intellectuals continued to understand Indian traditions as religions despite a huge number of contradictions. The colonial violence on Indian minds never left us and this is even more painful in contemporary times.

Indian culture absorbed alien religions and made them into traditions so that they could retain their identity and yet be flexible enough to give and take from other traditions. This is how traditional cultures evolve. This was the greatness of Indian culture. Instead of exploring how this might have happened by further research, we are insisting on converting our traditions into religions and making them more intolerant and rigid in the process.

These constructions also lead to the imagined religious rivalry based on truth values between Hindus and Buddhists or Hindus and Sikhs today. In traditions, the truth value is not a premium. Shankara’s followers may say Shankara was preaching the truth, but Madhava was not preaching falsehood. Heresy is unknown in Indian traditions. Our intellectuals have completely failed us in giving us an Indian viewpoint of our own culture. Orthodox Islam does not allow music and other fine arts to a great extent and yet some of the greatest Indian music and fine art exponents are Muslims who do so without a threat of a loss to their identity. This is the strength and hallmark of Indian culture which a standard application of religious paradigm can never achieve.

The more we turn our traditions into religions and start discovering books, central organisations, and messengers, the more trouble we are in. Secularism was a solution for a Christian world in the European middle ages. Universalizing it as a solution to all cultures across space and time is simply a collective intellectual failure. It is an irony that a culture where the phrase ‘Sarve Jana Sukhino Bhavantu’ (let all people be happy) is almost second nature gets secularism as the solution for its problems. Indian brand of secularism, by converting traditions into religions, paradoxically increases fundamentalism. It is the poorest solution for India replacing an already rich solution existing in our culture historically.

Thus, we produce rather strange solutions like Indian Institute of Religions as suggested by Bharat Jhunjhunwala in his article. If only he could look at the history of religion in the Middle East and European world, he would not be writing many things in his article. The explanation of migration to other countries from India because of religious violence is intellectual laziness in making biases and assumptions as solid reasonings.

Viruses and Vaccination (June 15, 2021)

The debate on vaccination is always confusing. It has been so since many decades. Vaccination against smallpox was known to Indians in pre-colonial times as Dharmpal so emphatically shows. Traditional vaids were using material from the smallpox patients for vaccination. Amazingly, the concept of immunisation was in place in Indian society in the era much before Jenner.

Most viral illnesses have a resolution rate of more than 90% without any interventions. This explains the success of many interventions in the treatment of viral diseases, like for example, many herbal products and local popular concoctions for the treatment of hepatitis. Secondly, vaccinations are never a foolproof guarantee against the occurrence of the concerned disease. The best protection rate is in the range of 70-75% perhaps. BCG for TB for example doesn’t have any great protection rates for primary lung disease though it works better for TB involving other organs like the nervous system.

Modern vaccination has always had a chequered history. Right from the beginning, injection of many vaccines into the human body in the first year of life administered along with many additives and preservatives has been a source of intense concern and debate. Autism, diabetes mellitus, autoimmune disorders have all been claimed to be associated with vaccination. The vaccine promoters and a majority of paediatricians say ‘no evidence’; the anti-vacciners say the jury is still out.

The first generation rotavirus vaccination had lot of issues with intussusception in children, a real surgical problem. There was a 30 fold increase in the likelihood of intussusception. The later generations of this vaccine have a lower risk. Any vaccine company wants only one dream situation and that is an official government policy to vaccinate the general population with that particular vaccine. This is the loveliest dream come true for any company to make for a massive kill in terms of business and healthy balance sheets.

Unfortunately, in a pandemic scenario where we are trying so many things it is expected that there would be attention to vaccines too. The background debate however against vaccines is nothing new despite being in extraordinary circumstances. This is perhaps the only time in the history of medicine where we are trying to develop vaccines and treatment strategies in the middle of a pandemic caused by an unknown virus. Beyond the oft repeated and standard narratives of greedy companies and bad governmental policies, the fact is, nobody knows the full picture. Many are desperately shooting in the dark. We don’t know about the nature of the virus; we don’t know about the natural history of the disease; we are not aware of any standard treatment strategies. Hence, the multiplicity of approaches to this natural or human made virus.

The human brain will keep on trying solutions to any problem. Like always in the history of humanity, complex political, social, and economic factors; personal issues; and emotional reasonings will distort a straightforward scientific or medical narrative. It is indeed a complex and messy situation with no straightforward answers. The present debate will never end as there are no ideal solutions excepting that the virus becomes completely quiescent; integrates into the human genome; or we develop a magic bullet like a quinine or chloroquine for malaria. Some scientists say that a great portion of human DNA might actually be of viral origin which got integrated nicely as a symbiotic relationship.

Unfortunately, with an explosion of knowledge and an easy access to information, we are getting all the more confused with the information. Extreme positions look at the worst of the opposite camp to justify their stands. The anti-people would only look at the small but real complications of vaccines. The pro people would quote the complications and deaths in the unvaccinated group. We cannot get a balance and a golden mean within such polarised debates unfortunately. The solutions are never easy, and they keep changing with evidence. Changing practices with evidence does not mean a deficiency; it is only scientific and healthy practice. Unfortunately, ill-informed intellectuals make ridiculous statements which go against the tenets of medical philosophy. Irrationality rules supreme in making many speculations which our media are only too keen to propagate. The poor citizens pay a heavy price with the added scare and fear.

Communism-An Alternative Narrative (June 3, 2021)

The two-part article by Mohan Kandaji manages to give a highly sanitised version of Communism in India. No single ideology has been more damaging to the spirit of India and Sanatana Dharma than the imperialist ideology of Communism and Marxism. Sita Ram Goel and Arun Shourie have explored them deeply in their essays and books.

Communist societies (Soviet Russia, China) reduced Marxism to a severe monotheism by being the only doctrine and the only Saviour. They could not help becoming totalitarian enemies of human freedom. Communism was an instrument of Soviet foreign policy, particularly with Stalin, in its drive towards world domination. It inevitably comes into conflict with positive nationalism drawing inspiration from its own cultural heritage and socio-political traditions.

Communist Party of India, a section of the Communist International, started in far-off Tashkent in October 1920. The British initially imposed a ban on the Communist party and made Communist literature easily available to revolutionaries to wean them away from this ‘terrorist’ path. Paradoxically, many patriots became convinced Communists and swelled the ranks of the party after discharge from the prison. In the public eye, these patriots retained their stature for their services. Communists became patriots in a reflected glory.

The dissonance between Communism and positive nationalism in India was starkly evident during the Second World War. The Communist Party of India had initially opposed British imperialism and the Muslim League. In 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Simultaneously, the Congress launched the Quit India Movement in August 1942. The Communists in the Congress opposed the Quit India resolution because now the ‘imperialist war’ became a ‘people’s war’ simply because an enemy of Britain had invaded the Soviet Union. An enemy (British) of an enemy (Germany) invading a friend (Soviet Union) became a friend. British imperialism became British bureaucracy. The Communists had a significant contribution towards the creation of Pakistan, perhaps next only to that of the Muslim League.

Its intellectuals have remained intensely inimical to the cultural traditions and heritage of India. Communism targets Sanatana Dharma as superstition, obscurantism, and priestcraft and denounces the Dharmashastras as repositories of primitive prescriptions, Machiavellian morality, caste oppression, untouchability, degradation of women, and so on. It condemns all Indic philosophies as Brahminical conspiracies to suppress Lokayata or atheism.

However, as the most important exercise in Independent India, Communist historians, gaining great influential power in the academic universities under a political patronage, have ridiculed every hero, period, episode, and precedent in which Hindus can take pride. In a peculiar and short-sighted philosophy of associating today’s Muslims with Islamic rulers of the past, they managed to completely whitewash the brutality of the Islamic invaders. This gross falsification of history is an injustice to all Indians, including Muslims.

In the intellectual sphere, Communism effectively uses a difficult language of doublespeak; it constantly discovers conspiracies against the working class and the minorities preventing harmony by pitching one against the other; and are adept at ‘swearology.’ Mahatma Gandhi (bourgeois scoundrel), Rabindranath (mageer dalal or pimp), Patel and Nehru (fascist duo) had some colourful names.

Unfortunately, India’s political language describes ‘Leftist’, ‘Rightist’, ‘Centrist’, and ‘Right or Left of Center’ positions without telling us what ‘Center’ means. Certain groups appropriated one label- ‘Leftist’ for themselves and reserved ‘Rightist’ for opponents without permission or prior consultation. The political language of Communists has been rich in introducing new terms. The heavy influence of this philosophy in the dominant ruling party after independence, the academia, and the media made sure that we internalised many of these toxic discourses. The peculiar political language evolved mainly by the Communists have not only misunderstood the Indian traditions but have gone a step further in maligning the Hindu traditions and culture.

Hindu society becomes a ‘crowd of caste-ridden, cow-worshipping and practitioners of obnoxious obscurantism’. The Leftists-Communists-Marxist-Socialist rainbow spectrum laud themselves as progressive, revolutionary, socialist, secularist, and democratic. Simultaneous is the denunciation of ‘Rightists’ or any opponent as reactionary, revivalist, capitalist, and fascist. The intellectual elite are extremely good at using difficult to counter Communist catchphrases: bourgeois and proletarian; class struggle and class collaboration; revolution and counter-revolution; bourgeois nationalism and proletarian internationalism; fascist forces and the democratic front, and so on.

Nationalists led by Gandhi could not understand the nature and purpose of this obscure language. The Communists considered Gandhi as their greatest enemy because he could wean away the masses effectively, something which they hoped to do with their Indian leaders. Though the intellectuals and the academia soak themselves in a rich Communist language, it is fortunate that Indian population has thought it fit to reject them politically. Historically, Russia, China, and Bengal show clearly how Communism and Socialism can only cause physical and intellectual violence but not progress.

SLAPPINGNOTICES ON CORPORATE HOSPITALS: GREED, RATIONALITY, AND ETHICS IN MEDICINE (May 8, 2021)

Autonomy (for the patient), justice (ensuring availability to all), beneficence (only for the good of the patient), and non-maleficence (not causing harm to individual or society) are the four basic principles of health care ethics. At the core of health ethics is the sense of right and wrong, and beliefs about rights and duties. Like all domains, ethics and morals are fluid and debatable with even cultural differences too. What is moral or ethical in one culture may not be so in another one. Ethics is dynamic. What was good ethics a hundred years ago may not be so today. Despite many controversies and discussions on the above four principles, most agree that patient autonomy is by far the most important overriding all the other considerations in event of a clash.

There are rights and duties of the doctor and there are rights and duties for the patient too. Unfortunately, the entire discourse of the governments, media, and the intelligentsia focuses on the duties of the doctor and the rights of the patient. In this process, a heartburn ensues which finally damages the profession.

Medicine, like many other professions, is a fine balance of art and science. Somebody in a malaria endemic area may choose to start anti-malarials for a fever with chills. There might be another doctor who would want an investigation to confirm malaria before starting treatment. Both are perhaps correct and cannot undergo comparison in the binaries of ‘non-academic/ academic’ or ‘non-commercial/commercial.’ The conflicts doctors encounter in the profession many times are complex beyond the understanding of even other non-involved doctors, not to mention the laypeople.

There is a list of many do and don’ts for the doctors divided as compulsory duties, voluntary duties, unethical acts, and misconduct. There are some we are quite aware of as it makes a lot of noise in the media. Some are more subtle. The unethical acts include advertising, printing a self-photograph on the letterhead, commissions, euthanasia, and so on. Misconduct includes sex determination tests, not maintaining records, and disclosing secrets, amongst many others. Active euthanasia is thankfully not a big debate issue in India as in some western countries.

Significantly, there are no guidelines on what the ideal charging for the patient should be. There might be official bureaucratic orders to display the consultation charges or the charges of various services provided in the hospital. However, the ethical guidelines provided by the medical council do not address the charges for services in the non-public sector at an individual or institutional level.

In terms of legal attacks, governmental regulations, and popular perception, the majority of the medical private sector has come in the ambit of a business model. Thus, there is an inherent and fundamental contradiction between the service model and the business model in our medical systems. The patient in a private hospital expects the best possible services but at the most reasonable charges. How is this balance decided? How can one calculate the rational pricing when an expert surgeon saves the life of an individual? Why should capping be applicable only to the medical sector? The business proposition seriously mixes with humanitarian considerations in medicine, and this is the main reason there is so much debate in society. Consumer protection and legal questions stay intact making the doctor always vulnerable in case of adverse outcomes. The art of medicine loses out in legal battles as the focus becomes only the guidelines and scientificity.

One goes to a five-star hotel and pays twenty times more than the nice hotel in the neighbourhood for the same idli. An individual or institute approaching a top-shot private lawyer would grumble but would happily pay a Himalayan amount of money for the services rendered. There is a choice available to the person. The reason for dissatisfaction and heartburn in society happens because poor patients and uninsured patients forcibly go to the private sector instead of utilising the public sector.

This lack of choice should make our thinkers reflect on the state of the public services in the country or the lack of proper and rational insurance policies. Ironically, the government insurance schemes for the public sector are so poorly structured that there is enormous hesitation to take up difficult cases and generate a whole set of practices which ultimately does not benefit the health of the individual or the society. Similarly, attacking individual doctors or slapping notices on corporate hospitals for being greedy is a short-term populist method of solving issues.

When the capping comes for private institutes in the health sector, what should be the limits? To what extent business practices apply to the medical sector? The point is, these are difficult issues and there is certainly a need for wide debate instead of unthinking reactions which can only harden stances. Ethics and morals are a very difficult subject, especially in the practice of medicine. Rationalising any unethical practice (on part of the doctors) and outright condemnation of any practice (not fitting into popular common-sense perceptions) are both wrong; and there should be perhaps an attempt to achieve a balance. The public-private model of health should deliver the goods to all the citizens of India in an effective manner without physical or intellectual violence in society. Is there hope for such a debate?

ABORTION- DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES IN DIFFERENT CULTURES AND TIMES (May 25, 2021)

The editorial on 25^th May, ‘Abortion still a raging issue in US’, wonderfully highlights a relevant topic where politics, society, law, medicine, ethics, morals, religions, and human rights make for a complex cocktail of raging emotions, disparate voices, and fights of all kinds. A consensus statement is unlikely anytime soon. Essentially, the debate is regarding a contradiction between the two fundamental properties of a liberal life: the freedom to choose and the right to live.

The so-called right wing (pro-life or no right to abort) and the so-called left wing (pro-choice or right to abort) take hard stances across a clear dividing line. Religious denomination also comes into fray. The Catholic Church do not support abortion categorically at any stage of pregnancy. Protestant Churches have a variable stand on the issue ranging from opposition to complete support. Compromise seems hardly possible as offense comes easily with any stance. This indeed is a serious issue in the West, especially the US.

The famous Roe v. Wade case changed American law on abortion. The legal guideline for terminating a pregnancy is a pragmatic view and not on any moral, ethical, or religious ideas. The right to live (for the fetus) is the consideration in the latter part of pregnancy and the freedom to choose (for the mother) in the early part. The US courts do not address the slippery slopes when each of the arguments goes to the extreme and demands either the freedom to choose or the right to live in all stages of pregnancy.

The US Supreme Court does not consider in the abortion debate whether human life or personhood begins at conception, birth, or at some point in between. The 24 weeks guideline is on the ‘survivability’ of the fetus outside the womb and specifically, the lung maturity to take independent breaths. Scientist Carl Sagan concurs with 24 weeks but for different reasons. Research is pointing out that at 24 weeks the fetal brain starts showing well-formed brain waves typical of a human being and that might declare the transition of a fetus to a ‘human’, he says.

Carl Sagan puts two questions here. First, why should breathing only justify legal protection? If one shows that a fetus can think and feel but not be able to breathe, would it be all right to kill it? Second, with improving technology, a fetus might survive much earlier gestational ages. If available in a possible future, does it then become immoral to abort earlier than the sixth month, when previously it was moral? Sagan says, ‘a morality that depends on, and changes with, technology is a fragile morality; for some, it is also an unacceptable morality.’

The Indian MTP act, formulated in 1971, made the legal limit to 20 weeks purely on the consideration that after this age, terminations can be unsafe for the mother. The discrepancy in the Indian rules arises from three considerations. First, termination is now safe even at later stages of pregnancy but the rule has seen an extreme resistance for updating based solely on this safety criteria. Second, many fetal anomalies, some serious and difficult, in the Indian scenario have a diagnosis between 20 to 24 weeks with the application of the latest in the field of antenatal testing including genetic analysis. This puts a severe stress on the doctors and the affected families both when there is potential confrontation with the law. Third, the conflation of the MTP Act (for safe and legal abortions) and the PC&PNDT Act (to prevent gender based selective abortions) has many implications on access to safe abortion services for women.

Nitin Sridhar (Abortion, A Dharmic Perspective) using extensive ancient Indic sources (Dharmashastras) shows how ancient Indians set the limit for legal abortion at 16 weeks but with a different reasoning. Taking the notions of the individual Jiva, Karma, Dharma, Adharma, and Prayashchitta into consideration, Dharmic texts perceive abortion as Adharma since, it prevents a Jiva from taking a physical birth, an entitlement based on Prarabdha Karma.

The Dharmic texts enunciate that though the Jiva associates with the fetus at conception, it enters the Hrdaya of the fetus only towards the fourth month of pregnancy. Thus, only the abortion performed after the 16 weeks of pregnancy is like killing a person, while abortion before 16 weeks is preventing Jiva from self-identifying with the fetus. Abortion after 16 weeks involved legal punishments and abortion before 16 weeks involved a Prayashchitta (a voluntary imposition for repentance) procedure for 12 years. However, the texts clearly say that after 16 weeks termination is acceptable without Adharma only if the purpose is to save the mother’s life.

Can we evolve a sustaining contemporary narrative and law on abortion based on the eternal principles enunciated in the Dharmic texts? The texts are not morally obligatory or legally binding as the colonials drilled into our collective minds. Intellectuals can always make better laws based on our Dharmic philosophy conducive to all, but have we travelled too far on a ship of modernity which looks at tradition with only disdain?

BABA RAMDEV AND THE IMA (May 23, 2021)

Baba Ramdev makes a public statement against allopathic drugs for Covid, and the outraged Indian Medical Association slaps a legal notice on him. The governments and the public fall into a trap of an unnecessary debate between tradition versus modernity; obscurantism versus scientificity, and so on. Poet Alexander Pope says, ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ and this applies well to both sides. A little knowledge regarding the ‘other’ system generates ignorance and stupidity in ample proportions.

Ayurveda, in its fundamental belief that nature is the cause and cure of diseases, bases itself on the Tridosha theory of human disease which postulates an imbalance of Vata (air and space), Pitta (fire), and Kapha (water and gross matter) elements of the human body. Interventions of any kind seek to restore the balance. It understands the human body from a different domain level. The atomic theory and the germ theory of disease is the basis of modern medicine.

The paradigms of studying health and disease are different in Ayurveda and allopathic medicine but both have the interest of the human being at its core. Ayurveda, as a system of medicine, goes deep into physiology, anatomy, and observational studies of diseases, equally scientific and equally rational. Before the atomic theory of matter and the germ theory of diseases, dating just a couple of centuries, for thousands of years the Ayurvedic understanding of health and disease gave us many stupendous contributions in the preventive and therapeutic fields including plastic surgical techniques and vaccination against smallpox. It is a colonial mindset and a constantly west looking mind which would denigrate Ayurveda as a form of medicine. The reverse holds true too when there is a mindless criticism of allopathic medicine.

The principles of Sattvic diet, Yoga, Pranayama, and meditation form a crucial component of preventive medicine in Ayurveda. Modern medicine looks at psycho-somatic problems increasingly seriously, but this mind-body connection deeply embeds into the Ayurvedic framework. Meditation and deep breathing are vital in the mental and emotional well-being and solutions to many psycho-somatic illnesses. Dean Ornish (Reversal of Heart Disease) makes a compelling evidence-based argument for his program of integrating Indian Yogic exercises, breathing techniques, meditation, and diet to reverse heart disease. Most interventions-aspirin, medicines, stents, and surgery, at best halt the progression of disease, rarely do they reverse.

The either/ or approach is a modern scientific philosophy which either calls for either complete acceptance or a complete rejection. Extreme claims by Ayurvedic practitioners without careful studies unfortunately tend to make light of its achievements and strengths. There is no point in belittling Ayurveda in the lens of modern medicine or modern chemistry. One paradigm cannot be a yardstick to measure the other.

Baba Ramdev has successfully converted Ayurvedic techniques and products into a huge business proposition, but he goes overboard in his criticism of modern medicine. Unfortunately, an equal imbalance and intolerance characterise the other party too. The criticisms arise from one’s own sense of power and poor understanding of the other side. In this clash, the powerful proponents end up making a showpiece of the worst of the other side. Harmony and integration have a quick death. In the bargain, there is only confusion and mayhem on the part of the ordinary people who only seek solutions to their health issues.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR – PUBLISHED AND MOSTLY UNPUBLISHED

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