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The legal doctrine that ate India’s religious traditions – Yashowardhan Tiwari & Krithika Jamkhandi

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Supreme Court of India

For seventy years, India’s courts have claimed the power to decide what counts as truly sacred. The theology behind that claim isn’t Hindu—it’s Protestant. – Yashowardhan Tiwari & Krithika Jamkhandi

In 1954, a dispute over a monastery in the coastal town of Udupi reached the Supreme Court of India. The state of Madras wanted its commissioner to take over the administration of Shirur Math, a centuries-old Hindu institution.

The math’s leadership resisted, arguing that the Constitution guaranteed religious denominations the right to manage their own affairs in matters of religion. The state countered with what must have seemed like a reasonable proposition: surely, not everything a religious institution does is actually religious. Some of it — the hiring, the money, the logistics — is secular, and secular activities are fair game for regulation.

Seven justices considered this argument. What they produced, in a judgment now cited in virtually every religion case in India, was something nobody had quite bargained for: a new constitutional test that would empower judges to determine which religious practices deserve protection and which do not. They called it the test of “essential religious practices.”

It was, by almost any measure, a catastrophe of interpretation. And its consequences are still unfolding.

The architecture of religious freedom in the Indian Constitution is, on paper, relatively straightforward. Article 25 guarantees individuals the right to freely profess, practise, and propagate religion — subject to public order, morality, and health.

Article 26 extends similar protections to religious denominations. Article 25(2)(a) carves out an exception: the state can regulate “economic, financial, political, or other secular” activities that may be associated with religious practice.

The framers of the Constitution understood something important about Indian life.

As B.R. Ambedkar told the Constituent Assembly in December 1948, religious conceptions in India “are so vast that they cover every aspect of life, from birth to death.” His proposed solution was to limit the definition of religion so that constitutional protection wouldn’t freeze all social reform.

The protection was meant for practices that were “essentially religious” — practices closer to the religious end of the spectrum, as opposed to the secular activities that might orbit around them.

This distinction — between practices that are essentially religious in character and those that are essentially secular despite being associated with religion — is what the constitutional text actually contemplates. It is a sorting exercise: is this practice more religious than secular, or vice versa?

But in the Shirur Mutt judgment, the Supreme Court performed a quiet sleight of hand. Instead of asking whether a practice was essentially religious in nature, it began asking whether a practice was essential to the religion. The difference sounds subtle but it s not.

The first question asks about the character of an activity. The second asks about its importance within a theological hierarchy—a hierarchy that judges, not practitioners, would now define.

The court did acknowledge the difficulty. “Where is the line to be drawn between what are matters of religion and what are not?” it asked, with admirable candour.

Then it drew the line anyway, declaring that what constitutes the essential part of a religion must be ascertained with reference to the doctrines of that religion itself.

The essentiality test was born, and with it, the implicit claim that courts could read scripture well enough to rank religious practices by importance.

Two days later, the same judge — Justice B.K. Mukherjea — authored the Ratilal Gandhi decision, citing Shirur Mutt as precedent. The doctrine was entrenched before anyone had time to object.

What followed over the next seven decades was an extraordinary expansion of judicial authority into sacred space.

Armed with the essential religious practices test, Indian courts began adjudicating questions that would make most theologians nervous:

• Is the practice of tandava dance essential to the Ananda Marga faith?

• Is the exclusion of women of menstruating age essential to worship at Sabarimala?

• Is cow slaughter incidental or central to Islamic observance during Eid?

The problem, as critics have pointed out with increasing force, is not just that judges lack theological training. It is that the test itself is structurally incoherent.

When the constitutionality of a religious practice is challenged, courts must first determine whether the practice is religious or secular in nature. If secular, the state can regulate it freely. If religious, the court must then determine whether it is essential to the religion.

If it is not essential, the state can regulate it anyway. Only if a practice clears both hurdles — genuinely religious and essential to the faith — does it receive constitutional protection. And even then, it can be struck down if it offends public order, morality, or health. In practice, this means the entire religious sphere lies open to state regulation.

The legal scholar Faizan Mustafa has argued that the doctrine effectively elevates the judiciary to the status of clergy. Writing at the turn of the millennium, the constitutional scholars Rajeev Dhawan and Fali Nariman offered a more vivid formulation: judges had assumed a theological authority greater than that of any high priest, maulvi, or dharmashastri. Few religious pontiffs, they noted, possess this kind of power.

The court’s preferred method of determining essentiality — examining scriptures and doctrines — compounds the problem. Indian religious life is staggeringly diverse, and much of it is rooted not in canonical texts but in oral traditions, local customs, and practices handed down across generations without anyone writing them down.

A doctrinal approach to essentiality privileges text-heavy, scriptural traditions and implicitly marginalises everything else. It is, in a sense, a test designed for religions that look like Christianity or Islam — faiths organised around a book — rather than for the sprawling, decentralised, often text-free practices that characterise much of Hindu, tribal, and folk religious life.

The scholarly case against the essential religious practices doctrine has grown formidable. Legal academics have attacked it from nearly every angle: it substitutes judicial judgment for religious conscience; it discriminates between practices without constitutional warrant; it rests on a misreading of the constitutional text.

One recent paper argued that the courts have been guilty of making ill-founded observations about the validity of religious practices, turning the constitutional question of “what is essentially religious” into the theological question of “what is essential in religion.”

The paper proposed that courts should instead focus solely on identifying what is secular — regulating only that — and leave the religious domain alone, subject to the narrow exceptions the Constitution already provides. The principle would be “limited state intervention but maximum protection.”

The constitutional lawyer Zaid Deva, writing in the Indian Constitutional Law Review, traced the doctrinal error to its source. The original mandate of Articles 25 and 26 was to protect essential and non-essential religious practices alike. What should have been a test to distinguish “essentially religious” activities from “essentially secular” ones became, through judicial alchemy, a test to rank practices within the religious sphere by their perceived theological importance.

Arpan Banerjee, writing in the HNLU Student Bar Journal, identified another dimension of the problem: the Constitution does not discriminate between religious practices based on their significance. It protects them all. The essential practices test introduces a hierarchy that the constitutional text explicitly declined to create.

And yet, for all its force, this body of criticism stops at a particular threshold. It questions the doctrine. It questions the court’s competence. It proposes alternative legal tests. What it does not question is the assumption beneath all of it: that within every religion, there exists a meaningful distinction between the sacred and the secular — and that this distinction can, in principle, be mapped.

This is where the story takes an unexpected turn. S.N. Balagangadhara, a philosopher of culture who spent four decades at the University of Ghent developing what he calls the “Comparative Science of Cultures,” has advanced a thesis that reframes the entire debate.

The secular-religious divide, he argues, is not a universal feature of human civilisation. It is a product of Christian history — specifically, of the centuries-long struggle between the Church and the Crown, the spiritual and the temporal, that defined European political life from late antiquity through the Reformation.

Within Christianity, the distinction between the sacred and the secular was always theologically loaded. Early Christianity imagined two realms — the spiritual, governed by the Church, and the temporal, governed by earthly rulers.

The relationship between these realms generated endless conflict: Who has authority over marriage? Over education? Over the moral formation of citizens?

The Protestant Reformation sharpened the divide further, insisting that nothing should stand between an individual and God, and pushed religion toward the private sphere.

The Enlightenment thinkers who followed secularised this Protestant story, recasting it in the language of universal political theory. What began as Christian theology became, through repetition and colonial export, the world’s default framework for thinking about the relationship between the state and the sacred.

Balagangadhara’s research traces how this framework universalised itself through two mechanisms. The first is straightforward conversion—the expansion of Christian communities across the globe. The second is subtler and, he argues, more consequential: the generation of secular variants of Christian theology that win adherents without anyone recognising the theology at work.

“De-Christianised Christianity,” he calls it—Christian doctrines that have spread far beyond the community of believers, dressed up in clothes that no longer look recognisably Christian.

The idea that the state must be separated from religion, on this account, is not a neutral discovery of political science. It is a theological doctrine of Protestant Christianity that has been secularised to the point of invisibility.

The implications for Indian constitutional law are profound. If the secular-religious divide is not a universal structural feature of all traditions but a specific product of the Christian intellectual inheritance, then the entire framework of Articles 25 and 26 rests on a borrowed assumption—an assumption that Indian traditions may not share.

The Constitution asks courts to distinguish between religious and secular practices within Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism. But these traditions may not contain the kind of internal sacred-secular boundary that the Constitution presupposes. The exercise is not merely difficult. It may be conceptually impossible.

This would explain why, after seven decades of trying, Indian courts have never produced a stable, coherent framework for making the distinction. It is not that the judges are insufficiently skilled. It is that they are searching for a boundary that does not exist—at least not in the form the Constitution imagines.

Balagangadhara’s thesis raises uncomfortable questions about the constitution-making process itself. Were the framers operating within what might fairly be called a colonial consciousness—accepting state neutrality toward religion as a universal political principle, when it was in fact a parochial one?

Did the experience of colonial modernity convince India’s founding generation that the secular-religious divide was a self-evident feature of all civilisations, rather than a specific inheritance of the Christian West?

These are not questions that courts can resolve. They belong to the domain of political philosophy, cultural anthropology, and honest historical reckoning.

But they cast the essential religious practices doctrine in a sharply different light. The doctrine is not merely a flawed legal test that can be repaired or replaced with a better one. It is the downstream consequence of a deeper conceptual error—the assumption that Indian religious life can be parsed through categories borrowed from a very different civilisational experience.

If this diagnosis is correct, the path forward is not simply a matter of the Supreme Court overruling one line of precedent. It demands a more fundamental conversation about the adequacy of the constitutional framework itself. Could a constitutional amendment reconceive the relationship between the state and India’s indigenous traditions? Would it survive judicial review under the basic structure doctrine? Would it fall foul of secularism—a principle that is itself, on Balagangadhara’s account, a secularised Christian theology?

The answers may not arrive soon, or cleanly. A nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court, constituted to reconsider the Sabarimala review, may offer an occasion to revisit the doctrine’s foundations—or it may simply sidestep them. The political incentives to leave it well enough alone are considerable.

But the intellectual case for the essential religious practices doctrine has collapsed. It rests on a misreading of the constitutional text, an impossible demand on judicial competence, a scriptural bias against India’s oral and customary traditions, and—most fundamentally—a borrowed theology that its practitioners do not recognise as theology at all.

The kindest thing the Supreme Court could do is grant the doctrine a quiet, dignified death, before it does any more damage to the traditions it was ostensibly designed to protect.

Here’s to hoping that the Sabarimala review bench engages with this pre-dated obituary of the essential religious practices doctrine, and that its judgment may serve as the official version  of it. – Swarajya, 11 April 2026

› Yashowardhan Tiwari is a Program Manager in the Office of the Vice Chancellor at Rishihood University.

› Krithika Jamkhandi is an Advocate practicing in Karnataka High Court.

Women protest the entrance of fertile women into Sabaraimala.

Red China pretends to be the world leader for Buddhism – Claude Arpi

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Marxism vs Buddhism

Today, Beijing is using the same old propaganda to propagate another lie: that China is the leading Buddhist power in the world, conveniently forgetting that Tibetan Buddhism comes from Nalanda Mahavihara in Northern India. – Claude Arpi

Every year around the end of March, Beijing’s propaganda clamours that China “emancipated” Tibet and “liberated millions of serfs” after the Dalai Lama escaped to India in 1959 and his government was taken over by the Chinese Communist Party in Lhasa.

This year, China Tibet Online, an official website of the Communist Party of China, in the same vein, titled an article “Lamenting the Most Heinous Crimes Against Humanity”. It explained, “In days of old, the Land of Snows was a living hell; serfs shed blood and tears that soaked their very garments. Stripped of their skin and gouged of their eyes—they possessed no human rights; the cruel regime’s sins ran deep.”

It is not what outsiders—both Westerners and Indians—who visited the Land of Snows reported; on the contrary, the independent observers discovered that the Tibetan people were a happy lot, though there were undeniably differences between the aristocracy, the clergy and the common men.

But today China continues to say, “Democratic reform ushered in a new dawn; a million serfs rose to become the masters of their own destiny”, adding that the Dalai Lama “defected to serve as a foreign lackey—betraying his faith, sowing chaos in Tibet, and spurning the benevolence of the nation.”

The “foreign country” is presumably India, which has always honoured the Tibetan leader as a very special guest.

In fact, an impartial study of the history of modern Tibet shows quite the opposite picture; it is the ordinary men and women who revolted against the Chinese yoke, in particular in March 1959, when the entire population rose against the Chinese occupiers to protect the life of their revered leader and allow him to leave for India.

Today, Beijing is using the same old propaganda to propagate another lie: that China is the leading Buddhist power in the world, conveniently forgetting that Tibetan Buddhism comes from Nalanda Mahavihara in Northern India.

India has started countering this misinformation by, for example, organising the second Global Buddhist Summit at the Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi on January 24 and 25, 2026.

The two-day conference brought together more than 200 delegates, mostly Buddhist leaders, scholars, practitioners and policymakers, to discuss contemporary global challenges facing the planet.

Sinisation of Buddhism

Today Beijing would like the world to believe that Buddhism has for decades been a leading component of Chinese civilisation and that China should take the lead in the propagation of the teachings of the Great Monk, who more than 2,500 years ago wandered in the plains of North India, preaching compassion, mindfulness and interdependent arising.

Paradoxically, Beijing wants to teach Buddhism to Tibet!

In September 2025, a meeting was convened in Lhasa by Wang Junzheng, the secretary of the party committee of the Tibet  Autonomous Region (TAR), to address Communist officials dealing with “religion”.

Is it not surprising that a state supposedly following Karl Marx’s atheist precepts should deal with religion?

Wang insisted on the necessity “to earnestly study and implement General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important instructions on religious work and … systematically promote the Sinicisation of Tibetan Buddhism.”

The objective was to “lay a solid foundation for long-term peace and stability”. This means that to be stable, Tibet needs to be Buddhist, but with Chinese characteristics.

Wang mentioned Xi Jinping’s visit to Tibet in July 2025, during which the president gave “important instructions …to  emphasise Buddhism with the requirements to systematically promote the Sinicisation of China’s religion, strengthen the governance of religious affairs and the rule of law and guide Tibetan Buddhism to adapt to the socialist society.”

In other words, first Marx and then the Buddha.

On November 11, 2025, Wang Junzheng, again presiding over a symposium on religious legislation in Tibet, asked the participants to “solidly promote the construction of the Chinese national community, actively guide Tibetan Buddhism to adapt to the socialist society”.

Preaching Buddhism Outside China

On April 21, Massimo Introvigne wrote on Bitter Winter, a specialised website following development inside China: “Buddhist Friendship in Seoul to Advance Its Religious Policy Agenda”, explaining that a Communist Party of China-controlled delegation “promotes Beijing’s line while regional partners intensify pressure on the Unification Church, Shincheonji, and other groups labelled as cults.”

It cites the case of a delegation from the China Buddhist Association (CBA), led by vice president Zong Xing, who travelled to Seoul from March 30 to April 2 to attend the preparatory meeting for the 26th China-Korea-Japan Buddhist Friendship Exchange Conference.

Bitter Winter observed that Chinese media portrayed this visit as a continuation of the “golden bond” of trilateral Buddhist cooperation, an idea established in 1995 by senior monks from the three countries. Official reports described the gathering as a way to contribute to regional stability and world peace, using the familiar language that defines Chinese religious affairs propaganda.”

The China Buddhist Association (CBA) is not an independent religious group; in December 2022 the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) noted that the CBA serves “as a tool of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to control Buddhism inside China and promote state narratives outside. USCIRF called the association a conduit and endorser of state propaganda”.

The Fate of Those Refusing to Follow the Party

On April 23, Amnesty International appealed to Chinese authorities, seeking information on the fate and whereabouts of a Tibetan religious leader and educator called Choktrul Dorje Ten Rinpoche from Chikdril County in the Golog Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Qinghai Province.

Rinpoche is a prominent religious and educational figure in the region; he founded a monastery and a vocational school supporting local Tibetan communities. He has been missing since December 2025. Thereafter, no information about his status, place of detention, or the charges could be obtained, though in January 2026, some individuals monitoring the case received informal indications suggesting that the Tibetan leader was ‘under investigation’.

According to Amnesty International, the prolonged incommunicado detention of religious figures “raises serious concerns under international human rights law. Such conditions, the group emphasised, place detainees at heightened risk of torture and other forms of ill-treatment.”

Take the case of another prominent Tibetan lama, Tulku Hungkar Dorje Rinpoche, who was arrested in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, on March 25, 2025, through a joint operation by Vietnamese police and Chinese agents. Rinpoche died in custody four days later, and despite international concern over transnational human rights violations, nothing came out of the case.

The Lama, aged 56, was a respected Tibetan spiritual leader and head of the Lung Ngon monastery in Amdo (Qinghai province). He had to escape to Vietnam to escape persecution by Chinese authorities. He was arrested in a hotel in Ho Chi Minh City.

Such cases have been happening regularly.

China’s Political Influence

Politically China remains very influential. It managed to get the International Council for the Day of Vesak to endorse an appeal from the Buddhist Association of China to host the 21st UN Day of Vesak Celebrations in China in 2026. The 20th UN Day of Vesak was held in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, from May 6 to 8, 2025, under the theme “Unity and Harmony for Human Dignity”, while the 19th UN Day of Vesak (2024) took place in Bangkok, Thailand, from May 19-20, 2024; the theme was “The Buddhist Way of Building Trust and Solidarity”.

This year it will be held in China. It is not being questioned.

A Positive Development in India

In this context, an extremely interesting development is the revival of Tibetan Buddhism in the Himalayan belt.

A conference on the contribution of Himalayan Buddhism to the spiritual and cultural heritage of India will be held in Leh, Ladakh, on May 3. According to the organisers: “Himalayan Buddhism is a distinct, esoteric form of Mahayana Buddhism practised across the Indian Himalayas as well as in Tibet, Bhutan and Nepal.” Himalayan Buddhism has indelibly shaped and contributed to the spiritual, cultural, and intellectual landscape of Asia by acting as a ‘living repository’ for ancient Indian traditions.”

A concept note added: “Centred on historic, high-altitude monasteries, this heritage features vibrant festivals, monastic education, and artistic traditions that promote peace, compassion, and harmony with nature.”

“A unique way of life that is practised daily” is what makes it different from Buddhism in China, which is mostly synonymous with repression and assimilation; the precepts of the Buddha are not practised in daily life.

The revival of the Buddha Dharma on the northern Indian borders also has a political message to China; where do you see stupas, prayer flags, and Om Mani Padme Hum stones in Tibet? No, only the red flag flies, even on the Potala Palace or in the Tsuglhakhang Central Cathedral in Lhasa. Isn’t it a sign? – Firstpost, 6 May 2026

› Claude Arpi is Distinguished Fellow at the Centre of Excellence for Himalayan Studies, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence (Delhi), and writes on India, China, Tibet and Indo-French relations.

Jokhang Temple in Lhasa with China flag.

The need for Pax Indica – Rajeev Srinivasan

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Chola Ship

Maritime trade is severely disturbed today, and it is increasingly a disaster for innocent bystanders bereft of oil and gas. And it is increasingly the Indian Ocean that matters: specifically the sea lanes from Hormuz to Malacca, which handle a significant portion of both oil/gas trade and goods trade globally.

In 1025 CE, exactly 1,001 years ago, Emperor Rajendra Chola sent an armada (probably the largest fleet in history before the advent of steam) 4,000 kilometres clear across the Indian Ocean. It was on a mission strangely familiar to us in 2026: open up a critical strait that was being choked by a littoral state. The thalassocratic Srivijaya Empire of Sumatra was closing the strait and imposing tolls, as well as winking at a little piracy.

The strait in question then was Malacca. The Chola goal: to reopen Indian trade with Southeast Asia and China. Remarkably, the Cholas were not interested in territorial conquest, only in freedom of navigation.

It is ironic that today, it is again a question of free trade, that shibboleth that has been waved about for decades (although that was a euphemism for “managed trade that benefits the West”).

The difference between then and now? The salient fact is that Rajendra Chola was able to open Malacca with his wooden ships. With all his aircraft carriers and F-35s and missiles, President Trump is unable to open Hormuz. This must mean something, although reasonable people may differ on what that is. My claim is that it means India has the opportunity, in fact the need, to step into the breach.

Maritime trade is severely disturbed today, and it is increasingly a disaster for innocent bystanders bereft of oil and gas. And it is increasingly the Indian Ocean that matters: specifically the sea lanes from Hormuz to Malacca, which handle a significant portion of both oil/gas trade and goods trade globally.

Geopolitics and Geoeconomics

It is a reasonable conjecture that the locus of power has shifted over the centuries: in the 19th century, the Atlantic was supreme; in the 20th century, the Pacific; and in the 21st century, the most important ocean is the Indian Ocean. Asia has returned to the centre stage. In support of this assertion, see how the economic centre of gravity of the world has returned to the vicinity of India, after the European colonial interlude.

It is, therefore, appropriate to ask what it would take for India to regain its former keystone role in the Indian Ocean. Of course, geography offers it to the country on a platter. From both Alfred Thayer Mahan’s theory of naval power, and from Nicholas Spykman’s Rimland theory, India could, or should, be the dominant power in the region: it is almost literally India’s ocean.

Mahan’s ideas, updated for today, suggest that a strong navy should protect a large merchant marine fleet, manage trade, and control choke points. The preferred hardware may have changed from battleships to aircraft carriers and especially nuclear submarines these days, but the basic idea remains: speak softly but carry a big stick with a force-projection navy.

Spykman’s Rimland theory seems more appropriate in current circumstances than the Heartland theory popularised by Halford MacKinder. The Eurasian landmass may well be subject to control by a coastal hegemon or an alliance that controls the sea lanes and choke points. Despite pipelines and rail-borne containers, maritime trade still dominates.

Spice Route versus Silk Road

A stark reminder of this is the comparison between the fabled ‘Silk Road’ and the ancient ‘Spice Route’. Despite all the breathless propaganda about the Silk Road, it is abundantly clear that sea-borne trade was an order of magnitude greater, because a caravan of 500 camels, braving deserts, robbers and so on across Central Asia couldn’t possibly carry more than 100 tonnes of goods; whereas an ocean-going stitched teak ship, like a single uru from Beypore, Kerala, could easily carry 400 tonnes. And the monsoon winds provided predictable, seasonal propulsion.

India’s prowess was built on the monsoons. By mastering the seasonal winds, Indian mariners turned the ocean into a highway. This made India the supreme trading power. Merchants from Rome and Egypt traded with Chinese and Southeast Asian counterparts on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts, leaving behind troves of coins as evidence.

The Switch

The remarkable thing is that these merchants did not even need to meet each other physically, because India provided the “multi-protocol switch”: translating their diverse needs and offering the conveniences of an entrepot, while also producing coveted, high-value products such as black pepper. For example, a Greek buyer could buy something from a Chinese seller, and settle the transaction using Indian credit.

And how did India do it? By providing the “switching fabric”, such as the ports, the credit systems, and the security, that allowed these disparate worlds to exchange products and wealth without ever meeting.

This is much like what a network gateway such as TIBCO does for packets of different kinds of data (in passing, how appropriate that TIBCO was founded by an Indian-American, Vivek Ranadive!). Hardware switches, e.g. from Cisco Systems, have been around for a while, but TIBCO abstracted that functionality in software to connect those with different protocols.

India already has many of the ingredients of the switching fabric in the India Stack. Using protocols like UPI, e-KYC, Account Aggregation, Central Bank Digital Currency, and ONDC, especially along with distributed-ledger blockchain-based smart contracts, it should be possible to provide end-to-end transparent and reliable multi-party trade support which complements the SWIFT payment system. Complement, not necessarily replace.

The same pattern held with India’s age-old trade system. The ports were on the Malabar Coast, such as Muziris; on the Coromandel Coast, such as Arikkamedu; and on the Konkan Coast, such as Bharuchcha. The credit systems were run by temples which acted as both bankers and venture capitalists for the trading guilds. The security: well, that’s what Rajendra Chola demonstrated in 1025 CE.

Alas, medieval India lost its maritime focus. So did China. Both became insular, and were overwhelmed by invaders, including Turks and Europeans. In India’s case, the Turkish invaders were land-focused powers; although there were isolated maritime attempts (e.g. the Maratha Navy, Travancore defeating the Dutch in an amphibious battle at Colachel in 1741, etc.)

Now, however, there are new ports. The most interesting of them is the Port of Trivandrum (Vizhinjam). This deep-water container transhipment port is only 10 nautical miles away from the Hormuz-Malacca sea lanes, and now when Dubai is closed, it reportedly has a backlog of 100 container ships waiting to be berthed. Then there is the upcoming Vadhavan container port in Maharashtra, and the Galathea Bay container port in Great Nicobar, which overlooks the mouth of Malacca.

Pax Indica today

The modern idea of Pax Indica borrows from both perspectives: hard power and a switch. An Internet search brings up the fact that it was my friend Bapa Rao and I who first started talking about it in terms of India being the benevolent hegemon in the Indian Ocean, way back in the 1990s.

Later, Shashi Tharoor wrote in his 2011 book Pax Indica that it could be “a peace system based on cooperation, stability, and rule-based order in Asia and beyond, in which rising India helps shape the rules of the road rather than impose its will through hegemony.” That is, along roughly the same lines as the “multi-protocol switch” or entrepot concept.

Pax Indica is not an empire; it is an ecosystem. There are three aspects: military power, the full exploration of the multiprotocol switch, and the port-led development policy. Bapa Rao and I will consider these in a future article. Briefly, though, here is what these entail.

1. Project Power: Use a 3-carrier, 18-24-submarine navy to ensure no single power can close the ocean’s gates.

2. Enable Trade: Use the Digital India Stack to act as the “Multi-Protocol Switch” for a fragmented world, plus super-ports like Vizhinjam (Trivandrum).

3. Secure the Choke Points: Be ready, like the Cholas, to act decisively when a “Srivijaya-style” blockade threatens the common good.

Hard power needs to come through the acquisition of a blue-water navy: at least three aircraft carrier groups, one for the Arabian Sea (Hormuz), one for the Bay of Bengal (Malacca), and one in maintenance, refit and upgrades.

Even though drones and missiles have rendered them less dominant than in earlier times, carrier groups are still important for air superiority and power projection. But an ever more critical factor is “area denial” by nuclear attack submarines (SSBNs) that can launch second-strike nuclear missiles as part of the “triad”, of which India should have at least three to four. In addition, there should be at least a dozen silent AIP-equipped diesel-electrics for securing straits, and at least 6-12 SSNs (possibly leased) to enhance blue-water reach.

“The IOR must become an Indian lake,” said General Raj Shukla on ‘X’. I agree: Not as a territory of conquest, but as a sanctuary of trade, where India sits at the centre, as the protocol provider that makes world trade work again, as in millennia past. – Firstpost, 29 April 2026

› Rajeev Srinivasan writes on strategy and innovation. He has worked at Bell Labs and in Silicon Valley, and has taught innovation at several IIMs.

10th Century Indian Ocean Trade

The Fallacy of Hope – Carlo Pizzati

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Hope

Hope, in the end, is not liberation but one of its obstacles; the belief that tomorrow will redeem us, that history has a direction; that our suffering serves a purpose; that the arc of the universe bends towards anything at all. – Carlo Pizzati

Hopelessness exists only for those addicted to hope. If you avoid falling in the traps of hope, you will be safe from hopelessness. Then you will discover there can be serenity and even happiness. Without hope. Asian thought has preached this for centuries, yet, lately, some Asian thinkers seem to forget this important lesson. They seem to stumble more and more often on the allure of hope, which is also the typical feeling that can emerge when a year ends and a new one begins, and we feel compelled to hope for a better one.

However, even some European thinkers have long been aware of the dangers of a path strewn with the blossoms of hope. When asked why he had declared that as you age you become more cheerful, Italian poet and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini answered: “Because when you have less of a future, you have less hope, and this gives you great relief.”

Hope is not universal. It’s a strongly Western construct, rooted in a prevail­ing branch of Christian theology and on the Enlightenment’s faith in progress.

To embrace hope as a moral obliga­tion is to remain captive to frameworks that mistake their own psychological architecture for human nature.

The true heroic act is the non-hopeful, clear-eyed confrontation with the pres­ent, rather than the hopeful quest for an imagined future victory.

Hope, as the West understands it, de­scends from Christian eschatology. It’s the promise of salvation, the kingdom to come, the resurrection that redeems all suffering.

In Christianity, hope has become a value that is not merely permitted but commanded. It’s the theological virtue that bridges the chasm between a fallen present and a perfected future. Saint Paul wrote that “hope does not disappoint,” binding the faithful to what is not yet, tied to a tomorrow that justifies today’s pain.

This Christian temporality, or the con­stant deferral of fulfilment, permeates sec­ular Western thought with the persistence of a genetic code. Enlightenment philoso­phies of progress, Hegelian dialectics, Marxist visions of historical materialism, even liberal dreams of expanding rights and freedoms: these are all structured by hope, by the conviction that history moves towards something better, that our striv­ing will be rewarded in time.

Yet for much of the world’s philo­sophical traditions, hope is not a virtue but a trap, not a solution but the prob­lem itself. In Buddhism, hope—asa—is a form of tanha, the craving or thirst that generates suffering. The Second Noble Truth teaches that suffering arises from desire, from our insistence that reality should be other than it is.

Hope is simply desire projected into the future. It’s the refusal to accept the present moment in its fullness and its pain. The Buddhist path does not run through hope but through its dissolu­tion. Liberation, nirvana, comes not from hoping for a better future but from extin­guishing the very mechanism of craving that makes hope possible. The Dham­mapada states: “Those who are free from selfish attachments, who have mastered their senses and passions, enjoy peace.” This peace is fundamentally incompat­ible with hope, which always involves attachment to what is not yet, to what may never be.

Daoist philosophy offers a parallel in­sight, though in a different key. The Da­odejing teaches wu wei, effortless action, the art of responding to circumstances without imposing desires upon them. To hope is to assert the ego’s will against the flow of dao, to demand that reality conform to our expectations rather than dancing with what is.

Zhuangzi wrote of the sage who “roams freely” precisely because he has no fixed outcomes in mind, no hopes to defend or mourn. Freedom, in this view, is not found through hoping for change but through releasing the need for any particular change to occur.

In Vedantic philosophy, hope is part of the illusion of maya, the veil that keeps us from recognising the eternal present of brahman. So long as we hope, we are locked in the world of becoming, blind to the truth of being. Nisargadatta Maharaj taught: “Wisdom lies in never forgetting the Self as the ever-present Source of both the experiencer and his experience.” To hope is to forget this, to imagine that ful­filment lies somewhere other than here, sometime other than now.

When we hope, we project ourselves out of the present and into an imagined future. We do not inhabit what is; we dwell in what we wish will be. Consider the mechanics: I love you, but you want to return to your ex. I hope you’ll come back to me. This hope is not love; it is suffering disguised as love, desire masquerading as devotion

These are not nihilistic philosophies, despite how they may sound to Western ears trained to hear any critique of hope as some form of depressing and fatalistic de­spair. Rather, they describe a different re­lationship to action and to the world: one that does not require the fiction of hope to sustain ethical life. They propose that we can act, create, resist, and love without the crutch of believing things will improve, without the narcotic of imagining our­selves on the right side of history.

Hope operates through temporal displacement, and this is its fundamen­tal violence. When we hope, we project ourselves out of the present and into an imagined future. We do not inhabit what is; we dwell in what we wish will be. Consider the mechanics: I love you, but you want to return to your ex. I hope you’ll come back to me. This hope is not love; it is suffering disguised as love, desire masquerading as devotion. I lack what I desire, and in my imagination, I possess what I might gain.

Hope keeps me suspended in this lack, unable to accept the present real­ity, unable to live without the fantasy of fulfilment. People who hope are never where they are; they are always some­where else, in a future that doesn’t exist, nursing a possibility that may be noth­ing more than self-deception.

This is how hope always functions, in love and in politics, in personal life and in collective struggle. It trains us to wait rather than to act, to defer rather than to engage. In hoping, we exchange the challenging work of presence for the seductive comfort of fantasy.

Hope is sort of a spiritual credit card: we purchase emotional comfort now by mortgaging the present to an imagined future, ac­cumulating a debt that can never be repaid because the future never actually arrives. It is always coming, always just beyond reach, always justifying today’s inaction or today’s endurance of the unendurable.

Hope is a concept which has been misconstrued within Christian theol­ogy as well. In the Bible, Jesus Christ often speaks of faith and love, but he is never recorded as having pronounced the word ‘hope’.

One could argue that hope actually undermines the acceptance dictated by faith in the divine. Ital­ian poet Dante Alighieri understood something that modernity has forgot­ten, something that sits uncomfortably with our compulsory optimism. In Paradise in the Divine Comedy the blessed do not hope. They contemplate the present beauty of God without reference to past regret or future longing. They are be­atified not because they hope for some­thing beyond themselves but because they are fully rooted in the now.

We can act because the action itself is right, because it expresses our values in this moment, because it is the response that the present demands according to our set of values, not because we hope it will produce a particular future. This is the difference between hope-driven action and what might be called present action.

Beatitude does not come through hope but through its transcendence, through the capacity to notice, accept, and celebrate what is, even when what is includes pain. The blessed have moved beyond hoping because they have dis­covered something hope always ob­scures: the sufficiency of the present moment.

Similarly, in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna doesn’t tell Arjuna to “hope for the best.” He tells him to act without attachment to outcomes, nishkama karma. Devotional traditions like Bhakti allow hope in di­vine grace, but the ideal is surrender, not at all the anx­ious expectations feeding Western neurosis. Hindu texts like the Vivekachuda­mani suggest that the pin­nacle of spiritual existence is to be “perfectly hopeless”, without expectation for a separate, eternal life in the material sense. It is not despair, but a state of complete detachment, vairagya, and self-sufficiency, where one is not bound by the anxiety of what the future may bring.

Even in circumstances of great suffer­ing, perhaps especially then, it remains possible to act without hope. When the present is agonising, when injustice seems insurmountable, we can still respond. But our response need not be grounded in the belief that things will improve, that history bends towards justice, that our efforts will be rewarded. This is the great lie that hope tells: that action requires the promise of success, that resistance needs the guarantee of victory, that we cannot stand for justice unless we believe justice will prevail.

We can act because the action itself is right, because it expresses our values in this moment, because it is the response that the present demands according to our set of values, not because we hope it will produce a particular future.

This is the difference between hope-driven action and what might be called present action: the former is always held hostage by outcomes, always vulnerable to despair when things don’t improve; the latter is free, autonomous, complete in itself. The lover who can remain pres­ent without hoping for reciprocation is blessed. The activist who can resist op­pression without hoping for victory is free. The artist who can create without hoping for recognition inhabits a dif­ferent quality of life. These are not ex­amples of resignation or passivity. They describe a more radical engagement with reality, one that does not require the crutch of hope to justify itself, one that finds its meaning in the act rather than in the outcome.

What would it mean to resist with­out hoping? To create without the prom­ise of success? To act justly without the consolation that justice will prevail? It would mean confronting the present in its full reality, without the analgesic of future redemption. It would mean rec­ognising that the anguish we feel when watching images from Gaza, witness­ing the failures of institutions, living through the collapse of old certainties is itself the truth we must inhabit, not a problem that hope will solve.

The anguish is the message. The hor­ror is the reality. And no amount of hop­ing will change this; hope only distances us from what is actually happening, allows us to look away by focusing on what might be.

This is harder than hoping. Although when our perception of reality is filled with anxieties this seems counterin­tuitive, in reality hope is easy, because it allows us to look away from what is by focusing on what might be. Presence is difficult; it requires us to bear what we see, to act without guarantee, to love without possession, to resist without the promise of victory. Hope offers comfort; presence offers only clarity. But only in this difficulty does freedom lie. Only by abandoning hope can we discover what Zhuangzi called “free and easy wander­ing,” what the Buddha called “the extinc­tion of craving,” what Dante glimpsed in his vision of Paradise: a life no longer en­slaved by the future, no longer torment­ed by the not-yet, no longer dependent on outcomes we cannot control.

Hope, in the end, is not liberation but one of its obstacles; the belief that tomorrow will redeem us, that history has a direction; that our suffering serves a purpose; that the arc of the universe bends towards anything at all. The truly radical gesture is to set hope aside. To act justly because justice is right, not because we believe it will triumph. To create beauty because beauty is its own justification, not because we hope it will change the world. To resist oppres­sion because resistance expresses our humanity, not because we trust it will succeed. To love because love is what we choose to do, not because we hope to be loved in return. – Open, 25 December 2025

› Carlo Pizzati is an award-winning multilingual author and journalist who has lived in India since 2010, currently residing in the fishing village of Paramankeni with his wife, author Tishani Doshi. He currently works as a political analyst and editorialist for La Stampa and contributes to The Hindu and Open.

Buddha Quote

Hellhole Nation: The mirror America refuses to look into – Sanbeer Singh Ranhotra

VOI

Opportunity vs Crisis in the US.

The reflexive American assumption that it sits above other societies in the hierarchy of civilisation—that it has earned the right to view the rest of the world as a collection of hellholes from which it extracts talent—is not a position sustained by evidence. It is a posture and an increasingly threadbare one. – Sanbeer Singh Ranhotra 

When conservative radio host Michael Savage described India and China as “hellholes” in a screed about birthright citizenship, it would have been unremarkable—the kind of fringe provocation that bounces around American conservative media most weeks. What made it different was that Donald Trump reposted it on Truth Social, without comment, for his nearly 100 million followers. India’s foreign ministry called it “uninformed, inappropriate and in poor taste”.

This is, in miniature, how the American myth corrodes. Not usually through a single outburst, but through what the powerful choose to endorse and what they choose to ignore. A country that has spent decades marketing itself as a beacon for the talented, the ambitious and the persecuted now has a president who approvingly circulates content describing two of the oldest civilisations on earth as “hellholes”—civilisations that predate the United States by several thousand years, that built universities when Europe was still in its Dark Ages, and that gave the world mathematics, philosophy, and systems of governance that America’s founders openly admired.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a February 2026 survey of Indian Americans conducted with YouGov, found that 40 per cent—14 per cent frequently and 26 per cent occasionally—have thought about leaving the United States altogether. The most cited reason, mentioned by 58 per cent of those considering departure, was frustration with US politics. Around 54 per cent flagged rising costs of living, and 41 per cent cited safety concerns. These are not recent arrivals with shallow roots. Indian Americans number more than 5.4 million, form one of the most economically productive immigrant communities in the country’s history, and have built careers, companies and families in the US over decades. Their disillusionment, even if not all of them act on it, is worth taking seriously.

The broader pattern the survey documents is arguably more telling than the departure numbers. Nearly a third of respondents said they had stopped discussing politics on social media out of fear of discrimination. One in five reported avoiding leaving and re-entering the United States—a profound chilling effect, given that many Indian Americans on work visas depend on routine international travel. Nineteen per cent said they avoided wearing Indian dress in public. This is a community modifying its visible identity in a country that has built an entire self-image around celebrating visible diversity.

None of this emerged from nowhere. The “nation of immigrants” narrative that America exports—through its culture, its universities, and its diplomacy—has always had a fine-print clause that most immigrants discover only after arrival. The warmth was historically calibrated by origin. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 explicitly barred Chinese labourers. The Immigration Act of 1924 used national origin quotas designed to limit arrivals from Southern Europe, Eastern Europe and Asia while keeping the door open for Northern Europeans. The Bracero Program brought Mexican agricultural workers in to pick American crops, then systematically deported them when the harvest was done. The pattern recurs: welcome the labour, manage the person, and expel the inconvenience.

What has changed in the current period is not the substance of this calculation but its openness. Previous administrations practised selective exclusion through bureaucratic friction—visa backlogs, H-1B uncertainty, and green card queues stretching decades for Indian nationals. The current administration is practising it more plainly. Mass deportation operations, executive orders on birthright citizenship challenged immediately in courts, and rhetoric that frames immigration primarily as a security threat and an economic displacement. The message being sent, whatever the legal outcome of any specific policy, is legible to anyone paying attention.

It is worth pausing on what the “hellhole” framing implies about America’s self-image, because the implicit comparison does not survive scrutiny. In 2024, the K-12 School Shooting Database logged 336 gun incidents on school property in the United States—roughly six or seven per week. Education Week, using the strictest definition of shootings that caused injuries or deaths during school hours, counted 39. Both figures are accurate; they measure different things. But even by the narrowest count, that is more than three incidents a month in which a child was shot at school. Firearms are the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers, ahead of car accidents and cancer—a distinction no other wealthy democracy holds. India and China have serious, well-documented problems. However, they are not countries where parents rehearse active-shooter drills with eight-year-olds before the school day begins.

The reflexive American assumption that it sits above other societies in the hierarchy of civilisation—that it has earned the right to view the rest of the world as a collection of hellholes from which it extracts talent—is not a position sustained by evidence. It is a posture and an increasingly threadbare one.

What the Carnegie survey also reveals, somewhat ironically, is the durability of American pull even under these conditions. When asked to advise a hypothetical professional considering whether to move to the US for work, 62 per cent of Indian American respondents still recommended applying for a US work visa. Dissatisfaction with American politics, in other words, has not yet translated into a wholesale rejection of American opportunity. The country’s universities, its capital markets, its infrastructure for innovation—these remain genuinely formidable. The unease is real, but it coexists with continued engagement.

That coexistence may not last indefinitely. The 40 per cent who have considered leaving skews younger and more educated. Of those contemplating departure, only a quarter named India as their likely destination—most are thinking about Canada, Australia or European countries with more stable immigration environments. This is the talent drain that American business leaders have begun to flag with some urgency to the administration, largely without visible effect. When a country tells its most productive immigrants, repeatedly and in public, that they were never fully welcome, some of them eventually believe it.

The American republic was not built on a graveyard, only metaphorically. Its founding involved the systematic displacement and erasure of Indigenous peoples and the forced labour of enslaved Africans, facts that its founding mythology has worked for two centuries to absorb, minimise or simply talk around. The immigrant narrative that replaced and overlaid that founding story was always conditional—a shifting standard applied differently depending on who was arriving and what the political economy of the moment required.

What is perhaps new now is that the conditionality is being stated so plainly, and at such volume, that it is becoming impossible to bracket as a fringe position. When a sitting president amplifies content describing India as a hellhole, the defence that he was merely reposting someone else’s words is technically true and functionally meaningless. The repost was the endorsement. And for 40 per cent of Indian Americans currently wondering whether the US still has a place for them, the distinction between authorship and amplification is not a comfort. – Firstpost, 25 April 2026

› Sanbeer Singh Ranhotra is a columnist for Firstpost, with an interest in world politics and South Asia.

Epstein waits for Trump in Hell

Two visions of India’s future at the beginning of British rule – Arvind Sharma

VOI

Raja Rammohun Roy

Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1772/74-1833) and Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) are two well-known public intellectuals of their times, both of whom presented a vision of the future of India which, at the time of their writing, had passed under British rule. The visions of both pertained to how this rule was likely to unfold, and to end.

I present below their visions in their own words, as I was struck by the similarity between the two, despite their radically different backgrounds.

Raja Ram Mohan Roy wrote as follows in a letter to an English friend in 1828:

“Supposing that one hundred years hence the Native character become elevated from constant intercourse with Europeans and the acquirement of general and political knowledge as well as of modern arts and sciences, is it possible that they will not have the spirit as well as the inclination to resist effectually any unjust and oppressive measures serving to degrade them in the scale of society? It should not be lost sight of that the position of India is very different from that of Ireland, to any quarter of which an English fleet may suddenly convey a body of troops that may force its way in the requisite direction and succeed in suppressing every effort of a refractory spirit. Were India to share one fourth of the knowledge and energy of that country, she would prove from her remote situation, her riches and her vast population, either useful and profitable as a willing province, an ally of the British Empire, or troublesome and annoying as a determined enemy.” – Ram Mohan Roy, The English Works of Rammohun Roy, edited by Kalidas Nag and Deba Jyoti Burman [Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1945-58], vol. 4, p. 103. See also Stephen Haye, editor, Sources of Indian Tradition, 2nd edition [New York: Columbia University Press, 1988], vol. 2, pp. 33-34.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

And Thomas Babington Macaulay declared, in the British Parliament, in the first half of the nineteenth century:

“The destinies of our Indian empire are covered with thick darkness. It is difficult to form any conjecture as to the fate reserved for a state which resembles no other in history, and which forms by itself a separate class of political phenomena. The laws which regulate its growth and its decay are still unknown to us. It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that, having become instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or to retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history. To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition, to have so ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title to glory all our own. The sceptre may pass away from us. Unforeseen accidents may derange our most profound schemes of policy. Victory may be inconstant to our arms. But there are triumphs which are followed by no reverse. There is an empire exempt from all natural causes of decay. Those triumphs are the pacific triumphs of reason over barbarism; that empire is the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws.” – Thomas Babington Macaulay, Essays, Critical and Miscellaneous [Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1844], vol. 1, pp. 167-68. See also Arvind Sharma, The Ruler’s Gaze [Noida: Harper Collins Publishers, 2017], pp. 95-96.

What strikes one, on reading these two passages, is the remarkable convergence between these two visions, despite the radically different backgrounds of these two intellectuals.

However, in order to see this convergence, one has to dive deeper into the passages and read between the lines. Both of them are hinting at a future in which the Indians may demand ‘European institutions’. I see this as a call for the possibility, which both of them foresaw, but could not articulate at the time directly, namely, a demand by the Indians to bring an end to British rule. Both of them had gazed at the crystal ball and seen something similar––Indians demanding an end to the status quo. Or to put it more bluntly: an end to British rule. And both were uncannily prescient in foreseeing this. – News18, 15 february 2026

› Prof. Arvind Sharma, formerly in the IAS, is the Birks Professor of Comparative Religion at McGill University in Montreal Canada.

Jana Gana Mana: How a British lie became India’s most persistent myth – S. Bhattacharya

VOI

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941)

Jana Gana Mana was neither written for King George V nor sung in his honour. The misconception arose in the overlap between the Congress leadership’s eagerness to ingratiate themselves with the visiting monarch and the British propaganda apparatus, always poised to exploit an opportunity. – Samik Bhattacharya

Even today, many still fall for the British-spawned myth about Jana Gana Mana, a song that was always an ode to India’s soul. How did such a distortion come into being? It arose from the convergence of two forces: the Congress leadership’s eagerness to ingratiate themselves with the Emperor, and the calculated manoeuvring of the British propaganda apparatus. At the time, several Congress leaders wished that Rabindranath Tagore compose a song in honour of King George V, to be performed at the Congress session.

In the ceaseless churn of falsehood, even gods may fall from grace, so goes the old saying. But fewer know that, in a similar vortex of falsehood, Rabindranath Tagore himself was once cast as a “British loyalist.” The irony is that the old Congress ought to have known better, for it was their silent complicity that allowed the British press to malign Tagore so effectively. One hundred and fourteen years have passed, and yet that slander still drifts through our collective memory as a stubborn myth. Many continue to be ensnared by it; a Member of Parliament was its most recent victim. But the BJP, as a party, has never endorsed the notion that Tagore composed Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka Jaya Hey in praise of King George V.

The year was 1911. From 26 to 28 December, the Indian National Congress held its session in Calcutta. It was there that Jana Gana Mana was first sung publicly. On the morning of 27 December, accompanied by Dinendranath Tagore’s musical arrangement and performed by a chorus of young boys and girls, the song resonated through the Congress pavilion.

It is true that King George V was visiting India at that time. But the song was neither written for him nor sung in his honour. How, then, did this misconception arise? It germinated in the overlap between the Congress leadership’s eagerness to ingratiate themselves with the monarch and the British propaganda apparatus, always poised to exploit an opportunity.

Many Congress leaders, wishing to please the Emperor, wanted Rabindranath to write a song honouring George V for the Congress session. This proposal reached Tagore through the barrister and Congress leader Ashutosh Chaudhuri. He was annoyed and indeed disappointed. He had no objection to writing a song for the Congress session, but to write one in praise of George V, he flatly refused.

And so, two songs were sung that day: in the morning, Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka Jaya Hey; in the evening, Badshah Hamara, composed by Rambhaja Dutta Chowdhuri. A glance at their language makes it immediately clear which song lauded the Emperor and which did not.

Rambhaja Dutta Chowdhuri, a Congress leader from Punjab, happened to be Tagore’s nephew-in-law, married to Sarala Devi Chaudhurani. Since Tagore would not grant the request routed through Ashutosh Chaudhuri, another Congress leader within the extended family took up the task and composed a loyal hymn for the British “Badshah.”

If this is what truly occurred, how then did the contrary myth take root? It was, quite simply, a British stratagem. The morning after Jana Gana Mana was sung at the Congress session, three English newspapers—including The Statesman and The Englishman—published identical claims that Tagore had written the song in honour of King George V. All three were faithful mouthpieces of the colonial regime. Their synchronised reports forged a falsehood that, over time, solidified into “truth.” Thus, an empty fiction grew into a vast national myth, still alive in our discourse today. Even in independent India, several eminent figures repeated this error, unaware that they were only echoing a lie crafted by the British.

Tagore himself attempted more than once to correct the distortion. On 20 November 1937, in Bichitra, and again on 29 March 1939, in Purbasha, he wrote with a mixture of pain and indignation, compelled to dismantle the persistent falsehood. He confessed that he felt insulted by such wilful misinterpretation. “I did not write this song for any George the Fifth or George the Sixth,” he stated unequivocally. The song, he clarified, was dedicated to those eternal, illumined spirits who had guided India since the dawn of civilisation. Yet, despite his own testimony, the slander survived.

In the 1990s, I myself intervened to save a political colleague from repeating the same old error. I was then active in the youth wing of the party. At a national event, I heard someone invoke the fable linking Jana Gana Mana to George V’s visit to India. I corrected him on the spot. L.K. Advani was present on that very stage. Yet even today, some continue to perpetuate the mistake.

A carefully researched essay by MP Sukhendu Sekhar Roy also sets forth the true facts. The piece rests on firm documentary evidence. Another work, Jatiyo Sangeet-er Utso Sondhane, sheds further light on the matter. Anyone in doubt may consult these sources.

Let me restate the essence plainly. On the evening of 27 December 1911, Badshah Humara was sung at the Congress session in honour of King George V. But that morning, Jana Gana Mana, sung at the very same venue, had no connection whatsoever to the Emperor. Just as the “Aryan invasion theory” is an unverified myth, so too is the claim that Tagore composed his song for George V. Many remain afflicted by this myth. But as a party, we do not endorse it; it has never been our agenda.

And to those now raising a hue and cry over the personal opinion of one BJP MP, do they remember what their own party once did to Tagore after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre?

When news of the atrocity reached him, Tagore wished to travel to Punjab with Mohandas Gandhi. He sent a messenger, but Gandhi did not respond. Tagore then urged Chittaranjan Das to organise a protest meeting in Kolkata. Chittaranjan Das asked whether Tagore would preside. Tagore agreed. Later, he was asked whether he would deliver the principal address. He agreed again. Then Chittaranjan Das suggested that Tagore himself should organise the meeting. Irritated and disillusioned, Tagore ceased further communication with the Congress leaders. Instead, he renounced his knighthood, turning his protest into a thunderous moral gesture that echoed across the world. – News18, 5 December 2026

› Samik Bhattacharya is the BJP WB President and Rajya Sabha MP.

Tagore's translation of "Jana Gana Mana" on 28 February 1919, at the Besant Theosophical College.

2 – Was India’s knowledge elitist? – Michel Danino

VOI

Book Knowledge

Thomas Babington Macaulay … declared that traditional Indian knowledge consists of “false history, false astronomy, false medicine … in company with a false religion”, many Indian academics and intellectuals have implicitly or explicitly accepted that knowledge from the West is the real thing. – Prof. Michel Danino

Indian civilization’s obsession with knowledge was our last “master idea,” with endless and still poorly explored contributions in nearly every field (“India as a Knowledge Creator”). But there is another side to the story, which in many ways characterizes the paradox of Indian culture.

No Indian university, IIT or IIM has a regular, comprehensive course on Indian knowledge systems (IKS) (though IIT Gandhinagar made a beginning a few years ago). There are, no doubt, a few scattered courses on systems of ancient science (IIT Bombay and Kharagpur), and a few universities teach courses on Indian philosophical systems or even “Indology”, whatever that means. By and large, however, indifference, neglect, or hostility to IKS is the rule.

All three are part of India’s colonial legacy: ever since Thomas Babington Macaulay, a powerful British figure of the first half of the nineteenth century, declared that traditional Indian knowledge consists of “false history, false astronomy, false medicine … in company with a false religion”, many Indian academics and intellectuals have implicitly or explicitly accepted that knowledge from the West is the real thing.

Our philosophy courses cover mostly European philosophy; the same goes with psychology (from which yogic systems of self-knowledge are generally excluded); contemporary Indian literature is often studied; classical texts rarely are. Students of Ayurveda are compelled to devote much time to modern medicine, but not vice versa. Political scientists generally know nothing of the systems of polity that prevailed in ancient India. And so forth. In 1946, the freedom-fighter and statesman K.M. Munshi wrote: “Modern education in India assumes that Indian culture is dead, only requiring post-mortem dissection, and that a new culture can be developed by imitating the West. No attention is paid to the importance of a ceaseless reintegration.”

That accounts for the indifference and neglect. But why hostility? I see it essentially as a survival of the colonial-cum-missionary stereotype that Indian knowledge systems were “elitist”, “upper caste” when not “Brahminical”, and denied to the lower castes and “untouchables”. Such declarations are usually based on a few Dharma Shastra texts prohibiting the teaching of the Vedas to lower castes. Granted, those texts and a few more were Brahminical and set down a caste-based order for the society.

However, the said society was far from circumscribed or defined by a few orthodox texts. A careful look at the mechanisms of transmission of knowledge gives a very different picture. “Brahminical” texts of mathematics produced number systems and calculation methods that were, in time, adopted by the population at large, down to the carpenter and the farmer. Astronomy created calendars that punctuated people’s lives and stood behind astrology and the ever-popular panchangas (almanacs).

Architecture was rooted in Vedic principles but practised by Vishvakarmas: technically Shudras, they often regarded themselves as higher than the Brahmins in their application of those concepts to temple construction and iconography (for the making of bronze or stone images), and themselves wrote manuscripts in both Sanskrit and regional languages. So too, texts of medicine, metallurgy, agriculture, animal and plant treatment, water management and other civil engineering techniques, were often written by the practitioners of those disciplines rather than by “upper caste” theoreticians.

All this points to a sustained, intense and complex dialogue between the Shastras (the theories or systems) and the popular practices (loka parampara). From the Ayurvedic classic which declares that for the knowledge of medicinal plants one should consult the hunter or the tribal, to Kautilya’s Arthashastra which explains how the quality of a metal ore is to be assessed through its taste and smell, this dialogue has clearly enriched the two sides, if at all there are sides. In literature and the arts, it is the much-discussed marga-desi interplay, or classic (generally pan-Indian and Sanskritic) vs. popular (regional and often non-Sanskritic) texts and art forms. Again, it is a story of mutual enrichment, with classical forms often emerging from popular ones and eventually influencing them back. This is perceptible in the epic genre (Mahabharata and Ramayana), in all performing arts (drama, dance, music), and in sculpture. A scholar friend of mine has compared this interaction to the double helix of the DNA molecule; as the helices, though joined by numerous bridges, never meet, I prefer the symbol of Hermes’s caduceus with its two intertwined snakes.

In 1920, Sri Aurobindo wrote to his younger brother, “I believe that the main cause of India’s weakness is not subjection, nor poverty, nor a lack of spirituality or Dharma, but a diminution of thought-power, the spread of ignorance in the motherland of Knowledge. Everywhere I see an inability or unwillingness to think—incapacity of thought or ‘thought-phobia’.” The last term perfectly applies to our cultural negationists of the day. Indian knowledge systems were not “elitist” or exclusivist, even if specialized fields did exist for the various castes. Overall, while they invoked lofty concepts, they were often remarkably pragmatic. No, they did not tell us how to construct vimanas or nuclear weapons; instead, they sought to equip the society with all the tools it needed for a complete development in the material, aesthetic, intellectual, ethical and spiritual fields. – The New Indian Express, 31 December 2018

› Prof. Michel Danino is a French-born Indian author, scholar of ancient India, and former educator at IIT Gandhinagar.

Saraswati Pija Kolkata

1 – India as a knowledge creator – Michel Danino

VOI

Hand of Knowledge

The India that was a creator of knowledge, has become a consumer rather than a supplier in the market. Two centuries of colonial dominance certainly played a part, but we have enjoyed seven decades of independence. Clearly, as a nation we have not done justice to Indian knowledge systems, which no Indian university teaches today except in bits and pieces. – Prof. Michel Danino

Launched with great fanfare in 2005, India’s National Knowledge Commission claimed to work “towards a Knowledge Society”, an objective which Dr. Manmohan Singh, then prime minister, repeated on many public platforms. It sounded quite noble, but few noticed how it implied that India was not yet a “knowledge society”, and perhaps never was one. Paradoxically, such a statement reflects a profound ignorance of the cult of—almost obsession for—knowledge in pre-modern India.

Indeed, India is the only ancient civilisation where knowledge was deified, with the honour going to Sarasvati. (Other cultures’ pantheons did often include knowledge, but only as a peripheral attribute.) Now, this fine move perhaps does not take us very far in practice—how do we assess whether knowledge was genuinely worshipped, or at least revered? We have a choice of methods; two will help us here, deviating from the stock answer that “Veda” comes from vid, or “knowledge”, that Upanishads view the knowledge of the Self as the highest knowledge, or that moksha is really liberation from ignorance—an objective shared by the Buddha. All that is fine, and perhaps essential; in the nineteenth century, however, it helped stereotype Indians as being “contemplative” or “otherworldly.” Let us be, therefore, crudely empirical.

A first answer comes from estimates of the number of manuscripts available in Indian libraries, repositories or private collections. They run into millions, with the U.S. scholar David Pingree once reaching an educated guess of 30 millions. This figure is but a tiny fraction of the mass of production over the last three millenniums, since numerous texts disappeared owing either to destruction (Nalanda’s library is an oft-cited case), the vagaries of time, neglect or obsolescence. A tiny fraction, again, of this figure has been published, and a much tinier fraction translated into some other language. We are therefore judging the mass of knowledge created in India by the tip of the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

What do those manuscripts deal with? Every topic under the Indian sun: 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, brain teasers, omens, ghosts, accounting, and much more—there are even manuscripts on how to preserve manuscripts! The production was colossal and in almost every regional language (with, expectedly, Sanskrit having the lion’s share).

The second answer comes from formal or informal educational institutions, the humble gurukula or the large Buddhist monasteries. A great concern in imparting knowledge—both inner and outer—is perceptible through a number of texts and inscriptions, and struck several European travellers to India. The Italian writer and musician Pietro Della Valle reported in 1623, during his journey across Asia, “They [Indians] are particularly anxious and attentive to instruct their children to read and to write. Education with them is an early and an important business in every family.” Two centuries later, Bishop Reginald Heber, who spent a few years in India, noted, “The Hindus are brave, courteous, intelligent, most eager for knowledge and improvement.”

If India was such a creator of knowledge, how has it become a consumer rather than a supplier in this market? Two centuries of colonial dominance certainly played a part, but have we not enjoyed seven decades of independence? Clearly, as a nation we have not done justice to Indian knowledge systems, which no Indian university today teaches, except for a fragment here and a snippet there. Many scholars, Indian and non-Indian alike, have flagged this debilitating lack of self-confidence in our creative abilities, and have demanded a place for the best of classical knowledge to be given due place in our academic spaces—to no effect as yet.

Exactly a hundred years ago, Sri Aurobindo wrote: “When we look at the past of India, what strikes us … is her stupendous vitality, her inexhaustible power of life and joy of life, her almost unimaginably prolific creativeness. For three thousand years at least—it is indeed much longer—she has been creating abundantly and incessantly, lavishly, with an inexhaustible many-sidedness, republics and kingdoms and empires, philosophies and cosmogonies and sciences and creeds and arts and poems and all kinds of monuments, palaces and temples and public works, communities and societies and religious orders, laws and codes and rituals, physical sciences, psychic sciences, systems of yoga, systems of politics and administration, arts spiritual, arts worldly, trades, industries, fine crafts—the list is endless and in each item there is almost a plethora of activity.” But that was in the past; the “inexhaustible many-sidedness” seems exhausted.

Even when India’s contribution to knowledge is somehow acknowledged, it has often been characterised as “elitist”: it was reserved, we are told, for the social elite and denied to the lower castes or the casteless. Does this serious charge withstand scrutiny? This will be the object of our next exploration, and our next master idea of Indian civilisation. – The New Indian Express, 29 November 2018

› Prof Michel Danino is a French-born Indian author, scholar of ancient India, and former educator at IIT Gandhinagar.

Village School India

Confronting the many faces of Hinduphobia in the West – Arun Anand

VOI

School of Oriental and African Studies with Thiruvalluvar statue.

Hindus in the West continue to face hostility, misrepresentation, and institutional indifference. They also raise serious questions about the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion in many Western societies. To address Hinduphobia, it is important that global academic, media, and policy discourses approach Hindus and their faith with fairness, intellectual honesty, and sensitivity. – Arun Anand

A series of disturbing events in the Western world have once again brought the issue of Hinduphobia to the fore. The latest incident is an attack on a Holi celebration in Harrow in the United Kingdom.

An X post by UK Insight, a well-known public advocacy group in the UK, gave details of this incident. It said: “Local Hindu families, including women and children, gathered to celebrate peacefully. What should have been a happy occasion was disrupted when a group of Muslim youths reportedly came from a nearby mosque and attacked the event, pushing over speakers and attempting to intimidate those celebrating. After initially leaving, they returned with around 20 others and began attacking members of the gathering. Police were called and arrived approximately an hour later, taking statements from those present.”

The UK Insight group flagged this incident, emphasising: “No one celebrating a religious festival in Britain should face intimidation or violence. The right to celebrate our faith peacefully is fundamental and must be protected equally for all communities. We demand that the authorities investigate this incident thoroughly and ensure accountability. Community harmony cannot be built on silence when one group is targeted. Hindus in the UK deserve the same safety, dignity and protection as everyone else.”

It may be recalled that the UK witnessed riots in Leicester in September 2022, where Muslim mobs went on the rampage targeting Hindus after an India-Pakistan cricket match.

Incidentally, a recent report that emerged from the United Kingdom made wide-ranging allegations against the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its ideology of Hindutva in the context of these riots, while brushing the role of Muslim mobs under the carpet. Hindus, who were the victims of these riots, have been mischievously projected as the perpetrators. The report titled “Understanding the 2022 Violence in Leicester” was funded by known Hindu and India baiter George Soros through his notorious Open Society Foundation.

The report was jointly authored by the School of Oriental and African Studies, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and The Monitoring Group. The fact of the matter is that the RSS functions only in India, and yet Hindus and their philosophy were targeted in this report by dragging in the name of the RSS without any evidence.

According to the New Delhi-based think tank Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies, “A central analytical weakness of the report lies in the disconnect between what it descriptively documents and what it prescriptively recommends: it records intimidation, property damage, temple-targeting, and anti-Hindu harm, yet its principal recommendations are directed towards identifying, isolating, and confronting Hindu ideological formations.”

It further adds: “By elevating “Hindutva extremism” into the core policy category, the report risks institutionalising a framework in which Hindus are acknowledged as having suffered harm but are nevertheless rendered the primary object of institutional suspicion, monitoring, and civic management.

The report itself acknowledges verification limits in relation to some of its most politically consequential claims, including alleged involvement of Hindutva-associated actors in the 17 September march and unsupported attributions such as references to ‘Hindutva RSS thugs’. These admissions materially weaken any strong causal inference linking Leicester’s violence to organised Hindutva structures.”

Read as a whole, the report does not merely analyse Leicester; it helps construct an official-sounding interpretive framework in which anti-Hindu harms are acknowledged but subordinated to a broader narrative of Hindu ideological risk. The result is a form of institutionalised asymmetry with implications for safeguarding, equality recognition, media discourse, and the public understanding of Hinduphobia in Britain, says the CIHS’ detailed analysis of this report.

In another incident, the Harvard University’s South Asian Studies Department used derogatory images to promote the department’s Elementary Sanskrit course.

After the Coalition of Hindus of North America (COHNA) objected to these images, the department apologised and withdrew them. According to a report in Harvard’s student newspaper The Harvard Crimson, the official statement from the department read: “The South Asian Studies Department deeply regrets the posting of an insensitive image in relation to our Sanskrit programme. … As a department, we have a long and celebrated history of teaching Sanskrit, and we remain committed to teaching the language and the great intellectual and cultural tradition it carries.”

The Harvard Crimson quoted Pushpita Prasad, chief of communications at the Coalition of Hindus of North America, as saying: “It is very rare for practising Hindus and mainstream Hindu organisations to be consulted on Hinduism.”

These incidents point to a pattern where Hindus in the West continue to face hostility, misrepresentation, and institutional indifference. They also raise serious questions about the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion in many Western societies. In contrast, reality often reveals a gap between principle and practice. To address Hinduphobia, it is important that global academic, media, and policy discourses approach Hindus and their faith with fairness, intellectual honesty, and sensitivity. – News18, 11 March 2026

› Arun Anand is an author, journalist, columnist and broadcaster.

G.S. Talib Quote