Category india

The Eiffel Tower controversy and Hindu monastic practice – Bhakti Mamtora

VOI

Swaminarayan monks at the Eiffel Tower, Paris.

The Eiffel Tower episode and its subsequent media coverage reveal how personal religious disciplines can be rendered as demands for accommodation. This is especially the case within the context of French secularism, or laïcité, wherein public expressions of religiosity might have made people upset. In this environment, a little-known monastic vow can be easily misinterpreted. – Prof. Bhakti Mamtora

A visit to the Eiffel Tower by a delegation of monks representing a global Hindu religious denomination on Sept. 5, 2026, has raised broader questions about accommodating religious observances in public spaces.

Eiffel Tower workers protested with a one-day strike after tower management allegedly replaced some women employees for the duration of a 20-minute visit by monks from the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, or BAPS.

As a scholar of South Asian religions, I have studied the Swaminarayan Sampradaya, a religious community founded in India in 1801, for nearly a decade. BAPS is one of several denominations within the group. I argue that at the center of this controversy lie different reactions to a long-standing Hindu religious practice known as “brahmacharya,” which the monks of the Swaminarayan Sampradaya follow.

While it is often translated as “celibacy,” the practice is aimed more expansively at developing inner control over one’s senses to attain spiritual perfection and immerse oneself in God.

The discipline of ‘brahmacharya’

Brahmacharya is described in many premodern Indian texts, including the Yoga Sutra, dating to the early centuries C.E. This text outlines eight successive stages of yoga aimed at reaching mental tranquility through focus on God. Progress toward higher stages of yogic practice—such as “asana,” postures; “pranayama,” breathwork; and “dhyana,” meditation—hinges on the steadfast observance of “yama,” a code of conduct governing the yogi’s interaction with others. The practice of yama includes avoiding violence, dishonesty, theft and greed, and cultivating brahmacharya.

In this text and others, brahmacharya involves physical and mental practices that are observed differently by lay and monastic members of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain religious communities. Lay disciples typically uphold the vow of brahmacharya by maintaining fidelity toward their spouse. For monks and nuns, it often takes the form of absolute celibacy.

From ancient times, various monastic orders have followed a more expansive form of brahmacharya, one that restricts eight types of engagement with the opposite gender. This includes not only physical and verbal but also mental contact, where “mental” means sustained, deliberate thought. Through this practice, monastics endeavor to lead a life that is focused on God.

Textual explanation and practice

Brahmacharya in the broader sense is an important practice in a foundational text that I have studied, called the Swāmīnī Vāto, which explains the core teachings of Swaminarayan, who lived from 1781-1830 and is revered in the Swaminarayan community as God.

The Swāmīnī Vāto notes the central position of brahmacharya among the five vows that Swaminarayan Hindu monks take upon initiation: overcoming desire, greed, taste, attachments and ego. Swaminarayan monks, who practice the eightfold version, see it as an important way to help eradicate all traces of desire and remain singularly focused on God.

By relinquishing marital relationships and family ties, Swaminarayan monks explain that they also seek to reduce claims to private attachment on their time and attention, allowing them to dedicate themselves more fully to devotion, spiritual counseling and other social work. They move from place to place, meeting devotees and traveling between temples, conducting rituals and addressing religious congregations consisting of both men and women.

In all such public spaces, they avoid direct eye contact with women, as that is understood as a form of connection, without requiring women around them to alter their presence or behavior.

According to BAPS theologians and textual traditions, brahmacharya is an individual choice, not a moral critique of others. While monks have relinquished family life for themselves, they recognize and support the family as central to people’s lives and practices.

Eightfold brahmacharya follows a similar logic: Monks adopt the discipline focusing on their own attention, desires and conduct, but they do not expect this of others. The discipline does not make a judgment about the worth of women. This ideal is made explicit in BAPS texts that affirm women’s equal spiritual standing and entitlement to religious practice and liberation.

The controversy

The current leader of BAPS, Mahant Swami Maharaj, consecrated a new Swaminarayan Hindu Temple in Bussy-Saint George, a suburb of Paris, on Sept. 6, 2026. Leading up to the consecration celebrations, the community’s delegation of 100 monks visited the Eiffel Tower. Following the visit, their centuries-old monastic vows became the center of controversy.

BAPS has stated that it requested an early morning visit to minimize disruption for visitors or staff, given the size of their group. Moreover, in a comment to CNN, BAPS Paris noted, “It was never, at any point, intended as a request rooted in gender, and any suggestion to the contrary does not reflect the spirit or values of our fellowship or the delegation.” A small area of the observation deck was sectioned off, which is a common practice for large groups, but BAPS categorically denies requesting the removal of women employees.

The Eiffel Tower Operating Company, SETE, claimed that the delegation had requested a visit that would limit “interactions with women,” according to CNN affiliate BFMTV. The BBC reported that Ariel Weil, president of SETE, “blamed its managers for being ‘a bit overzealous’ in complying with the request without questioning whether it was ‘inappropriate.’”

In my view, the issue seems to be a disconnect between what BAPS requested and what SETE requested of its employees. Understanding the practice of brahmacharya helps explain BAPS’s request: The early morning visit likely would have limited their interactions with heavy crowds, including women. Indeed, BAPS monks’ practices have typically gone unnoticed before now, because they observe them on their own, without imposition on others, even in crowded spaces where women are present.

The episode and its subsequent media coverage reveal how personal religious disciplines can be rendered as demands for accommodation. This is especially the case within the context of French secularism, or laïcité, wherein public expressions of religiosity might have made people upset. In this environment, a little-known monastic vow can be easily misinterpreted. – The Conversation, 30 September 2026

› Prof. Bhakti Mamtora is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

BAPS Swaminarayan Hindu Mandir, Paris

Scientist proposes conciousness might be the fabric of reality itself – Humans

VOI

What is conciousness?

Consciousness remains one of science’s greatest unsolved mysteries, and that understanding it may require researchers to rethink long-held assumptions about the relationship between mind, brain, and reality. – Dr. Christof Koch

For decades, neuroscientists have searched the brain for the biological basis of consciousness, assuming our thoughts, emotions, and subjective experiences emerge from networks of neurons.

But what if that assumption is incomplete?

That’s the provocative question explored by neuroscientist Christof Koch of the Allen Institute in Seattle.

Koch recently presented his ‘challenges’ to our understanding of consciousness at the Bial Foundation’s “Behind and Beyond the Brain” symposium in Porto, Portugal, in April 2026—building on a body of published work that includes this 2016 paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

Koch explained to ScienceAlert that it may be time to rethink one of neuroscience’s deepest assumptions: that consciousness is something the brain produces.

Koch does not dispute the brain’s essential role in conscious experience.

Decades of research have shown that injuries, disease, anesthesia, and electrical stimulation can profoundly alter—or even eliminate—awareness.

Instead, he asks a different question: Does the brain create consciousness, or could it be shaping something more fundamental?

Despite remarkable progress in understanding how the brain processes information, neuroscience still faces a profound mystery, Koch argues.

Scientists can increasingly identify the neural circuits involved in perception, memory, emotion, and decision-making. Yet those discoveries still cannot explain why physical brain activity is accompanied by subjective experience.

As Koch writes in a new, as-yet unpublished essay shared with ScienceAlert: “Nothing in science explains how three pounds of matter, a piece of furniture of the Universe like any other, subject to the same natural laws, can love, hate, dream, imagine, fear or hope for its future.”

It isn’t the first time Koch has grappled publicly with this puzzle. In 2023, he conceded a 25-year bet with philosopher David Chalmers, admitting neuroscience was no closer to pinning down consciousness’s neural mechanism than when he made the wager in 1998.

To address that question, Koch turns to a philosophical framework known as analytic idealism, which proposes that consciousness may be a fundamental feature of reality rather than something generated by the brain.

Within this framework, the brain is viewed less as a producer of consciousness and more as a filter or shaper of conscious experience.

The ideas did not emerge from a single scientific experiment. Instead, Koch describes a deeply personal experience that fundamentally changed the way he thinks about consciousness and reality.

Several years ago, while sitting alone on a beach, he recalls the boundary between himself and the world dissolving, describing the experience as a timeless and universal reality.

In his essay, Koch describes the experience as “the most meaningful of my life,” writing that it “flipped my view of reality”.

Koch is careful not to present the experience as scientific evidence. Instead, he writes that it gave him “a view of Mind-at-Large” and prompted him to re-examine the metaphysical assumptions that had guided much of his scientific career, taking alternative philosophical perspectives more seriously.

He also acknowledges that such experiences are inherently subjective. But he argues they should not be dismissed simply because they are difficult to explain, suggesting they, too, are part of the phenomenon science is ultimately trying to understand.

In the essay, he points to developments in modern physics as another reminder that some of science’s deepest assumptions have already been revised. He does not argue that quantum physics explains consciousness. Rather, he suggests that the history of physics shows scientists have repeatedly been forced to rethink the nature of reality when new evidence emerged.

Koch argues that “our understanding of reality must be rebuilt on a simpler foundation, compatible with both the ‘objective’ outcome of empirical science as well as with ‘subjective’ experience.”

Koch argues that if current assumptions about consciousness prove incomplete, neuroscience itself may eventually require a similarly profound conceptual shift.

The ideas also have implications for artificial intelligence. If consciousness is not simply the product of increasingly complex computation, the path toward conscious machines may be more complicated than simply building increasingly powerful AI systems.

That does not mean future AI systems could never become conscious. Rather, he argues that the debate cannot be settled simply by making computers more intelligent or more computationally sophisticated.

Koch acknowledges that analytic idealism is not an established scientific theory but a metaphysical framework whose future depends on whether its ideas can be translated into empirically testable hypotheses.

As he writes, “The most important task for the future is to take these insights and translate them into empirically testable hypotheses.”

He argues that consciousness remains one of science’s greatest unsolved mysteries, and that understanding it may require researchers to rethink long-held assumptions about the relationship between mind, brain, and reality. –  Science Alert, 9 August 2026

Man meditating on beach at sunrise.

Can Devdutt Pattanaik save Hinduism from Western distortions? – David Frawley

VOI

Devdutt Pattanaik

Make certain, Pattanaik is no detached observer, but has a vested interest in the very negative interpretations of Hinduism that he now seems to question. He has so far shown little interest in any defence of Hinduism whether by Indians or Westerners, much less promoting its deeper Yoga and Vedantic teachings. – Dr. David Frawley

Devdutt Pattanaik is a popular interpreter of Hindu sacred stories, what are now, not always respectfully, called “myths”. In an old article “From Macaulay to Frawley, from Doniger to Elst: Why do many Indians need White saviours”, he claims that “Indians do not really need Europeans and Americans to tell them what Hinduism, Sanskrit or Vedas were, are or should be.”

Attacking both Western critics and Western defenders of Hinduism

The title of the article appears appealing given the many Western distortions of Hinduism. Yet strangely, Pattanaik criticises both Western defenders of Hinduism as well as critics, lumping them both together as if they were two sides of the same bad coin, suggesting that neither understands the Hindu tradition.

Pattanaik would like us to think that he is honouring this tradition of great yogis that has suffered so much from colonial, missionary, Marxist and neo-modern misinterpretations. But in the majority of his own writings, he himself follows the current politically correct Western scholarship that denigrates Hinduism at a cultural level and downplays its deeper philosophical and yogic dimensions. His comments on Hindu gods and goddesses are often in terms of modern psychology and leftist politics, as if these deities were human beings with personal problems and social biases, not symbols of transcendent and cosmic powers.

Now Pattanaik is suddenly critical of the same controversial Western scholars like Wendy Doniger and Sheldon Pollock that he has previously defended. The mythological approach he uses is an approach they also use and is very different from India’s own dharmic school of thought. Is he questioning that mythological angle that he has so extensively promoted?

Looking deeper, Pattaniak’s article betrays a subterfuge. His critique of Western defenders of Hinduism appears more strident than his questioning of anti-Hindu views. Clearly Western scholars defending Hinduism are his main target, and by implication the defence of Hinduism itself.

India connections of Western interpretations of Hindu Dharma

Pattanaik makes a point that one has to be born a Hindu to be a real Hindu that is connected to “birth” and “geography”, no doubt to discredit any Western attempts to speak for Hinduism. This is historically easy to disprove given the numerous Hindu temples and kingdoms from Angkor Wat in Cambodia to Vietnam and Indonesia whose populace were not simply born Hindus in what is now India.

Yet the deeper question in all such discussions is the nature of the interpretations given, not the skin colour of the person advocating them. Most important is the methodology that such interpreters follow. Individual scholars are usually representatives of schools of thought that must be examined overall.

The denigrating approaches of such as Doniger and Pollack have prominent Indian supporters, notably Marxists like Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib, whom Pattanaik does not mention. Similarly, the view of Hindu Dharma by Western Hindus has its roots in teachers from India. The books of Sita Ram Goel and Ram Swarup have framed much of the defence of modern Hinduism. Yet this trend goes back to Sri Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda, Lokmanya Tilak and India’s Independence movement that challenged Eurocentric ideas of religion, culture and history.

Mahatma Gandhi’s criticism of Christian missionaries is also relevant here. It ultimately is based upon Vedic texts that address the nature of the mind and the meaning of human life in a very different manner than dominant Western schools of thought.

Pattanaik has tried to place Hinduism’s Western defenders on the “right” of the political perspective, with its critics on the “left”, forgetting that right and left in politics are Western views, not Indian and neither is dharmic. He reflects the statements of anti-Hindu writers who routinely label Hinduism as right-wing and regressive.

Pattanaik further describes Western defenders of Hindu Dharma as “authoritarian” and “Abrahamic” in approach, as if they were presenting a distortion of Hindu Dharma. This is also nothing new. The same charge is made by Luytens’ Delhi against any Hindu groups in India that have sought to proudly promote Hindu Dharma. Such verbal theatrics only shows that he remains ambivalent about presenting Hindu teachings in a respectful manner. He does not otherwise criticise Abrahamic traditions.

Problems with ancient history

Pattanaik seems to have a particular problem with the historical view of the Harappan or Indus Valley civilisation as Vedic, as supported by Western Hindus. Yet, this is also the view of the Archaeological Survey of India and its former director general Prof. B.B. Lal. It is the view of the Geological Survey of India based upon Landsat Satellite photography and numerous ground water studies of the long dry Sarasvati River. It is the view of India’s great gurus today. To call it into question because it is also a view of white Hindus is neither accurate nor sincere. It suggests that Pattanaik does not like the idea of a history of India that gives prominence to Vedic and Hindu contributions.

Is sadhana necessary to truly understand Hindu Dharma?

Hindu teachings, as in the Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads, have at their core a yogic pursuit of higher consciousness, including experiences beyond the human intellect and its limiting dualities. They hold that the physical world is but an outer aspect of a multi-dimensional universe of consciousness, with our inner self having many bodies and many births and ultimately extending beyond all time and space.

Pattanaik does not seem comfortable with such yogic spirituality, which Doniger and company routinely ignore or dismiss, though he throws a few Sanskrit terms around in order to sound traditional. He is particularly unhappy with my claim that Yoga sadhana should be part of any authentic interpretation of Hindu texts. Yet that is not merely my personal view, it is found in all the great traditions of India that emphasise meditation over mere book learning. If sadhana is not part of one’s study of Hinduism, one can only claim to have the view of an outsider.

Is Pattanaik changing his views?

Pattanaik’s article is a cover-up for his own errors and prejudices. It is an effort to surreptitiously disown his own past with Doniger and company, perhaps out of fear of being judged politically incorrect by these Western critics that he has often kowtowed before in the past. Attacking Western defenders of Hinduism along the way affords him the appearance of being a neutral observer, and makes it more difficult for him to lump with what Doniger and company castigate as the Hindu right that they usually decry as fascist as well.

Make certain, Pattanaik is no detached observer, but has a vested interest in the very negative interpretations of Hinduism that he now seems to question. He has so far shown little interest in any defence of Hinduism whether by Indians or Westerners, much less promoting its deeper Yoga and Vedantic teachings. While there is nothing wrong with changing one’s views, it is better to be honest about it and admit one’s mistakes. – Swarajya, 1 January 2017

Koenraad Elst & David Frawley vs. Wendy Doniger & Sheldon Pollock.

Jauhar & Rakhi: The art of misreading history – Abhinav Kumar

VOI

Jauhar

Before labelling a tradition as good or bad, can we first understand what it truly meant? – Abhinav Kumar

There are debates which catch your attention, and you want to respond, but the argument is not worth responding to. But then, in the age of social media, if you don’t counter that statement, it becomes a tool for shaping the narrative. In the last two weeks, there have been two statements by two so-called influencers. Both are on different issues, but the method is the same, and the target is also the same, i.e. Hindu traditions.

The first debate is about an old comment by Swara Bhasker that was presented at a new venue. She raised questions about the Jauhar sequence in the movie Padmaavat and said, “If I were a rape survivor, what is this film telling me? It would make me feel like a coward for not killing myself to save my honour.” On the sequence involving a pregnant woman in the Jauhar scene, she said that “the film seemed to suggest that a fetus, if female, does not deserve to be born because she might one day be raped by a Muslim ruler.”

The second debate is about a viral clip made for engagement farming by an influencer on Raksha Bandhan, where she calls the festival funny and then calls it patriarchal, saying that a sister ties a Rakhi and asks for protection, but protection from whom?

Both statements are not of the same kind, but they follow the same pattern. Both have a similar target and modus operandi: first, take an example of a tradition, separate it from its historical context, paraphrase it in simplistic language, and then criticise and demonise that translation as if it were the fact rather than an interpretation.

Historians call the deliberate misrepresentation of the past through present-day assumptions “presentism.” David Hackett Fischer referred to a similar error as the “nunc pro tunc” fallacy- imposing the present on the past.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, however, presentism is primarily an ontological doctrine: it is the view that only the present exists, absolutely and unrestrictedly. The view is the subject of extensive discussion in the literature on time and change, with much of it focused on the problems that presentism allegedly faces.

Jauhar: The question asked vs. what it was made out to be

About Jauhar first we need to understand why it was taken up by women of the Rajput rulers. Not that anyone wants to willingly go to self-immolate in a pyre of fire. The women of that time knew something about the raiders that, if they were alive, what they could be subjected to from sexual exploitation to slavery for lifetime. The Rajput women who chose Jauhar may have understood, from the earlier invasions of Muhammad bin Qasim, Mahmud of Ghazni and Muhammad Ghori, what defeat could mean for women-enslavement, sexual exploitation, captivity and being treated as spoils of war, with captives entering the slave markets of the Islamic world.

According to historian K.S. Lal’s Muslim Slave System in Medieval India, the Arab conquest of Sindh was accompanied by large-scale enslavement of women and children. Lal writes that after the fall of Debal, the male population above the age of seventeen was put to the sword, while women and children were taken captive. He further records that 700 women who had taken refuge in the temple were captured, with a portion of the female captives being sent to Hajjaj as part of the conquerors’ share of the spoils, while the rest were distributed among the soldiers. After the capture of Rawar, Lal records that thousands of men were massacred and that women, children and dependants were taken prisoner; he gives the number of captives as around 60,000, including women of royal families who were sent onward as slaves. Lal also describes instructions attributed to Hajjaj ordering Muhammad bin Qasim to give no quarter to the conquered population and to take women and children as captives. In the final stages of the conquest, he records that 20,000 prisoners from prominent families were set aside as the ruler’s share, while the remainder were distributed among the soldiers. Lal therefore concludes that “a few lakh women were enslaved” during the Arab invasion of Sindh.

Men would perform Saka, a final, suicidal charge. This history is not a figment of one side’s imagination. Muslim historians themselves recorded it during the Sultanate and Mughal eras. The book The Campaigns of Alauddin Khilji, translated with notes by Muhammad Habib, states that “a more horrid act of tyranny was committed by Nusrat Khan, the Wazir of Khilji and the author of many acts of violence in the city. In revenge for his brother’s death, he dishonoured and disgraced the wives of those who had struck his brother with their axes; he gave them to sweepers to be used as prostitutes and ordered their suckling children to be broken to pieces on their heads. His actions filled people with horror and dismay. A shiver went through the hearts of men.”

Even Akbar’s own records following the fall of Chittor in 1568 document the enslavement and massacre of the surviving women and children. In other words, the reason for lighting the pyre was not imaginary; the fear was real.

Now, think of Swara Bhasker’s argument. She seeks a different kind of “objective” or, rather, an object to degrade the tradition of that time and its circumstances. So she picks up rape survivors and creates an alternate theory, replacing the Rajput women with them. This allows the audience to be asked whether the right to live ceases to exist after rape. The straightforward part of this argument that a survivor has every right to live is absolutely correct, and there can be no ifs or buts about it. But the problem is that Jauhar was not the answer to that question.

The women who performed Jauhar were not “rape survivors.” They were rejecting the future that awaited them after defeat, namely, becoming sex slaves, used as sexual and domestic “resources” within the hierarchical order of the Sultanate, and seeing their children enslaved and reduced to spoils of war, to be sold in slave markets for a few tankas.

Equating the two is not an act of empathy; it is a failure of translation.

Raksha Bandhan

Rakhi: When did the thread become a ‘protection contract’?

Now lets move on to Raksha Bandhan. The argument regarding Raksha Bandhan is often simplified as follows: a sister ties a thread around her brother’s wrist and the brother pledges protection, therefore, the festival implies that women are weak and men are their protectors. Hence, the tradition is patriarchal.

However, this line of reasoning overlooks the entire significance associated with the raksha-sutra.

When a sister ties a Rakhi on her brother, she is not asking him for “protection”; rather, she is invoking protection FOR him.

The Rakhi tradition was not limited to the contemporary sibling dynamic; references to pratisara and kautuka appear in early Vedic and Grihya texts.

In the Atharvaveda Parishishta, a priest ties a protective thread around the king on Shravan Purnima. In the Bhavishya Purana, Shachi ties a Raksha Bandhan on Indra before a battle—meaning the protection is bestowed upon the wearer of the thread, rather than the act serving to prove the superiority of the person tying it.

Consider a historical example that upends this entire argument: during the anti-partition movement in Bengal in 1905, Rabindranath Tagore used the Rakhi as a symbol of Hindu-Muslim brotherhood, urging people to tie the thread across communal lines. A symbol that once served as an instrument of communal unity has today been reduced to a “signifier of a woman’s helplessness.”

This is not to say that criticizing contemporary advertisements or social media messages—which portray the brother merely as a “bodyguard”—is wrong; such criticism of modern portrayals is valid. However, concluding from this that the festival itself is inherently misogynistic is a different matter altogether.

The three tricks behind the distortion of tradition

First: Synecdoche, where a single popular interpretation is made to stand in for the entire tradition. Jauhar is reduced to “honour suicide following rape”; Rakhi becomes merely “a sister seeking protection from her brother.” Anything that does not fit this mould, the harem, Islamic slavery, children on the funeral pyre, the thread tied by a queen to a warrior or by a priest to a king is discarded.

Second: Moral inversion. Once the synecdoche is established, the critic can position themselves as the protector of the victims. Historians, proponents of the tradition, and even the sister who is happy to celebrate her festival are all portrayed as if they desire women to die or remain dependent.

Third: Deliberate disregard for the alternative. In today’s city, “living after rape” is the humane imperative. In today’s world, there are constitutional rights, laws, police, and institutions designed to protect people’s rights.

In a falling fortress, however, “living” signified a specific future: becoming a captive, being forced into domestic servitude, or ending up in a harem. There was no constitution, no modern legal framework, no IPC or BNS at that time to protect the rights of the enslaved. Any argument that fails to mention this third factor, being bought and sold like a commodity, pretends that there are only two values at play: honour versus life. Yet it is this third factor that drives the historical reality, and it is the very first thing to be erased.

This is not merely the tactic of a single ideology. The question is: what becomes of a politics that champions criticism when criticism itself is reduced to this?

An Honest Critique: Neither worship the past nor demonise it

An honest critique of Padmaavat might have gone something like this: Jauhar was a horrific choice made under horrific circumstances. Glorifying it through cinematic aesthetics in a society that already equates a woman’s worth with her sexuality raises valid questions. Critique the scene, certainly, but do so without labeling the deceased as “survivors,” a status they never actually held.

An honest argument regarding Rakhi could have been: popular culture often markets the day solely around the concept of male protection. Protection that does not include a share in property, or safety and dignity within the family, is an incomplete deal that is what needs fixing. But this does not require fabricating a narrative that a patriarchy, which somehow escaped Shachi’s notice when she tied the thread to Indra, has existed since the Vedic era.

Honest arguments ultimately leave something behind: film criticism, the politics of property rights, and the demand that living women not be shamed. Dishonest versions leave behind only a headline and contempt, whether for Rajput memory or domestic tradition while real issues, such as the rights of rape survivors or daughters’ property rights, remain buried beneath that very scorn.

In the End: Before judging a tradition, understand what it meant

Jauhar meant that Rajput women had a choice, and they chose death over constant sexual exploitation. Rakhi means that the one who wears the sacred thread is protected by the prayers of the person tying it. So, you can start from here. Feminism still has something left to offer. You can start by calling out and denying both presentism and engagement-farming. Because explaining is never enough, and the next festival or tradition will have to face the same kind of distortion.

People should not make it a binary choice between worshipping the past and demonising the past. There is a third way that can be defended. What can be defended should be defended, but what can be rejected must be rejected. What is being demonised also needs to be stopped and corrected. And, most importantly, do not congratulate yourself on defeating a caricature of Indian civilisation that you have conjured up.

There is no need to demonise Jauhar to defend the right to life of a rape survivor. This is also an injustice to rape survivors when they are used for engagement-farming. There is no need to make fun of Raksha Bandhan in the name of women’s rights. And feminism need not assume that women of the past lacked agency simply because they did not behave the way women do today.

The fundamental question remains the same: before labelling a tradition as good or bad, can we first understand what it truly meant? – Times Now, 4 September 2026

› Abhinav Kumar is a columnist at Times Now Digital.

Mountain of Hindu Skulls

The future will judge our Hindu civilisation – Ajai Sahni

VOI

Hindus and Flag

The question for Indians today is not what our ancestors achieved, but what we are doing. – Ajai Sahni

There is something profoundly perverse in contemporary politics: those who shout loudest about defending civilisation and culture are those whose conduct is most conspicuously divorced from both.

The phenomenon is not confined to India. Islamists invoke an imagined purity of Islamic civilisation while practicing violent intolerance. Christianity has a long history of projecting a ‘superior’ Christian civilisation, while engineering atrocities across the world. In India, the contradiction is increasingly visible in the political appropriation of Hindu identity: the Kanwarias, for example, have become a spectacle of religious assertion and of coercive and obscene public behaviour, while the vocabulary of Hindutva, Sanatan, and civilisational greatness is used to legitimise an aggressive repudiation of civility.

The fundamental confusion is between cultural and civilisational history, on the one hand, and living culture and civilisation, on the other.

India possesses an extraordinary civilisational inheritance. Its achievements in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, literature, architecture, medicine, and the arts are indisputable. Its ancient traditions of argument, scepticism, dissent, and intellectual contestation are extraordinary.

But the achievements of people who lived centuries or millennia ago are not the achievements of those who merely occupy the same geographical space today.

We cannot claim Aryabhata’s mathematics, Kalidasa’s genius or the intellectual achievements of ancient India simply because we were born here. Civilisation is not hereditary property.

A civilisation survives not because its ancestors were great, but because its descendants are capable of greatness.

Contemporary India is increasingly substituting ancestral pride for contemporary achievement. We celebrate Nalanda while engineering a collapse of educational standards; invoke ancient philosophical traditions while public discourse rewards abuse; boast of vasudhaiva kutumbakam while cultivating hostility towards specific ‘outgroups’; invoke a tradition of debate while treating disagreement as betrayal.

The past has simply become an instrument for avoiding responsibility for the present.

Culture, meanwhile, is reduced to symbols—dress, food, ritual, festivals, monuments, and slogans. But the essence of culture is reflected in whether disagreement produces argument or assault; whether public spaces belong equally to everyone; whether citizens can live differently without becoming objects of hatred.

The Kanwaria who believes religious devotion entitles him to intimidate another citizen, the Islamist who believes faith entitles him to suppress unbelief, and Christian extremists who believe righteousness entitles them to impose their dominance over others, are separated by theology and history; but they share a deep pathology: the conversion of a complex civilisation into a closed political identity.

The scheme behind this is Orwellian. Political control increasingly depends not merely on coercion, but on controlling language and historical memory. Nationalism is obedience; patriotism is the absence of dissent; culture is conformity; history is grievance; and dissent is anti-national. Through these, authoritarian proclivities are socialised: vocal sets of citizens dictate what others should or should not eat; who they should or should not marry, how they should practice their faith; what they should read; and what particular opinions they must hold.

But a confident civilisation does not fear difference; an insecure ideology does.

India’s civilisational history provides powerful resources against this insecurity. It is a history of encounters, migrations, arguments, accommodations, and transformations. India’s strength was not uniformity, but its capacity to absorb and transform differences through intellect.

The question for Indians today is not what our ancestors achieved, but what we are doing.

Will future generations admire our universities, literature, science, institutions, and public culture? Or will they see a technologically capable society that squandered its energies in manufactured cultural antagonisms?

There is nothing wrong with pride in India’s past. But if we admire intellectual achievement, we must produce it. If we admire philosophical argument, we must promote free discourse. If we admire pluralism, we must practice it. If we admire civilisation, we must behave civilly.

The truly civilised society does not need to proclaim its civilisation. Its character is visible in its institutions, intellectual life, public conduct and, above all, in the space it permits for those who disagree with it.

Inheritance is not achievement. Towering civilisations in history have collapsed into disorder and ignominy. The only civilisation that ultimately matters, is the one we ourselves create. – The New Indian Express, 13 September 2026

› Ajai Sahni is an author on counter-terrorism and Executive Director of the Institute for Conflict Management, New Delhi.

Kanwar Yatra Violence

India’s Holocaust – Koenraad Elst

VOI

Tower of Hindu heads as depicted in Akbarnama.

The great genocides of history are rarely taught in school. Only the Jews have succeeded in publicizing what happened to their people—Amazon.com lists 2,856 books devoted to the Holocaust of World War II. But just in this century Tutsis, Tibetans, Cambodians, Bangladeshis, Gypsies, Ukrainians and Armenians have all suffered more than a million deaths in deliberate actions. Before them died possibly a hundred million natives in North and South America, tens of millions in the slave trade—and unknown millions of Hindus in India as a result of the invasions beginning in the 7th century. In this thought-provoking article, Dr. Koenraad Elst attempts to shed light on the horrific and historically neglected Hindu experience. – Hinduism Today

Genocide is the intentional attempt to destroy an ethnic community, or by extension any community constituted by bonds of kinship, of common religion or ideology, of common socio-economic position or of common race. The pure form is the complete extermination of every man, woman and child of the group. Examples include the native Tasmanians and many Amerindian nations, from Patagonia to Canada, by European settlers in the 16th-19th century. The most notorious attempt was the Nazi “final solution of the Jewish question” in 1941 to 45. In April 1994, Hutu militias in Rwanda went about slaughtering the Tutsi minority, killing about 800,000, in anticipation of the conquest of their country by an Uganda-based Tutsi army.

Hindus suffered such attempted extermination in East Bengal in 1971, when the Pakistani Army killed one to three million people, with Hindus as their most common target. It is significant that no serious count or religion-wise breakdown of the death toll has been attempted. The Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi ruling classes all agree that this would feed Hindu grievances against Muslims. While India-watchers get indignated about communal riots in India killing up to 20,000 people since 1948, allegedly in a proportion of three Muslims to one Hindu, the best-kept secret of the post-Independence Hindu-Muslim conflict is that in the subcontinent as a whole, the overwhelming majority of the victims have been Hindus. Even apart from the 1971 genocide, “ordinary” pogroms in East Pakistan in 1950 alone killed more Hindus than the total number of riot victims in India since 1948.

“Selective genocide” may be defined as killing a sufficient number who form the backbone of the group’s collective identity, and assimilating the leaderless masses into the dominant community. This has been the Chinese policy in Tibet, killing over a million Tibetans. It was also Stalin’s policy in eastern Poland and the Baltic states after they fell into his hands under the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact, exemplified by the massacre of thousands of Polish army officers in Katyn. During the Islamic conquests in India, there was a policy to murder the brahmin priests after the Hindu warrior class had been dispatched on the battlefield. The Portuguese in Malabar and Goa also followed this policy in the 16th century. In antiquity, such partial genocide typically targeted the men for slaughter and the women and children for slavery or concubinage. That is how the Athenians depopulated the isle of Melos in 416 BCE to punish the Melians for their reluctance to join the war against Sparta. Likewise, in 626 CE, Islamic forces destroyed the Jewish tribe of the Banu Quraiza by having its 700 men beheaded and its women and children sold into slavery. Hindus too experienced this treatment at the hands of Islamic conquerors, e.g., when Mohammed bin Qasim conquered the lower Indus basin in 712 CE. The Chach-Nama reports how in Multan “six thousand warriors were put to death, and all their relations and dependents were taken as slaves.” This is why Rajput women committed mass suicide, to save their honor in the face of the imminent entry of victorious Muslim armies, e.g., 8,000 women immolated themselves during Akbar’s capture of Chittorgarh in 1568—where this most enlightened ruler also killed 30,000 non-combatants.

A third type of genocide is when mass killing takes place unintentionally, as collateral damage of other forms of oppression. The death of millions of natives in Central America after the first Spanish conquests was mostly the unintended side effect of the hardships of forced labor and the contact with new diseases brought by the Europeans. In contrast with Nazi and Soviet work camps, where forced labor had the dual purpose of economic profit and a slow but sure death of the inmates, there is no evidence that the Spanish wanted their Native laborers to die—eventually replacing them with African slaves required a large extra investment. These invader’s religious missionaries wished to convert the unbelievers, and preferred not to kill them.

The mass killing of Hindus by Muslims typically took place in the fervor immediately following military victories, e.g., a general massacre and arson followed the fall of the South Indian metropolis of Vijayanagar in 1565. Genocide in peacetime, perhaps the most perverse kind, is extremely rare; one example was Stalin’s organized famine in Ukraine in 1931-33, which killed some ten million people.

In India, once Muslim power was established, Muslim rulers sought to exploit and humiliate rather than kill the Hindus, and discouraged rebellion either by military action or by making some sort of compromise. One constraint was the endemic intra-Muslim warfare and intrigue, another the prevalence of the Hanifite school of Islamic law in India. This is the only school which allows Pagans to subsist as zimmis, disempowered third-class citizens paying a special tax for the favor of being tolerated; the other three legal schools ruled that Pagans, as opposed to Christians and Jews, had to convert. Sometimes, though, Muslim rulers resorted to forms of oppression comparable to Stalin’s famine. A policy of deliberate impoverishment by rulers like Alauddin Khilji and Jahangir were described as follows by Fernand Braudel in A History of Civilizations (1963): “The levies [the Hindus] had to pay were so crushing that one catastrophic harvest was enough to unleash famines and epidemics capable of killing a million people at a time. Appalling poverty was the constant counterpart of the conquerors’ opulence.”

Apart from actual killing, millions of Hindus disappeared by way of enslavement. After every conquest by a Muslim invader, slave markets in Baghdad and Samarkand were flooded with Hindus. Timur Lenk, who conquered Delhi from another Muslim ruler in 1398, recorded in his journal that he made sure his pillaging soldiers spared the Muslim quarter, while in the Hindu areas, they took “twenty slaves each.” Hindu slaves were converted to Islam, and when their descendants gained their freedom, they swelled the numbers of the Muslim community. It is a cruel twist of history that the Muslims who forced Partition on India were partly the progeny of those Hindus.

For its sheer magnitude in scope and death toll, coupled with its occasional intention to exterminate entire Hindu communities, the Islamic campaign against Hinduism, which was never fully called off since the first naval invasion in 636 CE, was famously evaluated by Will Durant as follows:

“The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.”

A first glance at important testimonies by Muslim chroniclers indicates that, over 13 centuries and a territory as vast as the subcontinent, Muslim warriors easily killed more Hindus than the six million of the Jewish Holocaust. Ferishtha lists several occasions when the Bahmani sultans in central India (1347-1528) killed a hundred thousand Hindus, which they had set as a minimum goal for “punishing” the Hindus; and they were only a third-rank provincial dynasty. The biggest slaughters took place during the raids of Mahmud Ghaznavi (ca. 1000 ce); during the actual conquest of North India by Mohammed Ghori and his lieutenants (1192 ff.); and under the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526). The Moghuls (1526- 1857), even Babar and Aurangzeb, were fairly restrained tyrants by comparison. Prof. K.S. Lal once estimated that the Indian population declined by 50 million under the Sultanate, but that would be hard to substantiate; research into the magnitude of the damage Islam did to India is yet to start in earnest.

In Indian schoolbooks and the media, an idyllic picture of Hindu-Muslim harmony in the pre-British period is propagated in outright contradiction with the testimony of the primary sources. Like Holocaust denial, this propaganda can be called “negationism.” The really daring negationists don’t just deny the crimes against Hindus, they invert the picture and blame the Hindus themselves. Thus, it is alleged that Hindus persecuted and destroyed Buddhism; in reality, Buddhist monasteries and universities flourished under Hindu rule, but their thousands of monks were killed by Ghori and his lieutenants.

Hindu philosophy holds that God pervades everything and everyone in the universe and that nothing and no one is intrinsically evil. How then to understand these great slaughters? Did the Ukrainians starve ten million people to death at some point in their past? Did the American Indians annihilate a race? Who did we Hindus conquer and oppress? History doesn’t record such events, and they certainly could not have been on the scale of the modern events, for there simply were not that many people in the world in prehistory.

But perhaps these catastrophic events are matters of national or racial karma, necessary occurrences related to the overall evolution of the people. In this down-to-earth sense, suffering genocide is the karmic reward of weakness. Even Hindu scriptures on government advise a king to invade and conquer his weaker neighbor, least another king do the same first and then threaten him.

The Jews concluded their genocide was a result of weakness, and since World War II have sought to create a strong nation-state out of a fragmented and stateless community. Even more importantly, they helped foster an awareness of the history of their persecution among their former persecutors, the Christians, which makes it unlikely that Christians will target them again. At the Global Forum in Moscow in 1993, the Jewish representatives said their oppressors have not repented and reconciled for their actions, and therefore, the representative said, “Given the chance, they will do it again.” In this respect, the Hindus have so far failed completely. With numerous Holocaust memorials already functioning, one more memorial is being built in Berlin by the heirs of the perpetrators of the Holocaust; but there is not even one memorial to the Hindu genocide, because even the victims don’t seem to care. – Hinduism Today, 1 March 1999

› Dr. Koenraad Elst is a Belgium Orientalist who studied philosophy, Sinology and Indology in Leuven, Belgium and Varanasi, India. He has published works on comparative philosophy, the Aryan invasion debate, Islam and contemporary Indian politics.

Bengal famine of 1770.

Ganesha: A figure of great mystery, power, and paradox – David Frawley

VOI

Shiva, Shakti & Ganesha

Ganesha represents the cosmic realisation of the Self as all nature, and can teach that infinite truth to us. But for this to occur we must also learn to go beyond the mind, something that most modern intellectuals with all their opinionated views are not likely to attempt. – Dr. David Frawley

Ganesha is a figure of great mystery, power, and paradox. We sense in his unusual figure something of the unknown, unlimited and mysterious, far beyond our human considerations. What are the secrets that he holds and what do they mean for us at the deepest level?

Ganesha’s arising or birth, if you could call it, appears very strange. It is said that his mother Parvati created him for her protection and asked him to prevent anyone from entering into her room. While Parvati was bathing, Lord Shiva approached, and Ganesha true to his role would not let him in. When Ganesha obstructed Shiva from entering, Shiva sensed an infringement on his power, fought with him and in the skirmish cut the boy’s head off.

Soon learning his mistake, that it was Parvati’s son, who was quite angry at his demise, Shiva quickly, sometimes it is said by chance, found the head of an elephant for Ganesha, put it on the headless body and brought him back to life. The story seems contradictory and arbitrary, like many Puranic depictions that have been the subject of denigration, if not ridicule.

Clearly, such bizarre tales are riddles for the mind to ponder, and not meant to portray literal events. They require a deep insight to unravel. This story has been analysed politically and psychologically, extending to bizarre Freudian and Marxist theories, but the inner meaning, which has nothing to do with sex or politics, has been missed altogether.

Symbolism of Ganesha

Ganesha symbolises the human soul and its latent aspiration for the infinite. Initially, the soul is bound to Maya or Prakriti, symbolised by Ganesha being created by Parvati (Prakriti) and seeking to protect her as her servant. The ignorant soul does not know Shiva, the transcendent reality beyond Maya. Shiva, therefore, cannot recognise the soul as his own.

In cutting off Ganesha’s head, Lord Shiva takes the soul beyond the human mind, its dualities and expectations—which is a common theme in deities with their head cut off, be it Hayagriva, Chinnamasta or Ganesha. In giving Ganesha the head of an elephant, Shiva connects it to the profound cosmic intelligence that is under his guidance.

Shiva is Pashupati or the Lord of the Animals that symbolises the souls bound to ignorance, ruling over them from his unbounded awareness. Ganesha as Ganapati or the Lord of the Group is the chieftain or head of the animals, the foremost of which is the elephant and indicates Shiva’s consciousness in manifestation.

The elephant relates to memory, concentration and the hidden wisdom of nature. Ganesha as the awakened soul learns the secrets of the universe and gains the ability to teach them to all who are receptive. Ganesha becomes the guide to the cosmic processes of birth and death, karma, and liberation, and holds all the vidyas or sacred ways of knowledge for understanding all existence.

Ganesha as the Guru

With the head of an elephant, Ganesha becomes awake as Shiva’s son, and functions as the great guru and the giver of wisdom through Shiva’s power within him. He gains access to the mantric energies of the cosmic mind, in which all the higher knowledge is stored, the omkara of Lord Shiva, which is Ganesha’s own word of power.

Such higher knowledge as Ganesha possesses cannot be transmitted to the mortal mind, put into ordinary language or logic, or confined to the parameters of mere human depictions. It requires going beyond the intellect and emotions to unitary awareness or samadhi, which rests upon a profound Yoga sadhana.

Ganesha represents the cosmic realisation of the Self as all nature, and can teach that infinite truth to us. But for this to occur we must also learn to go beyond the mind, something that most modern intellectuals with all their opinionated views are not likely to attempt.

To worship Ganesha, we must become Ganesha, which is to let go of our outer minds and embrace the unknown higher knowledge, becoming the entire universe and beyond, Shiva and Shakti, both within and around us. To do that we must become humble and let Shiva and Parvati enter into us. Jai Ganesha! – Daily-O, 24 August 2017

› Dr. David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Shastri) is the director of the American Institute of Vedic Studies and the author of more than 30 books on Yoga and Vedic traditions. 

Ganesha Symbolism

The Bottle, the Broom and the Cockroach – Mayank Jain

VOI

BBC Meme

The symbols — bottle, broom and cockroach — change but our weakness remains the same: hope can misguide us into forgetting the lessons of the past. – Mayank Jain

How Intoxication Makes History and Suffering Disappear

Sita Ram Goel once told a disturbing parable. A man had strangled his wives yet women continued to marry him. Each new bride knew what had happened before but persuaded herself that her own story would be different. Circumstances had changed. Perhaps she understood him better. Perhaps what happened to the others would not happen to her. Wishful thinking had acquired the appearance of reason.

The horror of the parable lies not merely in the murderer but in the failure of memory and judgement. Human beings can know what happened yesterday and still persuade themselves that tomorrow will somehow be different. Politics repeatedly exploits this weakness. The old order is declared rotten and a new movement arrives promising purification through a new symbol — a rose, a fist, a broom and now a cockroach.

The last symbol is unintentionally revealing. In nature cockroaches can be useful decomposers. In human habitation they are pests capable of carrying pathogens such as Salmonella and E. coli, while their shed skin and droppings can trigger asthma and allergies. The broom promised to clean the system; the cockroach thrives in its filth — and can spread the disease.

Delhi’s broom once possessed enormous moral power. Anna Hazare’s fasting body became an accusation against an entire political class while Arvind Kejriwal supplied the organisation and strategy capable of converting indignation into political power. The outsider eventually entered the Secretariat.

The destination of this austere revolution contained a remarkable irony. Kejriwal had identified himself with the rejection of VIP culture and ostentatious government privilege. Years later his official residence at 6 Flagstaff Road became the centre of the controversy his opponents called the “Sheesh Mahal”. The CAG found that a project initially estimated at ₹7.91 crore and awarded for ₹8.62 crore ultimately cost ₹33.66 crore. Of that final expenditure, ₹18.88 crore went into additional items involving what the audit described as superior-specification, artistic, antique and ornamental work. The built-up area itself increased by 36 per cent. The numbers supplied their own political metaphor: the movement that entered power carrying a broom and preaching austerity had arrived at a ₹33.66-crore residence.

From the Fast to the Bottle

Perhaps no image captures the transformation more cruelly than liquor. India Against Corruption had been born amid fasting, sacrifice and Gandhian imagery. A decade later, during the COVID period, Delhi witnessed liquor retailers offering a bottle free with every bottle purchased — “buy one, get one free” — under the AAP government’s excise regime. The movement born around an old man’s fast against corruption had travelled from abstinence to an excise regime associated with aggressive liquor discounting. The financial consequences were serious too. The CAG subsequently estimated a ₹2,002.68-crore revenue loss arising from deficiencies in the formulation and implementation of the 2021–22 excise policy.

But the bottle interests me for a reason larger than Delhi. Alcohol has historically offered governments an extraordinary combination: revenue for the state and oblivion for the drinker. An intoxicated man can forget his misery for an evening. The unpaid bill disappears, humiliation recedes and tomorrow loses urgency. Morning arrives, circumstances remain unchanged and the bottle beckons again. Intoxication privatises anguish. Instead of asking why his circumstances remain miserable, a man acquires a temporary escape from them. The sorrow has not been cured. It has merely disappeared from consciousness.

Tsarist Russia constructed an enormous fiscal machine around vodka and, remarkably, the Communist state rediscovered the same instrument. Lenin maintained prohibition but after his death Stalin restored the Tsarist-era vodka monopoly, importantly for state finance. Mark Lawrence Schrad traces the continuity across supposedly antagonistic systems: the Tsar fell and Communism abolished the aristocracy but the political utility of intoxication survived the revolution (Mark Lawrence Schrad, Vodka Politics).

Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign exposed the trap from the opposite direction. Once the state becomes dependent upon alcohol revenue, curing alcoholism carries a fiscal cost. Misery encourages intoxication, intoxication generates revenue and revenue makes the state materially dependent upon the source of intoxication. The worker believes he is escaping the system for an evening; the system is collecting money from his escape.

Apartheid South Africa offers another disturbing example. Under the notorious dop system, agricultural labourers in parts of the Cape were historically remunerated partly in wine, a practice studied explicitly in relation to alcohol abuse and social control. Alcohol could become part of a structure that impoverished a family while making its suffering temporarily easier to endure. Across radically different political systems, the mechanism survived: revenue for authority, oblivion for the citizen. Consolation is easier to distribute than competence.

When the Rebel Became the Establishment

Ramlila Maidan briefly made corruption a moral question in Indian homes. The Lokpal was being discussed by people who had never read a statute. Millions believed politics might finally be purified by people who did not resemble politicians. Kejriwal converted that moral energy into organisation and electoral power. But power brought new interests — offices, money, loyalists and the need to stay in power. By 2017 Anna Hazare was looking back with a devastating sentence: “I hope no Kejriwal comes out of my movement again.”

The lesson goes beyond Kejriwal. Movements that claim to be morally superior often discover that power changes their leaders too. The broom had promised to change politics. Instead, power changed those carrying the broom.

When the Broom Met the Ledger

Eventually every revolution meets arithmetic. DTC recorded a loss of ₹8,498.35 crore in 2022–23 (CAG, State Finances Audit Report of the Government of NCT of Delhi, 2022–23). A loss on that scale is not an accounting abstraction. Public finance eventually becomes human experience — in buses, roads, hospitals, water supply and the quality of institutions a citizen encounters every day.

The Delhi Jal Board illustrated the problem differently. Water can be made free to the consumer but water itself cannot become free. Somebody must source it, purify it, pump it, maintain pipes and sewers and treat what eventually enters the Yamuna. A government can remove a bill from a household; it cannot repeal engineering.

The Mohalla Clinic was similarly an attractive idea: take primary healthcare closer to people. Yet against a target of 1,000 clinics, only 523 were operational by March 2023. Auditors also found that in the period examined, 70 per cent of patients in sampled clinics spent less than one minute with the doctor. A healthcare promise ultimately has to survive contact with a patient. Politics can announce an entitlement in an afternoon. Institutions capable of delivering it take years to build.

The Intoxication of Populism

The bottle now becomes a wider metaphor. Populism can also intoxicate. The bottle offers immediate escape from suffering; the freebie offers immediate escape from economic cost. Both can obscure who eventually pays. A sewage-treatment plant cannot compete emotionally with a zero bill.

Welfare and populism are different. Welfare helps people become stronger; populism gives immediate benefits to win their support, often at tomorrow’s cost. The real question is whether public spending strengthens people and institutions or weakens institutions to keep people happy.

Venezuela is an extreme warning. Oil wealth allowed the government to fund subsidies and cheap imports while domestic agriculture and industry weakened. When oil revenues fell, the country could no longer afford what it had become dependent on importing. Shortages, inflation and mass emigration followed. Political disasters rarely look dangerous when they begin.

Communist societies generated their own jokes about this gulf between ideological promise and everyday reality. An old Eastern Bloc joke has a man standing for hours in a bread queue in the freezing cold. Finally he explodes: “I have had enough of this Communist regime. I am going to shoot the General Secretary!”

An old Soviet joke tells of a man who has been standing for hours in a bread queue. Finally, furious with the shortages, he shouts, “I’ve had enough. I’m going to shoot Brezhnev!” and storms off.

An hour later he returns and quietly takes his place in the bread queue again.

“What happened?” his friend asks.

The man sighs: “The queue to shoot Brezhnev was even longer.”

The joke captured the absurdity of a system in which shortages had become so common that even getting rid of the leader required standing in a queue.

This is why a competent government is less glamorous than revolutionary politics. Sewage treatment, water pressure, bus maintenance, hospital staffing and balanced accounts do not generate the emotional excitement of a movement. But civilisation depends upon precisely these boring achievements.

Punjab: The Second Laboratory

Punjab gave AAP something few political experiments receive: a second laboratory. It also inherited one of India’s most terrible social problems — narcotics. The Tribune estimated in 2025 that 7.5 lakh to 10 lakh people in Punjab were addicted to heroin, consuming an estimated 93.75 kg daily and spending an average ₹60–70 crore every day.

The government’s enforcement campaign has produced arrests and seizures but the magnitude of those figures itself reveals the scale of the disease. Behind them are households in which savings disappear, possessions are sold and parents watch addiction consume the future they imagined for their children.

The narcotic makes the same promise as the bottle: I cannot remove your sorrow, but I can make you forget it for a while.

Russia’s vodka, South Africa’s alcohol system, Delhi’s liquor politics and Punjab’s narcotics tragedy belong to very different histories but expose the same psychological vulnerability. Suffering disappears from consciousness without disappearing from life.

Goel’s United Front

Here another warning from Sita Ram Goel becomes particularly relevant. In Hindu Society Under Siege, he wrote:

“The United Front between Islamism and Communism has been in existence and active since the early forties. … Christianism … has not been an equal and direct partner. … This United Front functions under the protective umbrella of Macaulayism.”

Goel was not describing three identical ideologies. He was describing forces with different doctrines, constituencies and ambitions which, in his analysis, could nevertheless converge against Hindu society. Elsewhere in the same discussion, he identified different social fields in which he believed these ideologies operated: Christianism among tribal Hindus, Islamism among Dalits and Communism among the upper and middle classes. Goel’s argument was simple but powerful. Different forces do not need the same goals to unite against a common enemy. They may disagree about the India they ultimately want but can still work together against the civilisation or political order they all oppose.

Delhi offers a good example. Different political and ideological groups repeatedly came together around the same protests. Jamia, Shaheen Bagh and the anti-CAA protests began around a law but soon became part of a much wider political mobilisation. Sharjeel Imam’s words revealed how far some of the rhetoric had travelled. Speaking at Aligarh Muslim University in January 2020, he said: “If we have five lakh people with us, we can cut off the Northeast from India.” He spoke of blocking roads and railway tracks so that Assam would be separated from the rest of India, at least temporarily.

Then, during Donald Trump’s visit in February 2020, north-east Delhi erupted in riots. Fifty-three people were killed. Homes and businesses were destroyed within hours, leaving families to live with the loss long after the riots ended.

The farmers’ agitation became another huge protest movement. On Republic Day 2021, sections of protesters left the agreed routes, broke barricades, clashed with police and stormed the Red Fort. CCTV cameras, metal detectors and other property were damaged. What was presented as a protest over farm laws ended with one of India’s greatest national symbols being vandalised.

Goel’s warning therefore leaves us with questions more important than the slogan of any particular agitation: who converges around a movement, who supplies its intellectual legitimacy, who amplifies it and what political order emerges if the movement succeeds?

The Colour-Revolution Trap

Colour revolutions understood the power of symbols. They turned complex politics into a simple battle between a corrupt government and a virtuous public, represented by a colour, flower, fist or other symbol. Public anger provided the energy while organisation, funding, media, international support and political ambition helped turn that anger into a movement.

Georgia’s Rose Revolution of 2003 was initially celebrated around the world. The new government reduced petty corruption and strengthened parts of a dysfunctional state but the revolutionary halo offered no protection against concentrated power. In 2007 the government violently dispersed opposition protests and imposed a state of emergency. Then came the disastrous 2008 war with Russia and enduring territorial fracture involving Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The lesson is larger than Georgia. Destroying legitimacy is easier than constructing legitimacy. A crowd can help bring down a government within weeks. Building institutions capable of restraining power, administering justice and holding a divided country together can require generations.

A rose identifies the enemy. A broom promises cleansing. Neither runs buses, treats sewage or administers courts. Revolution simplifies; government must deal with everything the slogan omitted.

From the Broom to the Cockroach

And now another symbol has appeared. The Cockroach Janta Party has brought together anger over examinations, jobs and institutions. The broom belonged to the television age; the cockroach belongs to social media, where an insult can become a meme, a meme can become an identity and an identity can quickly become a political movement.

Sonam Wangchuk initially gave the movement credibility. But by August 2026, he was distancing himself from its founders, calling them “not saints” and saying they appeared to have political ambitions. He wanted the student movement to remain independent of political parties..

Delhi has seen this pattern before. Moral credibility builds trust, trust brings crowds and crowds create political power. The broom also began with a promise to clean up politics. What happened afterwards is exactly why we should not forget that history when another movement arrives with a new symbol.

Delhi has already paid the price for one political experiment. A new name, younger faces and a new symbol do not necessarily mean a new kind of politics. The lesson of AAP is simple: the next movement promising to clean up politics should be examined carefully before it is trusted.

And then there is the symbol itself. The broom promised to clean the system. The cockroach survives in the very dirt the broom failed to remove. The question now is simple: will the cockroach clean up the system or thrive in its dirt?

When Intoxication Erases Memory

We return finally to Sita Ram Goel’s parable. Every woman knew what had happened to the women before her. Yet each believed that her own story would end differently. That was Goel’s warning: history may show us the danger but hope can misguide us into believing that this time will be different.

Political intoxication works similarly. Revolutionary certainty can intoxicate. Populism can intoxicate. The conviction that this time the faces are different can intoxicate. Every new movement offers essentially the same reassurance: they became corrupt, we shall remain pure; they wanted power, we want change; they betrayed the movement, we are the movement.

Real people pay the price for political experiments. Anna’s supporters gave the movement their trust. Families devastated by addiction lose much more than money. Fifty-three people lost their lives in the Delhi riots. The Red Fort was vandalised. And angry young people can easily become a ladder for someone else’s rise to power.

That is what connects the bottle, the broom and the cockroach. The symbols change but our weakness remains the same: hope can misguide us into forgetting the lessons of the past.

That is the warning in Sita Ram Goel’s parable. The husband had killed his wives before, yet each time he could present himself as innocent and convince another woman that the past did not tell the truth about him. She knew what had happened to the others but still believed that her own story would be different. Politics often works in the same way: the record is there but a new promise makes us believe that this time will be different.

The bottle makes us forget our suffering. Revolutionary politics makes us forget history. And when we forget history, the next promise looks new again.

› Mayank Jain is an author and filmmaker with more than 50 critically acclaimed films to his credit. His work spans governance, national security, public health and social reform and is known for tackling complex issues with intellectual rigour and cinematic clarity.

I am a cockroach.

Christian Inculturation: How Tamil evangelists are trying to appropriate Murugan-Kartikkeya – Aravindan Neelakandan

VOI

Murugan

Culture marauders in Tamil Nadu are trying to appropriate the shining Vedic deity Murugan-Karttikeya, making him into a historical Tamil patriarch they can co-op into Christianity via the mythical St. Thomas. – Aravindan Neelakandan

Murugan is the god of Tamils. Of late, a virulent form of Tamil secessionists has been seeking to appropriate this deity. Paradoxically, this movement wants to remove all the cultural and spiritual significance attributed to Murugan through the millennia. Murugan has been for Tamils a higher principle—both transcendent and immanent. Personified as a handsome boy and a valiant romantic young man with charming anecdotes woven around him, he is also unborn. However, the movement headed by one Seeman, whose original name is Simon, has been claiming that Murugan was originally a patriarch—a historical personality, and that worship of Murugan is nothing but worshipping ancestors.

It is important to understand that such claims by Seeman which are being considered by many as statements by a lunatic fringe leader, are an indicator of a “breaking India” force trying to attain critical mass in the political arena. As early as 1990s, John Samuel, a fanatical Christian, started using the Institute of Asian Studies in Chennai to further an evangelical agenda in the academic domain. Samuel started conducting international conferences on Murugan. Many devotees and scholars, who were unaware of the real intentions of Samuel, attended these conferences and even presented papers.

Hinduism Today in its May 1999 issue, unwittingly brought out the subtle agenda that was being covertly run in the conferences. The magazine asked Sri Lankan delegate Dr Vimala Krishnapillai of the Colombo University, if the participants considered Murugan as a godhead, or “just an evolution of a historical person”. She said that out of 45 research papers she knows of (a total of 135 were presented), 70 per cent extolled Murugan as god. However, the magazine discovered that Samuel “increased the last percentage, opining a non-mystical—and subtly anti-Hindu—view that most scholars, including himself, believe Murugan was elevated from a historical person”. Soon, the pretence of subtlety was jettisoned. He stated openly in 2001 that Soma-Skanda, a famous form of Murugan worshipped throughout Tamil Nadu, was actually the representation of the Christian Trinity.

It is not an accident that Samuel, who tried to reduce Murugan to  historical personality and then christanise him, and Seeman, who is trying to echo these sentiments in the political arena, are both Christians, who are trying to use Tamil identity politics to subvert the community’s culture and spirituality. In this, they are aided by cultural and spiritual illiteracy that has been created among Tamil Hindus by the Dravidianist education system.

If one correlates the way this appropriation happens with the change in religious demography of the state then one can understand how well choreographed the evolution of Murugan-appropriation movement is with the demographic siege.

Between 1951 to 1971, Christian population in the state rose from 4.79 to 5.75 per cent. It was during this time that the Dravidian movement described by a Christian bishop as “a time bomb planted by the Church to destroy Hinduism” rose to power. That also coincided with crackpot scholars releasing books which claimed Christian origin for Thirukkural. By the 1980s, the percentage was galloping towards 6 per cent, and that saw the International Tamil Reserach Institution releasing a book claiming not just Thirukkural but also Saivaite cannonical texts as being derived from Thomas Christianity.

These academic attempts met with severe resistance from real scholars. The period between 1991 and 2011 saw a very rapid increase in Christian population and aggressive forms of evangelisation. Academically-discredited crackpot theories of Hinduism or a perverted form of Thomas Christianity have started becoming strong evangelical tools. Simultaneously, Christian leaders in seemingly secular Tamil chauvinist movements started claiming that Murugan was only an ancestor and not a deity. This has serious consequences. One can very well see how these fringe groups work ideologically and theologically in tandem with Christian evangelical strategies. Let us take a hypothetical scenario. Christian demography can decide the political outcome in parts of Thanjavur, Tiruchirappalli and Dindigul in the central region; the Nilgiris and parts of Coimbatore in the west; Sivaganga and Ramanathapuram in the southeast; and, Tirunelveli, Thoothukkudi and Kanyakumari in the south.

If the evangelical Church and “secularised” Tamils in these pockets influence the victory at least of a few of the candidates of fringe elements, then they can start raising these totally unscientific even pseudo-scientific theories in the legislative assembly. If these elements can also enter into administrative positions in Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department, then they can even conduct a mass in a Murugan temple, claiming that Murugan being just a secular ancestor, a Christian service in his honour would not be wrong. The scenario may look right now hilarious or paranoid but then which sensible person in the seventeenth century would have thought that one day the Ramayana would be interpreted in terms of races?

So Hindus, people belonging to a post-colonised, third-world religion, need to fight against this siege at different levels with only one weapon. They have neither state support nor surplus from colonialism. Worse, they have to also face apartheid. So the only weapon they have is their immense cultural and spiritual knowledge and heritage.

So, who is Murugan?

He is the son of Shiva and the goddess who slayed Mahishasura. The most ancient of Tamil literature speaks of him as the one who slayed the asura—Soor. In the eco-cultural classification of landscapes, Murugan is the deity of kurinchi—the forests, mountains and mountain forests. One of the core aspects of Murugan worship is the manifestation of him in the altered state of consciousness, into which the chief priests of Murugan, both male and female, enter.

Epigraphist and author S. Ramachandran, points out to a very important feature about Murugan. Kurinchi, the eco-cultural zone, where Murugan is the deity, is also used as a literary backdrop for secret love-making. The literary setting for this usually portrays the girl as belonging to a tribal clan, and made to guard the millet. When a rogue elephant charges at her as she guards the field all alone, a young tribesman (usually from another clan to raise the level of hostility that would stem from the romance), saves her from the elephant, and they fall in love. In this context, S. Ramachandran points out that one of the prominent mounts of Murugan was elephant. In very ancient petroglyphs found in Tamil Nadu, a male form mounted on an elephant with females dancing in line, is depicted.

As late as the fifteenth century, the elephant-enabled romance gets mapped to Murugan. Murugan desires to marry Valli, a tribal girl. However, she is not attracted to Murugan, who appears before her in the form of an old man. So, Murugan meditates upon Ganesha, who, by now, is considered as his elder brother. Ganesha appears in the form of a wild elephant. Terrified by the elephant, Valli hugs the old man, who then reveals his original form. The anecdote is repeatedly highlighted in Tamil literature, emphasising its spiritual symbolism—Ganesha being muladhara and Valli being the jivatma, and Murugan the Brahman. Also, Valli-Murugan symbolism speaks of Valli as iccha-shakti. The spear of Murugan represents the gyana shakti and Devayani or Devasena, another consort of Murugan, represents kriya shakti.

He is also called Kandan—another favourite name Tamils use to call him. Needless to say, it comes from Skanda. One of the ancient forms of Tamil temples enshrined “kanthu”, which is mentioned frequently in old Tamil literature. “Kanthu” is related to both linga worship as well as Murugan worship, emphasises the epigraphist.

The word “kanthu” is also related to skambha—the pillar of all existence worshiped in Atharva Veda through the Skambha-Sukta hymns. Here, he is described as the very foundation of rtam—the cosmic order. He is pursued by “two maidens of different colours”—here, day and night. Skambha is also the “unborn”. His very form is the hymns of the four vedas. Skambha “firmly holds in place the six widespread directions”.

All these aspects of Murugan are repeated in the Tamil bhakti literature with remarkable consistency. The six faces of Murugan looking in six directions also become the symbol of the infinitely diverse nature of the divine in Tamil literature. Nakeerar, a Sangam Age poet in his Thirumurkaatrupadai, describes the first face of Murugan as the one that dispels darkness; the second gives his devotees what they seek; the third protects the Vedic yagna; the fourth illuminates the intellect of those who search for knowledge; the fifth destroys the obstacles in the path to realisation including ego, illusion and karma; the sixth being enchanted by the beauty of tribal girl Valli, radiating eternal bliss. Arunagirinathar, a fifteenth century Murugan devotee and a great poet, has also popularised through a very melodious song the diverse functions of the six faces of Murugan. In his Kandar Anuboothi, a famous devotional and mystic hymn on Murugan, he speaks of the lord as “unborn”.

Through his poems that are melodious, rhythmic and highly spiritual, he describes Murugan as being attained through the great Shiva-Advaitic state of consciousness. In the seventeenth century, Kumaraguruparar, an autistic child who later became a prodigy, sang songs in praise of Murugan that were filled with poetic brilliance and deep spirituality. He defines the spiritual form of Murugan with mantras as his bloodstream. The consistency with which the spiritual symbolism of Murugan is brought forth is indeed breathtaking. One can say that Tamil culture has not only preserved but taken Vedic divinity, which was presented in a seed form in the Vedic hymns, to the highest spiritual potential.

The colonial-Marxist historiography, euphemistically called Nehruvian secularism, has systematically devalued this innate spiritual nature of our culture. This, in turn, plays well into the hands of evangelical and other “breaking India” forces, which want to reduce Hindu deities to historical personalities.

The distorted worldviews of the likes of Samuel and Seeman are then the disease vectors bred by the cultural illiteracy created by our curriculum. They represent the ignorance propagated by what author Ram Swarup calls the “ego-god” complex. In Tamil tradition, the spear of jnana given to Murugan by the goddess destroys this “ego-god” complex, ultimately subduing them to become his mount and his flag mast. –  Swarajya Magazine, 1 December 2018

Jesus as Murugan.

Manu and Moral Presentism: The safest book to hate in India – Prajesh Panikkar

VOI

B.R. Ambedkar burning the Manusmriti.

The Manusmriti deserves neither worship nor hysteria. It deserves to be read as what it is: an ancient text, shaped by the anxieties, assumptions, customs and social hierarchies of its time. – Prajesh Panikkar

In his Annihilation of Caste, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar says the Manusmriti prescribes pouring molten lead into the ears of a Shudra who hears the Veda. Ambedkar writes: “The Manusmriti prescribes such heavy sentences as cutting off the tongue, or pouring of molten lead in the ears, of the Shudra who recites or hears the Veda.”

Among the many charges levelled against the Manusmriti, this is one of the most frequently cited and most damning: that it prescribes pouring molten lead into the ears of a Shudra who hears the Veda. How brutal! How primitive! One might even think that stoning the offender to death would have been the more humane alternative. After all, stoning is not primitive; it is still prescribed and practised in some places for certain offences considered immoral.

But there is a problem with this charge: the Manusmriti does not mention it. Dr. Ambedkar was mistaken. Nowhere in the Manusmriti is such a punishment prescribed for such an offence. Interestingly, one of the more recent editions of Annihilation of Caste, edited and annotated by S. Anand, with an introduction by Arundhati Roy, acknowledges this discrepancy in a footnote, though without explicitly stating that Ambedkar himself was mistaken. The footnote says, “Such verses do not figure in the Manusmriti”, as if the Manusmriti has fallen short, rather than Ambedkar having gotten it wrong.

Ever since Ambedkar attacked the Manusmriti, the text has come to be seen across India as a symbol of all that is vicious in Hindu society. But this perception overlooks a basic fact: the Manusmriti is not a sacred text, nor does it govern the day-to-day life of a Hindu, not even that of a Brahmin. It is just one text among many in the vast corpus of Hindu Dharma literature, a tradition that spans the Apastamba and Gautama Dharmasutras to the Yajnavalkya and Vishnu Smritis. Occasionally these texts are cited to justify a particular practice or position in a religious context. But the corpus is so vast and varied that one can find scriptural support for almost anything, as well as for its opposite.

Not a binding text

Today, no Smriti, not the Manusmriti, not any other, dictates how a Hindu lives, Brahmin or otherwise. These texts do not govern the daily life of even the most conservative modern Hindu. To treat them as the Hindu equivalent of a universally binding religious code is not just wrong; it is a fundamental misreading of their place in the tradition.

But there is a readymade answer to this argument. Since the Manusmriti-charade has been going on for so long, anyone who follows the debate is familiar with the arguments, the comebacks, and the comebacks to those comebacks.

“We are not saying that the Manusmriti is a binding text,” the critic of the Manusmriti would say. “What we are saying is that the Manusmriti shaped India’s casteist social backwardness. Its ideas seeped into the culture, even if nobody cites the text today. It therefore stands as a symbol of the viciousness and societal ugliness of Hinduism.”

The reality is that there was never, in the entire history of Hinduism, a single Smriti followed by all its sects and communities, Brahmin or non-Brahmin. There was no single tradition, no single set of rituals, no single code of law. The Namboothiris, the Brahmins of Kerala, for instance, claim their code of conduct is shaped by the Shaankarasmriti, a text attributed to Shankaracharya, and many of its provisions directly contradict those prescribed in the Manusmriti. Even its followers readily admit that Shankaracharya did not write it; the attribution was likely made to lend the text greater authority.

Plurality of laws

Each region, village, and family had its own customs and its own code of law. In the Arthashastra, Kautilya refers to this as the “plurality of laws”. The many Smriti texts and Dharmasutras emerged in this context. Each of these codes of law contained provisions that differed from those found in the others, while also sharing, and sometimes directly borrowing, ideas and verses from one another. More importantly, these texts were not necessarily expressions of the personal ideas of their authors. The authors largely codified practices and norms that were generally accepted as law, while also extolling the virtues and traditions of their own clans. This explains why many Smriti texts contain similar ideas, and why some even contain identical or near-identical verses. Whether it is the Manusmriti, Yajnavalkya Smriti, Vishnu Smriti, or Shaankara Smriti, these texts reflected the ideas, customs, and social norms prevalent among the communities in which they emerged. At the same time, they often sought to establish the special status of those communities and their traditions, portraying their customs as more authoritative, their social position as more legitimate, and, at times, their place in the social order as having a particular sanction or proximity to the divine.

Among these, Manu’s code of law has a particular significance, as it is among the earliest surviving systematic codifications of law in India. It was a text that was written around 2nd century CE. One of the verses most often cited to portray the text as primitive is “na stri svatantryam arhati”, commonly understood to mean that a woman should remain under the care of her father, husband, or son and is not entitled to independence. This was one of the verses quoted by Rahul Gandhi in one of his recent PowerPoint presentations, in what appeared to be an attempt to connect with the Gen Z. (One is reminded of Eric Cartman’s famous line from the sitcom South Park; “How do I reach these keeeeds!”)

The idea expressed in this verse, however, was hardly unique to India. The notion that women should remain under the guardianship of men was widespread across the ancient world and reflected a broader social and legal norm of the period. Take The Institutes of Gaius for example. That text was an introductory legal textbook on Roman private law written around the same period as Manusmriti. In the Book 1, the text says, “Where the head of a family has children in his power he is allowed to appoint guardians for them by will. That is, for males while under puberty but for females however old they are, even when they are married. For it was the wish of the old lawyers that women, even those of full age, should be in guardianship as being scatter brained.”

Women in Manusmriti

The text goes beyond merely denying women independence. It places women in a subordinate legal and social position, explicitly justifying their continued guardianship on the grounds that they were considered incapable of exercising independent judgment.

We can judge such ancient observations and value systems by today’s standards, recoil in shock, and condemn them with full force. But that is moral presentism. There is a difference between condemning an ancient law according to our present moral standards and understanding what that law meant, how it functioned, and the historical context in which it emerged. The former becomes the fallacy of moral presentism when contemporary assumptions are substituted for historical inquiry.

No sane person in India would support the Manusmriti and seek to enact it as though it were the word of God. For a believing Hindu, the text has virtually no practical authority in everyday life. It does not dictate family life, social or political life, how a man or woman conducts themselves in public, or even religious practice. For the overwhelming majority of Hindus, the Manusmriti has little to no bearing on how they actually live their lives.

Even though it has no direct bearing on a Hindu’s life, it is possible that the Manusmriti may have influenced or shaped Hindu practices in some faint or indirect way, much as the Institutes of Gaius influenced the development of modern civil law systems. Such influence does not mean that the text’s ideas, positive or negative, were simply copied and carried forward unchanged. It means only that an old text can leave traces in the intellectual and cultural traditions that develop around it, even when the text itself is no longer followed as a code of conduct.

Why was Manusmriti written?

The Manusmriti was written, or perhaps more accurately codified, at an interesting point in Indian history. Buddhism was gaining increasing acceptance among several major royal houses, while Brahmanical traditions, which had until then enjoyed considerable influence and a role in courtly and political affairs, were facing a changing social and intellectual landscape. It is in this context that the Smriti tradition takes on an interesting significance. The Brahmins had to reaffirm their own importance, not merely to others but to themselves. They needed a framework that affirmed their place at the centre of the social and religious order, and that presented the proper functioning of society as dependent upon Brahminical authority and sanction. Scholars who have studied the text in detail, such as Wendy Doniger and Patrick Olivelle, as well as historians of ancient India, have advanced versions of this view. The Smritis, with their repeated emphasis on Brahminical status and their assertions of the superiority of Brahmins over other social groups, can be understood, at least in part, against this backdrop of a community seeking to reaffirm its position and authority.

Given all this, why is the Manusmriti, a text that is almost two millennia old, that plays no major role in how Hindus live their lives, and that is today of greater interest for its anthropological and historical value than its religious one, so often portrayed as a vicious scripture venerated by the entire Hindu community as though it were sacred and universally authoritative? This week too, the Congress burned the text in front of the RSS headquarters. Every year brings at least one such protest, a public burning of the Smriti. Yet hardly anyone seems to care anymore. No Hindu, not even the most conservative, bats an eye.

This has to be seen in contrast with the conspicuous silence from the same quarters when it comes to more severe forms of misogyny from other corners. For example, Kantapuram Aboobacker Musliyar, the current general secretary of the Samastha Kerala Jam’iyyathul Ulama, the same body that passed a resolution discouraging Muslim women’s education in the 1930s, said last week that women should “remain confined to the home and live quietly”. Kantapuram, an octogenarian Islamic scholar who holds the title of Indian Grand Mufti and commands considerable respect among Kerala Muslims, said the Holy Quran itself holds this view and that women’s public appearance would cause great destruction. The comment, which one would not need to think twice before condemning or rejecting, was handled with kid gloves by many political leaders. P.C. Vishnunath, a Congress MLA from Kerala and Minister for Cultural Affairs, whom one might have expected to be among the first to condemn such a misogynistic remark, instead said, “I do not want to get into the substance of Kantapuram’s remarks and comment on them.”

If a national leader of the Congress, say Rahul Gandhi himself, were pressed for a comment on Kantapuram’s observation, it would be hard to imagine him giving a very different answer. The reason is simple. Misogyny in many other quarters is harder to attack because it is woven into the very fabric of their ideology. Religious and social practices in those communities are still shaped by such ideas, making it difficult to condemn them without risking accusations of hurting religious sentiments.

Why is it an easier target?

The Manusmriti, and the other Smriti texts, present an easier target. Their misogyny or casteism can be attacked and vilified precisely because, for all practical purposes, these texts are obsolete and have little or no influence on the religious or everyday lives of Hindus. Burning the Manusmriti costs nothing: no priest will refuse to perform a wedding over it, no temple will alter its rituals, and no believer will feel that their faith has been violated. Nobody’s religious sentiments are going to be hurt, because for most Hindus, the text was never a living document to begin with. It is a safe act, a pseudo outrage, one that lets the burner claim the moral high ground of fighting caste and patriarchy without having to confront any actual, currently practiced belief or institution that might resist, defend itself, or generate real controversy.

Burning the Manusmriti had a symbolic value when Ambedkar did it decades ago. It no longer carries the same significance today. The symbolism was further eroded when some protesters turned the burning of the Manusmriti into an annual, and sometimes even a monthly, ritual. What was once a powerful symbolic act has now been repeated so often that it has lost much of its meaning. Today, burning the Manusmriti means little to anyone. Want to burn a Smriti text now? Go ahead. Who cares?

Today, the Manusmriti is attacked not because it plays a prescriptive role in Hindu life, but precisely because it does not. It has virtually no role in the lives of Hindus, and nobody is likely to object when it is attacked. Burning it is therefore a profitable exercise for a politician. You can fight a glorious battle without hurting anyone, like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, and walk away with accolades, applause, and, instantly, the credentials of a progressive.

And that is why, after a point, talking about the Manusmriti becomes boring. Yes, patriarchy. Yes, misogyny. We know. It is a code of law that is two millennia old and is not practised in any meaningful way by anyone today. Tell me, sir, what are your views on the misogyny that is still practised and remains embedded in the foundational ideas of other faiths? What about the lived reality of women in those communities? What about scholars who say that women should not appear in public, or that women should not lead governments? Does that not require any rectification or change?

The Manusmriti deserves neither worship nor hysteria. It deserves to be read as what it is: an ancient text, shaped by the anxieties, assumptions, customs and social hierarchies of its time. We can reject its misogyny and caste distinctions without pretending that it governs the lives of Hindus today. We can condemn what is objectionable in it without attributing to it an authority it does not possess. And if our concern is genuinely with the dignity and freedom of women, our scrutiny should not stop at texts that are politically convenient to attack. The real test of progress is not how loudly we condemn a book that nobody follows, but whether we are willing to question ideas that continue to influence the lives of people today. That is a far more difficult, but far more meaningful, battle. As long as that concern does not extend to those politicians who attack the Manusmriti, their criticism cannot be regarded as genuine. It is agenda-driven, insincere, and nothing more than political posturing dressed up as progressive morality. – News18, 2 September 2026

› Prajesh Panikkar is a commentator with a research degree in philosophy from the University of Sheffield, focusing on the intersections of culture, history, and politics. 

Gandhi-Ambedkar Cartoon