Category india

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

Caste-based reservation system is not rational – S.N. Balagangadhara

VOI

Caste-based Reservations

The caste-based reservation system is neither rational nor moral. One has to say that Indians are either irrational or immoral or both, if they defend reservation. — Prof. Dr. S.N. Balagangadhara

The problem that has plagued India since Independence [is] caste-based reservations for education, employment and career promotions. In the last four decades of living in Europe, I have heard both sides of the debate. As an Indian living abroad, it appears to me that these debates actually raise one single question: Are Indians irrational or immoral, or both? This is the un-debated side of the reservation discourse in India. Let me explain. Is caste-based reservation a rational policy to follow? The answer to this question does not require a definition of ‘rationality.’ Instead, the issue is: does this policy eventuate in irrational consequences or effects?

Consider two individuals: one outside the reserved category, the other within. The former knows that to get an admission in a good university, he should belong to the top 0.5 per cent of the applicants. He knows too that he will not be part of the very few, who make the grade. Thus, what is the most rational thing for him to do? If putting in enormous effort and taking it easy both produce the same result, it is rational for him to expend less effort. Consider the latter. He knows that to get a seat in a good university, he only needs 35 per cent. Getting more marks will not increase his chances. No matter how little effort he puts in, he will get the desired seat. As a rational agent, therefore, he too takes it easy. Because knowledge and competence are mostly commensurate with the efforts put in to acquire them, expending little effort implies equivalent increase in ignorance and incompetence.

Since the caste-based reservation makes it rational for people both in and outside reservation to choose to be lazy, there is an incentive to remain ignorant, incompetent and inefficient. If this attitude is generalised—in colleges, courts and bureaucracy—it produces and reproduces such people. Result: the institutions they run cannot be more efficient than them. The inevitable consequence is the collapse of both the society and its institutions. That is how outsiders perceive India today: her courts, educational institutions, bureaucracy, police, governments, are in the process of breaking down.

Why does this rationality argument not figure in Indian discourse? There is a well-known answer: the reservation is the reparation for the injustice committed by one group of people against another over two millennia or more. In that case, moral considerations trump rationality. If we accept that it is irrational to follow policies that lead to the collapse of society because everyone is rationally encouraged to pursue irrational goals, the question becomes: is it moral to be rational?

In and of itself, there is nothing absurd about it. One can indeed speak of local rationalities, such as scientific, technological and ecological rationalities and raise ethical questions about them. So, let us ask: irrespective of its rationality, is the caste-based reservation system moral?

Today, it is common sense to say that there is oppression of one group of people across the whole of India by another group of people spread equally widely across India. However, there can be no empirical evidence for this claim because say ‘Dalit’ or OBC (Other Backward Castes) is neither one social group nor one particular caste. Both names refer to sets of groups. It is only correct to say then that multiple groups have oppressed multiple other groups in the last millennia in India. One could, of course, name the oppressed groups as the Dalits or OBCs. Sadly, this fact of oppression is true for all human civilisations. Therefore, if the reservation system is a moral critique of oppression, it would have to follow that all other societies except the Indian are immoral, because they do not have such a system. This suggestion is implausible. Is the reservation system a payment for the sins of our forefathers, who instituted an unjust social system? This could be true, but only if one argues that the children of oppressors have to pay for the sins of their forefathers.

This moral stance is unique to the Judaic tradition, where the sins of the fathers visit their sons. No other moral tradition has coherently argued this. I am aware that some Indians do talk in this fashion but that is incoherent within the framework of Indian culture.

Rightly or wrongly, ideas like karma and punarjanma require that only the agent pays for his misdeeds. If one has to pay for the misdeeds of another, what do karma and karmaphala mean? The entire set of Indian traditions would become totally incoherent. Therefore, you cannot assume this ethical stance unless you are a Jew yourself. But Jewish Israel has no reservation system. Neither are Indians Jewish. Hence, this moral justification does not work.

Can we not say that the reservation system is the reparation of past damages, whether inflicted on one group or on multiple groups? Maybe. In the case of the Native Americans, for example, the white settlers took away their lands and became wealthy as a result. The Nazis deprived the Jews of property, wealth, and life itself. African-Americans were displaced and transformed into slaves.

Perhaps, one could also address the British for the damages inflicted by colonialism. In all these cases, a specific group appropriates unjustly what belonged to another specific group. Again, there is no historical evidence to indicate that there was dispossession of the property of one particular group by another specific group all over India.

If none of these arguments work, why does this policy appeal? Is it because of the demands of justice in general and of social justice in particular? If this is the case, one should give the criteria of justice and of social justice that make sense of caste-based reservation. Nobody has done so. Surely, those who question the morality of rationality mean something other than all these flawed arguments.

Here is one such. Just structures are preferable, since they always generate just consequences. However, it has been shown that just structures, in certain contexts, produce unjust consequences. Therefore, this claim is not a logical truth; we are compelled to show empirically that the reservation system is not generating unjust consequences. If that were to be the case, there would be no Patel, Gurjar or Jat protests, nor Mandal Commission. Thus, the reservation system is not an embodied critique of a local rationality—‘the’ caste system—nor is it about the morality of rationality.

Consequently, the caste-based reservation system is neither rational nor moral. One has to say that Indians are either irrational or immoral or both, if they defend reservation. The British were reluctant to give self-rule or independence to India because many were convinced that Indians were immoral and irrational. Looking from the outside today, one is compelled to ask: were the British telling the truth, after all? – The New Indian Express, 11 September 2015

› Prof. Dr S. N. Balagangadhara of Ghent University, Belgium, is the Director of the India Platform and Research Centre, Comparative Science of Cultures.

A History of Caste – Koenraad Elst

VOI

Caste Batman Meme

In an inter-faith debate, most Hindus can easily be put on the defensive with a single word—caste. Any anti-Hindu polemist can be counted on to allege that “the typically Hindu caste system is the most cruel apartheid, imposed by the barbaric white Aryan invaders on the gentle dark-skinned natives.” Here’s a more balanced and historical account of this controversial institution. – Dr. Konraad Elst

Merits of the Caste System

The caste system is often portrayed as the ultimate horror. Inborn inequality is indeed unacceptable to us moderns, but this does not preclude that the system has also had its merits.

Caste is perceived as an “exclusion-from,” but first of all it is a form of “belonging-to,” a natural structure of solidarity. For this reason, Christian and Muslim missionaries found it very difficult to lure Hindus away from their communities. Sometimes castes were collectively converted to Islam, and Pope Gregory XV (1621-23) decreed that the missionaries could tolerate caste distinction among Christian converts; but by and large, caste remained an effective hurdle to the destruction of Hinduism through conversion. That is why the missionaries started attacking the institution of caste and in particular the brahmin caste. This propaganda has bloomed into a full-fledged anti-brahminism, the Indian equivalent of anti-Semitism.

Every caste had a large measure of autonomy, with its own judiciary, duties and privileges, and often its own temples. Inter-caste affairs were settled at the village council by consensus; even the lowest caste had veto power. This autonomy of intermediate levels of society is the antithesis of the totalitarian society in which the individual stands helpless before the all-powerful state. This decentralized structure of civil society and of the Hindu religious commonwealth has been crucial to the survival of Hinduism under Muslim rule. Whereas Buddhism was swept away as soon as its monasteries were destroyed, Hinduism retreated into its caste structure and weathered the storm.

Caste also provided a framework for integrating immigrant communities: Jews, Zoroastrians and Syrian Christians. They were not only tolerated, but assisted in efforts to preserve their distinctive traditions.

Typically Hindu?

It is routinely claimed that caste is a uniquely Hindu institution. Yet, counter examples are not hard to come by. In Europe and elsewhere, there was (or still is) a hierarchical distinction between noblemen and commoners, with nobility only marrying nobility. Many tribal societies punished the breach of endogamy rules with death.

Coming to the Indian tribes, we find Christian missionaries claiming that “tribals are not Hindus because they do not observe caste.” In reality, missionary literature itself is rife with testimonies of caste practices among tribals. A spectacular example is what the missions call “the mistake:” the attempt, in 1891, to make tribal converts in Chhotanagpur inter-dine with converts from other tribes. It was a disaster for the mission. Most tribals renounced Christianity because they chose to preserve the taboo on inter-dining. As strongly as the haughtiest brahmin, they refused to mix what God hath separated.

Endogamy and exogamy are observed by tribal societies the world over. The question is therefore not why Hindu society invented this system, but how it could preserve these tribal identities even after outgrowing the tribal stage of civilization. The answer lies largely in the expanding Vedic culture’s intrinsically respectful and conservative spirit, which ensured that each tribe could preserve its customs and traditions, including its defining custom of tribal endogamy.

Description and History

The Portuguese colonizers applied the term caste, “lineage, breed,” to two different Hindu institutions: jati and varna. The effective unit of the caste system is the jati, birth-unit, an endogamous group into which you are born, and within which you marry. In principle, you can only dine with fellow members, but the pressures of modern life have eroded this rule. The several thousands of jatis are subdivided in exogamous clans, gotra. This double division dates back to tribal society.

By contrast, varna is the typical functional division of an advanced society—the Indus/Saraswati civilization, 3rd millennium, BCE. The youngest part of the Rg Veda describes four classes: learned brahmins born from Brahma’s mouth, martial kshatriya born from his arms; vaishya entrepreneurs born from his hips and shudra workers born from his feet. Everyone is a shudra by birth. Boys become dwija, twice-born, or member of one of the three upper varnas upon receiving the sacred thread in the upanayana ceremony.

The varna system expanded from the Saraswati-Yamuna area and got firmly established in the whole of Aryavarta (Kashmir to Vidarbha, Sindh to Bihar). It counted as a sign of superior culture setting the arya, civilized, heartland apart from the surrounding mleccha, barbaric, lands. In Bengal and the South, the system was reduced to a distinction between brahmins and shudras. Varna is a ritual category and does not fully correspond to effective social or economic status. Thus, half of the princely rulers in British India were shudras and a few were brahmins, though it is the kshatriya function par excellence. Many shudras are rich, many brahmins impoverished.

The Mahabharata defines the varna qualities thus: “He in whom you find truthfulness, generosity, absence of hatred, modesty, goodness and self-restraint, is a brahmana. He who fulfills the duties of a knight, studies the scriptures, concentrates on acquisition and distribution of riches, is a kshatriya. He who loves cattle breeding, agriculture and money, is honest and well-versed in scripture, is a vaishya. He who eats anything, practises any profession, ignores purity rules, and takes no interest in scriptures and rules of life, is a shudra.” The higher the varna, the more rules of self-discipline are to be observed. Hence, a jati could collectively improve its status by adopting more demanding rules of conduct, e.g. vegetarianism.

A person’s second name usually indicates his jati or gotra. Further, one can use the following varna titles: Sharma (shelter, or joy) indicates the brahmin, Varma (armour) the kshatriya, Gupta (protected) the vaishya and Das (servant) the shudra. In a single family, one person may call himself Gupta (varna), another Agrawal (jati), yet another Garg (gotra). A monk, upon renouncing the world, sheds his name along with his caste identity.

Untouchability

Below the caste hierarchy are the untouchables, or harijan (literally “God’s people”), dalits (“oppressed”), paraiya (one such caste in South India), or scheduled castes. They make up about 16% of the Indian population, as many as the upper castes combined.

Untouchability originates in the belief that evil spirits surround dead and dying substances. People who work with corpses, body excretions or animal skins had an aura of danger and impurity, so they were kept away from mainstream society and from sacred learning and ritual. This often took grotesque forms: thus, an untouchable had to announce his polluting proximity with a rattle, like a leper.

Untouchability is unknown in the Vedas, and therefore repudiated by neo-Vedic reformers like Dayanand Saraswati, Narayana Guru, Gandhi and Savarkar. In 1967, Dr. Ambedkar, a dalit by birth and fierce critic of social injustice in Hinduism and Islam, led a mass conversion to Buddhism, partly on the (unhistorical) assumption that Buddhism had been an anti-caste movement. The 1950 Constitution outlawed untouchability and sanctioned positive discrimination programs for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Lately, the Vishva Hindu Parishad has managed to get even the most traditionalist religious leaders on the anti-untouchability platform, so that they invite harijans to Vedic schools and train them as priests. In the villages, however, pestering of dalits is still a regular phenomenon, occasioned less by ritual purity issues than by land and labor disputes. However, the dalits’ increasing political clout is accelerating the elimination of untouchability.

Caste Conversion

In the Mahabharata, Yuddhishthira affirms that varna is defined by the qualities of head and heart, not by one’s birth. Krishna teaches that varna is defined by one’s activity (karma) and quality (guna). Till today, it is an unfinished debate to what extent one’s “quality” is determined by heredity or by environmental influence. And so, while the hereditary view has been predominant for long, the non-hereditary conception of varna has always been around as well, as is clear from the practice of varna conversion. The most famous example is the 17th century freedom fighter Shivaji, a shudra who was accorded kshatriya status to match his military achievements. The geographical spread of Vedic tradition was achieved through large scale initiation of local elites into the varna order. From 1875 onwards, the Arya Samaj has systematically administered the “purification ritual” (shuddhi) to Muslim and Christian converts and to low caste Hindus, making them dwija. Conversely, the present policy of positive discrimination has made upper-caste people seek acceptance into the favored Scheduled Castes.

Veer Savarkar, the ideologue of Hindu nationalism, advocated intermarriage to unify the Hindu nation even at the biological level. Most contemporary Hindus, though now generally opposed to caste inequality, continue to marry within their respective jati because they see no reason for their dissolution.

Racial Theory of Caste

Nineteenth-century Westerners projected the colonial situation and the newest race theories on the caste system: the upper castes were white invaders lording it over the black natives. This outdated view is still repeated ad-nauseam by anti-Hindu authors: now that “idolatry” has lost its force as a term of abuse, “racism” is a welcome innovation to demonize Hinduism. In reality, India is the region where all skin color types met and mingled, and you will find many brahmins as black as Nelson Mandela. Ancient “Aryan” heroes like Rama, Krishna, Draupadi, Ravana (a brahmin) and a number of Vedic seers were explicitly described as being dark-skinned.

But doesn’t varna mean “skin color?” The effective meaning of varna is “splendor, color,” and hence “distinctive quality” or “one segment in a spectrum.” The four functional classes constitute the “colors” in the spectrum of society. Symbolic colors are allotted to the varna on the basis of the cosmological scheme of “three qualities” (triguna): white is sattva (truthful), the quality typifying the brahmin; red is rajas (energetic), for the kshatriya; black is tamas (inert, solid), for the shudra; yellow is allotted to the vaishya, who is defined by a mixture of qualities.

Finally, caste society has been the most stable society in history. Indian Communists used to sneer that “India has never even had a revolution.” Actually, that is no mean achievement. – Hinduism Today, 1 September 1994

› Dr. Elst is a Belgian scholar who has extensively studied the current socio-political situation in India. Keenly interested in Asian philosophies and traditions from his early years, he has studied yoga, aikido and other oriental disciplines.

Caste Reservation

The fallacy of human agency and the perils of algorithmic grooming – Sreejith Sreedharan

VOI

AI

Who decides what AI knows? Whose values shape its reasoning? Which languages, histories, and knowledge systems are marginalised by the data it learns from? Which voices are amplified, and which are effectively erased because they do not belong to profitable markets or dominant cultures? – Sreejith Sreedharan

We have built an entire civilisation on a comforting assumption: that each of us, as individuals, freely determines our own thoughts, values, and choices. That we are the authors of our own minds. That our decisions are wholly and unmistakably ours.

It is a beautiful idea. It is also, in the strictest sense, incomplete.

A person does not begin life as a self-made thinker. A child inherits language, class position, family habits, cultural assumptions, religious background, and ideas about success long before the child has the capacity to question them. School extends that inheritance. Peers reinforce it. Media saturates it. Daily routines harden it. By the time a person begins to call a belief their own, much of the mental architecture has already been installed by forces outside their control.

That does not mean agency is an illusion. People still choose. They still judge. They still resist. But agency operates inside conditions that were not selected by the individual. Human freedom is real, but limited, shaped, and unevenly distributed.

Artificial Intelligence has entered this already conditioned environment and begun to alter it at scale and speed.

The loud concerns around AI diminishing or even replacing human agency are understandable. Yet the argument often misses a deeper point. Human minds have never developed in a vacuum. They have always been formed by institutions, social norms, and inherited systems of belief. The real question is not whether conditioning exists. It always has. The real question is what kind of conditioning AI now produces, and who controls it.

For the first time in history, a technology can do more than distribute information. Writing preserved knowledge. The printing press widened access to it. The internet made vast quantities of it available to nearly everyone. But none of these systems democratised the capacity to reason with information. They expanded access to data, not necessarily access to judgement.

AI changes that status quo radically. Used well, it can act as a reasoning companion. It can explain, translate, compare, summarise, test assumptions, and scaffold thought. A first-generation learner in a small town in Odisha or Oaxaca can now ask questions and receive a level of intellectual engagement that once belonged largely to elite classrooms. That is a real shift in the conditions under which thought develops.

This is why AI carries such promise. It may become the first technology capable of raising the cognitive floor rather than merely expanding the speed of execution. It can help more people reason, write, learn, and participate in knowledge systems that were earlier closed to them by geography, class, language, or institutional access.

Across philosophical and spiritual traditions, many thinkers have argued that a civilisation advances when knowledge and capability become more widely shared. Not equal outcomes, but a more even base of epistemic standing. A society cannot remain intellectually healthy if only a small minority has the tools to think clearly while everyone else is left to consume, repeat, and comply.

AI may be the first technology capable of helping build that base.

But that promise sits beside a more troubling reality. The AI systems shaping public life today are not neutral infrastructure. They are products. They are built within business models, commercial incentives, and institutional assumptions that reflect a narrow set of priorities. Frontier AI remains concentrated in a relatively small number of firms and research ecosystems, even if development is becoming more global. That concentration is a red flag, as it shapes what these systems know, what they optimise for, and what kinds of users they are designed to serve.

The result is not a plural expansion of human possibility. In many cases, it is a worldview encoded at scale. English-language dominance, Western institutional habits, and the logic of engagement and monetisation influence how these systems respond, recommend, and rank. The hidden power here is not simply technical. It is cultural and political.

Algorithmic conditioning works differently from older forms of cultural conditioning. Traditional conditioning was often coercive, but it was visible. People could argue against it, form counter-cultures, or reject it outright. It had friction. That friction gave some room for reflection.

Algorithmic conditioning is more adaptive. It studies what a person already prefers and returns it in refined form. It offers convenience while narrowing the range of encounter. Personalisation can reinforce existing habits, reduce exposure to disagreement, and narrow the range of ideas people encounter. It creates the feeling of discovery while quietly reducing surprise. The recommendation engine does not simply show people more of the world. It often shows them more of themselves.

The deeper concern is not that a feed is mildly curated. It is that repeated curation trains attention, and attention shapes thought. A person who is continually shown familiar positions, familiar styles, and familiar emotional cues begins to treat familiarity as depth. The system does not need to coerce. It only needs to keep rewarding what already works. We already see this pattern in everyday choices, from mundane chores to the people we choose to lead us.

That is why the AI governance question is critical and matters so much. The real influence lies in the algorithms, where design choices quietly become societal outcomes.

Who decides what AI knows? Whose values shape its reasoning? Which languages, histories, and knowledge systems are marginalised by the data it learns from? Which voices are amplified, and which are effectively erased because they do not belong to profitable markets or dominant cultures?

These are civilisational questions, not technical ones. Yet they are being resolved today with limited public oversight and little democratic participation from most of the world.

There is still a meaningful opportunity here. AI can widen access to reasoning support, lower barriers to learning, and help more people participate in intellectual life with greater confidence. It can serve as a tool for epistemic levelling if it is designed and governed with that purpose in mind.

But that outcome is not guaranteed. If the systems that shape thought at scale remain concentrated in a handful of corporate hands (or governments), the result will not be liberation. It will be a more efficient consolidation of intellectual power, dressed in the language of empowerment.

Governing AI for the good of all humanity is not a nicety, but a necessity. Public institutions cannot treat AI as a neutral utility while its incentives shape what large populations see, repeat, and accept. The systems that mediate thought now require scrutiny equal to their influence. Transparency, language inclusion, dataset diversity, and accountability are no longer niche policy concerns. They are core conditions for preserving plural thought.

The debate we need is not whether AI threatens human agency that never fully existed. It is who governs the algorithmic conditioning that now shapes thought, and whether that power serves human development or merely corporate advantage.

That debate is not happening at the scale and with the intention it should. It urgently must. – Firstpost, 22 August 2026

› Sreejith Sreedharan is a technology analyst and author. He works on organisational AI readiness and created the AI Instinct Index®, a psychometric diagnostic designed to assess behavioural readiness for AI adoption and adaptive capacity in constraint-heavy environments.

AI

If Arunachal is ‘South Tibet’, let’s talk about Tibet – Utpal Kumar

VOI

Xi Jinping Caricature

One hopes Beijing realises that the law of diminishing returns has set in. If it doesn’t and continues calling Arunachal Pradesh “South Tibet”, then Bharat should be ready to send another message: “Dear Beijing, if Arunachal Pradesh is ‘South Tibet’, let’s then talk about Tibet.” – Utpal Kumar

Former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran, in his book How China Sees India, recounts an extraordinary conversation between Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1972.

“India is a highly suspicious country,” Zhou told Kissinger. “It is quite a big country; sometimes it puts on airs of a big country, but sometimes it has an inferiority complex.”

Kissinger had a ready explanation: “It has been governed by foreigners through most of its history.”

“Yes,” Zhou replied, “that might be one of the historical factors.”

Then came the most fascinating—and revealing—recollection. Zhou told Kissinger about a tea party the then Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had hosted in his garden. Among the guests were two Tibetan lamas. Then, suddenly, another figure appeared in Tibetan costume: a woman.

“Do you know who she was?” Zhou asked.

“Madame Binh?” Kissinger guessed.

“Madame Gandhi,” Zhou replied, provoking laughter.

It was Indira Gandhi, dressed entirely in a Tibetan attire.

“That was something that Nehru was capable of doing,” Zhou recalled. “I was speechless (when) confronted with such a situation. It was impossible for me to say anything.”

There, compressed into this seemingly innocuous episode, lies much of the tragedy of Bharat’s early engagement with China. Nehru apparently thought he was making a charming cultural gesture towards his Chinese guest. Zhou saw it as an affront to China’s conception of itself and, perhaps, further reason to suspect that Bharat harboured ambitions regarding Tibet.

Ironically, Delhi was doing all this to impress Beijing. For decades, and particularly during the first 15 years after Independence, it repeatedly sought to win China’s confidence, only to produce results that were often the opposite of what it intended.

The failure was as much intellectual as political. Until relatively recently, most scholars who presented themselves as China experts, particularly in academia, tended to be Sinophiles. They admired the Chinese system and civilisation, were often in awe of them, and even appeared reluctant to subject Beijing’s worldview and actions to sufficiently rigorous scrutiny. The result was that Delhi continued making mistakes without undertaking adequate course correction.

At the heart of the problem, therefore, was an inadequate understanding of the Middle Kingdom mindset. Indians tended to see China through an Indian prism. They assumed that conciliatory “Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai” rhetoric could foster a genuine sense of fraternity. The Chinese interpreted conciliation differently, more as a weakness that should be exploited.

The Chinese political worldview has been starkly different from that of its southern neighbour. Historian R.C. Majumdar explored this in an article in the Organiser in 1965: “It is characteristic of China that if a region once acknowledged her nominal suzerainty even for a short period, she would regard it as a part of her empire forever and would automatically revive her claim over it even after a thousand years whenever there was a chance of enforcing it.”

Then there was another Chinese characteristic that Tibetologist Charles Alfred Bell wrote about: the tendency to first make “mild” claims and “then to wait a bit and if it passes without objection, to say or do something stronger”.

Seen against this backdrop, Delhi’s recent decision to formally identify 27 places in Arunachal Pradesh by their standard Indian names deserves attention. Predictably, Beijing has reacted sharply, describing the exercise as “self-deception” and warning that it runs “counter to the improving momentum in bilateral relations and could complicate efforts to properly handle border issues”.

The indignation is revealing. China has spent years weaponising nomenclature. It has issued Chinese names for places in Arunachal Pradesh, which it claims as “South Tibet”, repeatedly using maps, terminology and administrative declarations to bolster its territorial claims. Now Bharat is answering in the same language. It has realised that maps are not innocent pieces of paper in territorial disputes. It now understands that names are not merely labels. Cartography, nomenclature, infrastructure, administrative control and diplomatic repetition are all instruments through which states reinforce claims and seek to establish political facts.

Beijing, being a past master of this nomenclature game, has always understood, and even weaponised, this exceptionally well. What’s heartening is that Delhi now appears to understand it too. The timing makes the message even more significant. Xi Jinping is expected to visit Delhi next month for the BRICS summit. The older Indian diplomatic instinct might have been to postpone anything remotely provocative. The usual Indian thinking would have been: why create unnecessary friction before such an important visit?

Not anymore.

There is a certain irony here because Beijing itself has repeatedly demonstrated that summitry does not require strategic restraint. Xi’s 2014 visit to Bharat coincided with a serious confrontation in the Chumar sector. Even as the Modi government rolled out the diplomatic carpet in September 17-19, 2014, troops of the People’s Liberation Army were confronting Indian forces along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

China has, for years, mastered the art of what former Indian envoy to China Vijay Gokhale would, in his latest book, China’s Wars, call the Chinese “talk-and-take” strategy—“the selective application of force at the times of China’s choosing, while simultaneously forcing a desirable outcome through the negotiations”. Beijing has long understood that territorial disputes are fought not merely by soldiers but also by historians, diplomats, mapmakers, bureaucrats and propagandists. Repeat a claim often enough, publish it on enough maps, give places Chinese names, incorporate them into official documents, and wait for opportune moments to let these changes concretise.

Now, as the Arunachal Pradesh episode shows, Delhi too is responding to the Chinese challenge—soldier to soldier, diplomacy to diplomacy, maps to maps. It has realised that merely having civilisational, constitutional control over a territory is not enough. The country also needs to fight and win the narrative war.

The bigger challenge now is consistency. Beijing plays a long game. Delhi should be ready for that and resist the temptation to judge its China policy through individual summits, temporary border disengagements or carefully worded joint statements. It must cultivate strategic patience of its own.

For decades, Bharat’s China policy was haunted by the hope that one more gesture of goodwill might finally persuade Beijing of Delhi’s peaceful intentions. As Zhou Enlai’s story about Indira Gandhi shows, merely having good intentions is not enough. It is also paramount to send the right message.

This is where Delhi’s Arunachal Pradesh messaging is important. One hopes Beijing realises that the law of diminishing returns has set in. If it doesn’t and continues calling the Indian state “South Tibet”, then Bharat should be ready to send another message: “Dear Beijing, if Arunachal Pradesh is ‘South Tibet’, let’s then talk about Tibet.” – Firstpost, 10 August 2026

Arunachala Pradesh Map

Arunachal Pradesh is the official Indian name for the state, which means “Land of the Dawn-Lit Mountains” or “Land of the Rising Sun” in Sanskrit (derived from Aruna meaning dawn/sun and achala meaning mountain). Historically, the region was known as the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) before being renamed and becoming a union territory in 1972. 

In August 2026, the Government of India formally identified 27 specific places within the state with their standard Indian names on the official Survey of India map to counter Chinese renaming attempts. These locations include:

  • Strategic Border Areas: Long Ju, Maja, Jairampur, and Thag La (site of the 1962 war).

  • Mountain Passes: Bisa, Dzo La, Riza La, Pukur La, and Thag La. 

  • Historical Memorials: Jaswant Garh (Martyr Jaswant Singh Rawat) and the Sher-e-Thapa Memorial. 

  • Geographical Features: Sambho Sarovar (high-altitude lake), Bara Kundun, and Chhota Kundun. 

  • Villages and Settlements: Dhan Bari, Pritnagar, Teritnagar, Ramnagar, Sagar, Padma, Jyotinagar, Baisakhi, Chhota Ropuk, Bara Ropuk, Shivaji Nagar, Sunpura, Kamlang Nagar, and Buddhamandir. 

While China refers to the region as Zangnan (Southern Tibet) and has issued multiple lists of alternative names, New Delhi rejects these as “fictitious” and maintains that Arunachal Pradesh is an integral part of India.

India’s Independence: The overlooked forces behind freedom in 1947 – Nilantha Ilangamuwa

VOI

Gandhi, Nehru & Azad

India did not become free because the British suddenly accepted the moral case for self-rule. Independence emerged from a far more turbulent convergence of anti-colonial resistance, wartime exhaustion, economic crisis, political calculations, communal mobilisation and growing doubts about the Raj’s ability to command obedience. – Nilantha Ilangamuwa

Unlike many countries that count their independence by anniversaries, India has developed a peculiar habit of counting its freedom in ordinal numbers. The United States, for example, celebrated its 250th anniversary in 2026, marking two and a half centuries since independence. India, by contrast, calls 15 August 2026 its 80th Independence Day, although the country became independent in 1947 and this is therefore the 79th anniversary of independence. The language of the 80th Independence Day suggests a continuous national ritual in which each passing year is another instalment of a story already settled. Yet India’s independence was anything but settled. It was born from an extraordinary collision of anti-colonial resistance, imperial exhaustion, famine, political calculation, communal mobilisation, ideological disagreement, international pressure and personal rivalries.

The British Empire did not simply relinquish India because the moral case for independence had finally become irresistible. By the end of the Second World War, Britain faced a more practical question than whether Indians wanted freedom. It was whether Britain still possessed the political, economic and coercive capacity to govern India indefinitely. Independence was therefore both a nationalist victory and the retreat of an exhausted empire.

Few episodes expose the contradictions of British rule more brutally than the Bengal famine of 1943. Crop failures, the 1942 cyclone, wartime disruption, inflation, procurement policies, transport constraints and the loss of rice imports after the Japanese occupation of Burma all played roles. But political decisions made during the crisis cannot be separated from the catastrophe. Churchill’s government prioritised the demands of a global war in which India was treated as an imperial resource while Indians had no equivalent political authority over the allocation of those resources. Indians were being asked to participate in the defence of an empire whose political system did not give their lives equal weight in the calculation of wartime priorities.

Churchill-Tharoor Quote

The surviving record becomes darker still when the language of imperial officials is examined. In his diary, Secretary of State for India Leopold Amery recorded Churchill making a remark about Indians “breeding like rabbits” during discussions over famine relief. Amery was so appalled by Churchill’s attitude towards India that he wrote privately that, on the subject of India, Winston was “not quite sane” and compared his outlook with Hitler’s. Millions were starving while the allocation of ships, grain and other resources was being argued over in terms of military necessity, imperial priorities and competing claims on British shipping. The famine was therefore not merely a humanitarian disaster. It exposed what imperial government meant when the population affected by a decision had no sovereign authority over it.

Churchill did not merely oppose a timetable for Indian self-government. He opposed the underlying historical direction. He famously declared that he had not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. For Churchill, empire was not an incidental possession. India remained one of its essential foundations.

India’s side is no less troubling. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad remains one of the most consequential figures to disappear into the background of the conventional independence narrative. His opposition to Pakistan was not based on a denial of Muslim identity. He argued from within an Islamic intellectual framework that a Muslim had no reason to surrender India because political territory could not be divided neatly into the pure and the impure. He regarded the whole of India as his political inheritance. For Azad, Muslim identity and Indian nationhood were not incompatible propositions.

Azad believed that Congress had been offered a constitutional route that could have preserved Indian unity while accommodating substantial political autonomy for Muslim-majority regions. Nehru’s insistence that the Constituent Assembly would ultimately be free to alter the arrangement, Azad argued, gave Jinnah the opportunity to claim that the safeguards offered to Muslims were unreliable. In Azad’s judgement, this was one of the greatest tragedies of Indian history. He went further, arguing that Nehru had committed an “almost equal blunder” in 1937 and that the consequences of Congress’s decisions in the United Provinces helped give the Muslim League a new lease of political life. Partition, in this reading, was not simply the inevitable result of an ancient Hindu-Muslim antagonism. Political decisions made by nationalist leaders helped narrow the alternatives.

Azad himself differed from Gandhi on war and strategy. He regarded non-violence as a policy rather than an absolute creed and argued that Indians had the right to fight if circumstances required it. He also warned Gandhi that Japanese forces approaching India could not simply be regarded as enemies of the British rather than potential enemies of India. He found himself in the extraordinary position of having earlier urged organised opposition to Britain while later warning that Gandhi’s proposed strategy, once Japanese forces approached India’s frontier, was dangerously unrealistic.

Gandhi could regard non-violence as a moral principle, while Azad could regard it largely as a political method. Nehru could view the Second World War through the global confrontation between fascism and democracy, while Azad insisted that India’s own freedom remained paramount. C. Rajagopalachari openly dissented from Congress policy and argued that accommodation with the Muslim League might unlock the constitutional deadlock. Jinnah moved from constitutional politics towards a mass-based demand for Pakistan. Patel pursued political calculations that Azad regarded as falling short of Congress’s professed nationalism.

Meanwhile, even some Europeans concluded that loyalty to justice required opposition to empire. Annie Besant, an Englishwoman, became one of India’s most prominent advocates of self-government. Benjamin Guy Horniman, another Englishman, identified so closely with Indian political grievances that he publicly aligned himself with the nationalist cause. American missionary Samuel Stokes went further, adopting Indian practices and entering the nationalist struggle.

Then there was Shapurji Saklatvala, the British-Indian communist politician whose political relationship with Gandhi was far from harmonious. Saklatvala belonged to a political tradition that viewed Gandhian methods with suspicion. Constitutionalists, revolutionaries, socialists, communists, religious nationalists, secular nationalists and advocates of non-violence disagreed profoundly about what freedom should produce. The British Empire was weakened not by one argument but by the accumulation of contradictions.

An empire claiming to fight fascism could not indefinitely deny political freedom to its largest colony. A government demanding Indian resources could not easily explain why Indian political authority remained subordinate. A state dependent on Indian soldiers could not ignore changing loyalties within the armed forces. By 1946, the Royal Indian Navy revolt demonstrated how dangerous that transformation could become. It was not the sole cause of British withdrawal, but it was an unmistakable warning that the coercive foundations of colonial rule were becoming unstable. The empire had survived earlier rebellions because it could rely upon the obedience of its soldiers and police. That obedience could no longer be taken for granted.

The deeper meaning of 1947 is therefore not that one man defeated an empire, nor that one organisation liberated a nation, nor even that Partition was unavoidable. India became independent because an enormous imperial structure had been weakened from several directions while Indians themselves were arguing fiercely over what should replace it. That is why the overlooked history matters. It asks why an empire that proclaimed liberty ruled India for so long, why famine coexisted with imperial priorities, and why the Raj ultimately lost the loyalty on which its power depended. The flag raised in 1947 represented freedom, but also the end of several competing visions of what India could become. Some disappeared with the empire. Others disappeared with Partition.

Churchill’s government prioritised the demands of a global war in which India was treated as an imperial resource while Indians had no equivalent political authority over the allocation of those resources. Indians were being asked to participate in the defence of an empire whose political system did not give their lives equal weight in the calculation of wartime priorities – The Pioneer, 17 August 2026

› Nilantha Ilangamuwa is a policy analyst and columnist based in Columbo.

Last Bristish troops leave India at Bombay (1948).

Humanity and the forgotten dream of world unity – Gautam Chikermane

VOI

Sri Aurobindo

Just as an individual does not lose individuality when united with the divine but fulfils it, nations too flower to their fullest and freest expressions when united—this is the spiritual goal for a planet currently being crushed by rapidly fragmenting geopolitics. – Gautam Chikermane

On India’s Independence Day and Sri Aurobindo’s birth anniversary on August 15, 2026, there are two phenomenon the world seems to have forgotten: the idea of man as a transitional and evolving being as defined by Sri Aurobindo, and the geography (India) that gave birth to that spiritual inheritance five millenniums ago. Lurking in the dark shadows of progress, the rich age of the mind continues its onward march but the crude era of physical dominance continues; the latter through military may even be hijacking the fruits of development ripened after centuries of West-dominated conflicts.

In Sri Aurobindo’s universe, a nation is not merely a contract of individuals coming together, it is equally and more accurately, a society expressing itself through what he redefined as “collective being”. Such a society has a collective mind, a collective soul, a collective swabhava (essential nature) and a collective swadharma (law of action flowing from swabhava). We can term it ‘spiritual geopolitics’ that has become the psychic undergirding of the surface drama being enacted by principal actors in the form of collective beings expressing themselves as various nations.

When we reframe nations as beings rather than borders, we find in them not the drive of perfected statecraft, impeccably articulated by Ved Vyasa, Sun Tsu or Clausewitz, but the differently-evolving parts of the state: the physical, the vital, the mental and the psychic, each demanding and finding its individual place in the collective consciousness, each incomplete without the other. In 2026, it is the vital parts of the collective beings that are dominating this devolutionary pause in the larger evolutionary discourse.

Replacing progress with regress, we are being gaslit by emotive and vital streams of consciousness through actions of states and powered by nonstate actors such as US Big Tech, both of which are being aggressively embraced by humans stripped of geographical limitations. The slow, deliberate and decisive geological time-treads of evolution towards what Sri Aurobindo defines as the ‘supramental’ seem to have paused under the weight of the physical and the emotional. The grease of war is seeing humanity slip a few steps. It is fumbling, its spiritual aspiration lost to material fall, its ideas of security drowned by the forces of warring technologies.

The question he would ask, therefore, is not who is fighting the righteous war but from which stage of consciousness are the collective beings acting from: the illumined mind, the awakened soul or the desire-seeking vital. Amid the bombings of soldiers and civilians alike, the answer is clearly skewing towards an ego-driven ambition that, in a bid to create history, has chosen to forget history.

Beyond the strait, if Sri Aurobindo were writing today, he would observe the US-Iran war as much an occult phenomenon expressing the repeated rise of asuric forces to counter humanity’s spiritual evolution as a surface conquest and control of chokepoints or energy economics through an ethics-challenged power play. The US-Iran war is an axiomatic paradigm, part of the bigger tensions around the US-Russia-China rivalry that is showcasing itself through the Eastward shift of power and potentially the emergence of a new world order where the US-led West stands strategically softened, still in the play but seeking the dominance that has vanished.

To Sri Aurobindo, the US would be a vital-mental civilisation of tremendous dynamism, built on individual liberty and pragmatic energy, but with a persistent confusion between its national interest and a universal ideal. Its danger is not tyranny of the old imperial kind but a subtler one. It is the tendency to mistake its own particular form of life—technological and military dominance, market democracy, soft power, or once-robust institutions—for the only legitimate form of human progress, and to press this uniformity on other collective beings in the name of unity.

He would see Russia as a wounded and defensive vital ego, a civilisation with a real and distinct soul-nature shaped by centuries of hostility that continue till today. Apart from security, the collective being that is also the world’s largest geography has not yet found the peaceful, self-assured expression of its swabhava. Triggered by great power dominance and pitched against the US and the EU, its swadharma is constantly in a reactive mode. Its current assertiveness, the annexation of territory, the appeal to civilisational destiny, would strike him as the vital being’s attempt to recover dignity through force because it has not yet discovered a freer, more inward form of national stability.

As far as China goes, Sri Aurobindo would view it as an old and formidable civilisation-state whose genius lies in collective ordering, cultural continuity, and disciplined mental organisation capable of remarkable internal coherence. Its risk, in his terms, would be the opposite of America’s: not chaotic individualism exported as universal form, but a centralised harmony imposed from above, in which uniformity masquerades as unity. That is, a well-organised mind and a disciplined citizenry now experiencing wealth and economic success that has not yet let the deeper soul of its people, or of the nations within its orbit, breathe freely.

All three, he would argue, are playing a very old game: alliances, deterrence, balance of power, sanctions, spheres of influence. In other words, power. This is essentially the same mechanism as the historical struggle between empire-by-conquest and confederation-by-mutual-interest that he analysed in his essays in The Ideal of Human Unity, an unstable equilibrium, not a true unification, because it is built on calculation of force and self-interest rather than on the discovery of a common soul-life.

The solution Sri Aurobindo would point to, as he did in his August 15, 1947, article for All India Radio, would be in last three of the five dreams he had for India and its role in global affairs: “A world-union forming the outer basis of a fairer, brighter and nobler life for all mankind.” The momentum of this future existed then, as it does now, if India can develop a statesmanship not limited by current facts and surface events. It must build the physical resilience to endure headwinds, the emotional strength that sustains vitality, and the mental argumentations backed by material power to lead the world to peace, prosperity and progress.

The challenges before us today are not very different from those eight decades ago, when the vacuum of peace was filled with global institutions, all of which have failed to sustain, constantly in need of repair, with temporary changes to quieten voices rather than fix the problems. The institutions, particularly the United Nations, that can sustain humanity’s tomorrow cannot stand on the debris of yesterday; they need to be reimagined, not reformed—a new body to replace the UN, as the UN once replaced the League of Nations in 1946, which replaced the Concert of Europe in 1914.

Three characteristics would define the future. First, for institutions to be born and to sustain, the 195 collective beings would need to function as federations of equality rather than be vulnerable to the fragilities of self-interest; if anything, the latter must be embedded into the former.

Second, each collective being would need to attend to its own inner swadharma rather than importing from others; the powerful would need to prevent themselves from being intoxicated by their outer powers and resist the temptation to impose their models on others. The US and the EU would need to temper their universalising impulses and embrace the wider diversity of planet earth; Russia to secure identity through inner strength rather than territorial assertions; China to let its internal harmony become more inclusive outside borders; India to build its physical and vital strength to reach the higher recesses of the spiritual and become a medium of Sri Aurobindo’s dream.

And third, to understand that administrative or economic unification is merely the scaffolding that can handhold collective beings towards peace; it is a necessary component of getting there—but it is not sufficient. Real unity requires a change of consciousness, a transmutation into something more than the national ego or an idea beyond consumption dominance, geopolitical grabbing or coercion under the threat of a nuclear bomb. As he wrote in Savitri:

I have found the atoms from which he built the worlds:
The first tremendous cosmic energy
Missioned shall leap to slay my enemy kin,
Expunge a nation or abolish a race,
Death’s silence leave where there was laughter and joy.

The bomb may have created some external unity, forced by the weight of destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Surely such a unity cannot sustain; below the word, collective beings continue to simmer at the asymmetry. Tehran seeking a nuclear deterrence and Washington D.C. preventing it, or Islamabad and Pyongyang sabre rattling around their nuclear bombs are parts of that strategic simmering of disunity.

In all this, it is difficult to see the individual and the collective, the spiritual and the material as a unified divine expression. But in one line Sri Aurobindo merges them seamlessly. “I may now see myself as a creature contained in the universe,” he wrote in Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, “but when I come to self-knowledge, I see too the universe to be a thing contained in myself.” Just as an individual does not lose individuality when united with the divine but fulfils it, nations too flower to their fullest and freest expressions when united—this is the spiritual goal for a planet currently being crushed by rapidly fragmenting geopolitics. Guided by Sri Aurobindo, global unity is what India aspires for, moves towards and will lead the world into. – Firstpost, 14 August 2026

› Author and journalist, Gautam Chikermane explores the unholy trinity of money, power and faith. He is the New Media Director at Reliance Industries Ltd and a Director on the Board of CARE India. 

Indians with their flag.

Muslim Testimonies: The Plight of Women in Islam – Virendra Parekh

VOI

Indian women want changes to Muslim Personal Law.

It is nearly impossible for non-Muslims, especially Hindus, to understand the powerful influence that religion exercises on Muslims. In the Indic traditions, religious books are part of an individual’s cultural heritage and exist to guide him in his moral and spiritual quest. In Islam, religious books exist to command and control every aspect of man’s life, spiritual and material, on promise of eternal pleasures in heaven or everlasting pain in hell hereafter. – Virendra Parekh

That Muhammad, founder of Islam, was a progressive reformer for his times and his teachings improved the lot of Arab women is a fashionable belief in many elite circles in non-Muslim countries. Shruti Anerao in a recent book, Muslim Women: Through the Prism of Muslim Scholars, examines its veracity in the light of writings of Muslim scholars, which point to the opposite conclusion: Islam regards women as inherently inferior to men, and taking advantage of its injunctions they are ill-treated, oppressed and exploited in ways beyond the imagination of average non-Muslims. Each of these scholars was born of Muslim parents and brought up in accordance with Islamic tradition in an almost wholly Muslim society. No outside influence shaped their perception until they came of age and began to doubt the justice and humanity of what was going on around them. They write from direct first-hand knowledge of Islam and Muslim society.

It is nearly impossible for non-Muslims, especially Hindus, to understand the powerful influence that religion exercises on Muslims. In the Indic traditions, religious books are part of an individual’s cultural heritage and exist to guide him in his moral and spiritual quest. In Islam, religious books exist to command and control every aspect of man’s life, spiritual and material, on promise of eternal pleasures of the heaven or everlasting pain of the hell hereafter. The Quran remains for all Muslims, not just traditionalists, the uncreated word of God Himself. It is valid for all times and places for the whole of the mankind; its ideas are absolutely true and beyond criticism. To question it is to question the very word of God and hence blasphemous. A Muslim’s duty is to believe it and obey its commands. This explains the hold of Ulemas on the Muslim society as interpreters of the Quran and custodians of its knowledge and traditions. It also explains the enormity of the task facing reformers: Any question about a dogma, any talk of reform can quickly be portrayed as questioning the word of God, punishable with terrible consequences. Indeed, from the early eighth century to our own times, this has been the fate of many who just raised a question. Shruti Anerao’s book has to be viewed in this light.

From the horse’s mouth

Wafa Sultan, the Syrian lady doctor and author of A God Who Hates, says that Muslims hate their women because their God does. Her grandfather held her grandmother responsible for the disgrace of not having a son. So, he forced the woman who bore him five children to find for him a beautiful girl to marry. After the wedding, the poor lady was reduced to the status of a servant in her own home. As a medical student at Aleppo University, Wafa stayed with the family of her brother’s friend, Ahmed and Huda. She often wondered how Huda, a very beautiful woman with green eyes, pink skin and blond hair selected such a short husband with a pendulous belly and skinny limbs. Huda shared her experience of their first night. “When he came into her room, she began to shudder. The wedding guests were all waiting outside the door for the proof of her virginity. The bridegroom swooped upon her like an animal and emerged from the room a few minutes later with a piece of cloth.”

As a medical student and later as a practitioner, Wafa came in direct contact with women from a large cross section of society. She could sense the fear in their eyes. Once she won their confidence, horrendous stories of their sexual exploitation tumbled out. Many had been raped, most by male members of their family, usually the fathers, brothers or in-laws. Unmarried women who became pregnant as a result of the rape were killed, in most cases by the rapist himself to keep the scandal from spreading. No doctor was required to obtain a death certificate; witnesses were sufficient.

A shocking aspect of this grim reality was that the victims could not expect sympathy from any quarter. A woman came to Wafa’s department with many circular burns the size of a small coin on her thighs and abdomen. Answering the doctor she said her husband used to stub out his cigarettes on her body “to punish her for being stupid.” The male doctor—repeat, doctor—laughed and said, “You must deserve it, he wouldn’t do it if you weren’t stupid!” Fatima, a thirty-year old widow was diagnosed with a three-month pregnancy. She had four children when her husband died five years ago. Her brother-in-law was raping her every day as he fed the family since the death of his brother.

Fatima implored the doctor to end her pregnancy anyhow as “my son would kill me if he knew about it.” The doctor performed the operation without anaesthesia as she did not have enough money to pay. The operation was extremely painful and she nearly died while undergoing it. But the doctor would not forgo even a small part of his fee.

Amal, a doctor, ran to an eye hospital with chemical burns in her eyes and on the face. First she said it was boiling water that caused the burns, but later she confided the bitter truth to her friend. Amal’s brother, fifteen years younger than her, had poured a fuel bucket on her face when she insisted on going out without his permission. Her mother, when told about the incident, chided Amal, “You got what you deserved. I have warned you more than once about going against your brother’s wishes. Now you know.” Even if a woman is educated, mature and capable of taking her own decisions, she is not allowed to do so.

If you thought that this picture is confined to some countries or some sections of the society, think again. Jean Sasson in her trilogy comprising Princess: A True Story, Princess Sultana’s Daugthers and Princess Sultana’s Circle, unveiled how even women of royal family lived a life of isolation, loneliness and humiliation in an authoritarian and patriarchal society.  Sultana was a Saudi princess born to uncountable wealth.

Tahmina Durrani, the wife of the powerful Pakistani politician Mustafa Khar, right hand man of Zulfikar Ali Butto, was born in an influential family and lived in high society. In her autobiographical book My Feudal Lord, she describes her childhood. “Apart from my father, brother and a few close relatives, men were alien creatures, and from my earliest moments I was trained to avoid them. My childhood was encumbered by a lengthy list of don’ts, all designed to maintain an inviolable distance between myself and the masculine world: never wear makeup or nail polish. Do not look at boys. Avoid modern girlfriends and avoid any girlfriend who has an elder brother. Never visit a friend without special permission and without your nanny. Never pick up the phone. Never go out alone with the driver. Never stand around the kitchen with male servants.”

Compliance with this code of conduct, however, did not get her a happy married life. Tahmina had left her husband and a daughter to marry Mustafa. The reward: Mustafa scolded her every time she remembered her child and missed it. When her political fortunes were down, Mustafa would take it out on servants and wives. In a month of Ramzan, the servant was five minutes late in bringing the food. Mustafa beat him until he was unconscious. Then came Tahmina’s turn, who was then pregnant. Mustafa questioned her as if she were a criminal and a liar. No answer would satisfy him. “Suddenly, he threw me down on the bed and jumped on me. Sitting astride my belly, he slapped me repeatedly with his open palm, forehand and backhand, … he pulled my hair, thrusting my head from side to side, … suddenly, he leaped off me. One hand clutched my long braided hair and jerked me off the bed and onto the floor, … he threw me against a wall, picked me up and threw me against another again and again. Something burst in my ears, I felt an agonising pain in my eyes. Something split. Something swelled. Then the pain merged into a deep sense of agony….”

We have described this heartrending incident somewhat in detail, because it is not an isolated incident. Merciless beating of women by their husbands and other relatives is a common occurrence because it is rooted in beliefs and attitudes inculcated relentlessly across centuries and geographies.

Even worse is the contempt in which girl children are held, total control exercised on every aspect of a woman’s life by persons other than herself and a complete obedience routinely expected from her in everything. It is meant to snuff out any spark of freethinking, any chance of scepticism and any possibility of rebellion. When Wafa Sultan shouted at a mullah in a TV debate, “Be quiet! It is may turn!” it sent shockwaves across the countries. How can a woman dare shout at a man?

Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, an Iranian American political scientist in his book, A God That Hates Women, tells us that in his family girls were considered “the most difficult of burdens and most worthless things.” In Syria, Iraq and other countries of West Asia, the role of a woman, determined on the basis of religious books, is mostly limited to taking care of home, husband, family and bearing and rearing children. Education beyond elementary level is a waste of time, a dispensable luxury. Dr. Rafizadeh’s mother secured high grades in school, but her mother declared one day that she would not be going to the school from the next day. As she put it, “Why should you keep studying if you are eventually going to stay at home? You are meant to wash asses of your children, to clean, cook and take care of your family. Girls are born to stay at home and please their men.”

Even here, a girl cannot expect to select a suitable match. He would be chosen for her by others, usually elder males in the family. Amira, Majid’s mother, was compelled to marry a 39-year-old man, 24 years older than her. On the night of her marriage, she was forced to follow his wish to consummate the marriage. As Tahmina Durrani puts it, “The common belief is that a woman is an instrument of man’s carnal pleasure; if the woman ever indicated that she felt pleasure (in sexual relations), she is a potential adulteress and not to be trusted; to think independently is a crime that he has a right to punish.” Ayaan Hirsi Ali says in her book, Infidel, that in her childhood she was taught to be an ideal wife, a barri (pure, chaste). Among other things, “If her husband is cruel, if he rapes her and then taunts her about it, if he decides to take another wife, or beats her, she lowers her gaze and hides her tears. And she works hard, faultlessly. … If you long for love and comfort, you pray in silence to Allah to make your husband more bearable.”

What the Book says

Remarkably, every perpetrator of atrocities justified them by invoking commands of Allah in the Quran and precept and practice of the prophet in the Hadith. Like many feminists from this part of the world, Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali initially attributed this mind-set and conduct to a misinterpretation of Islam and teachings of the Prophet. However, when they managed to learn Islam from the original sources through authentic translations, they were forced to change their opinion.

Ibn Warraq, a Muslim of Pakistani origin and author of a highly scholarly work, Why I am not a Muslim, had no such illusions. He quotes chapter and verse from the Quran and Hadith to show that Islam is deeply anti-feminist. Islam is the fundamental cause of repression of Muslim women and remains the major obstacle to the evolution of their position. Islam has always considered woman as an inferior creature in every way: physically, intellectually and morally. This negative vision is divinely sanctioned by the Quran, corroborated by hadiths (anecdotes of the Prophet) and perpetuated by commentaries of theologians, custodians of Muslim dogma and ignorance.

Islam regards woman essentially as a sex object created by God for the pleasure of man. It looks upon woman physically, even nakedly. The primary meaning of the word aurat is female genital organ and that of nikah is coitus. The Quran says “Your wives are your fields, so go and plough into your fields whichever way you like” (Surah 2.223)

Islam adopted the legend of Adam and Eve from the Old Testament and adapted it in its own fashion. Quran (4.1 and 7.189) says that the Allah created mankind from a single soul and therefrom he created its mate. From these, Muslim theologians have concluded that man was the original creation—womankind was created secondarily and for the repose of man. The rest follows from this. “Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend their property (for the support of women). So, good are obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah has guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart; and scourge (beat) them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them.” (Quran 4.34). No wonder, under Shariat, a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man and a daughter’s share in parent’s legacy is half that of a son. Islam explicitly forbids certain professions to women: head of state,  head of the armed forces, imam, and judge.

Equally, in numerous hadiths on which are based Islamic laws, we learn of the woman’s role—to stay at home, to be at the beck and call of man, to obey him (which is a religious duty) and assure man a tranquil existence. “If it had been given me to order someone to prostrate themselves in front of someone other than God, I would surely have ordered women to prostrate themselves in front of their husbands,” says a hadith. Omar, the second caliph, said, “Prevent women from learning to write! Say no to their capricious ways.” Ali, the fourth caliph, said, “The entire woman is evil and what is worse is that it is a necessary evil.”

According to the famous and much revered philosopher Al-Ghalzali (1058-1111), whom professor Montgomery Watt describes as the greatest Muslim after Muhammad, “She should stay at home and get on with spinning, she should not go out often, she must not be well informed, nor must she be communicative with her neighbours and only visit them when absolutely necessary; she should take care of her husband and respect him in his presence and his absence and seek to satisfy him in everything; she must not leave her house without permission.…”

Wafa Sultan points out that in Islam, every relationship is essentially a power equation. The nature of relationship between God and Man in Islam is that between the ruler and his subject, master and slave, husband and wife, father and son. Woman is a property of man, a child is the property of his father, a slave is the property of his master and a labourer is a property of his employer, she says.

These injunctions are enforced with the threat of eternal punishment of burning in hell. In Muslim teaching, hell is intensely real and very close. You could feel the flames at any moment. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book, Infidel, describes how young minds are filled with fear of hell to mould them into resolute Muslims. “Quran lists hell’s torments in vivid details: sores, boiling water, unimaginably intense thirst, peeling of skin, burning of flesh, dissolving bowels, the everlasting fire that burns you forever because as flesh chars and your fluids boil you grow a new skin. You will go to hell unless you obey.” Christopher Hitchens, who wrote the foreword to Ayaan’s book says that, “Ayaan told me that she was not completely free of her repressive upbringing until she had lost all terror of hell.”

Contrast it with the condition of women in pre-Islamic Arabia. Khadija, the first wife of Mohammad, was a wealthy and successful merchant in Mecca, rode horse, hired Muhammad for her trade caravans and proposed marriage to him. The tenth-century Arab historian Al-Tabari, gives a vivid picture of the independence of aristocratic women before Islam. Women swore allegiance much as men, took part in negotiations with the new military chief of the city, i.e. Mohammad himself, and were often frankly hostile to the new religion, he says, in his account of Hint bint Otba, the wife of Abu Sufyan, the head of an aristocratic merchant of Mecca.

The cage and the way out

Ayaan Hirsi Ali compares the psychological conditioning in Islamic culture with a cage and calls Muslims as prisoners suffering from the Stockholm syndrome. She exhorts intellectuals and rational Muslims to be like Voltaire and work for their own enlightenment. The power of reason and individual responsibility, she hopes, will free the minds of individual Muslims from the burden of the hereafter, the constant feeling of guilt and temptations of fundamentalism. They should learn to become responsible for their problems and the areas where they lag behind.

History tells us that authoritarian regimes based on fear and violence appear to be very strong from outside, e.g. the Church in the Middle Ages, Mao’s China, Brezhnev’s USSR. But their rigidity proves their undoing. They implode from within. Man’s yearning from freedom and the quest for truth cannot be suppressed for long, however great the fear.

Enlightenment is catching up with Islam also, slowly but surely. Despite efforts of Ulemas, many Muslim countries have made considerable progress in the fields of education and public life. Winds of change are blowing even in citadels of Islamic orthodoxy like Saudi Arabia. Women are certainly not tied down to their homes, husbands and children as much as the orthodox would want them to be. At the other end, thousands of people in most conservative countries are leaving Islam in droves. The process is greatly aided by the revolution in information and communication brought about by technology. Thought control is becoming virtually impossible. (Thought manipulation is a different thing altogether, of course.) Yet the ease with which the theocratic regime in Iran crushed the women’s movement for reforms, the way Taliban imposed Sharia rule in Afghanistan as recently as the last decade highlights the enormity of the task before reformers.

Shruti Anerao’s book is a must read for Hindu women who have long been easy targets of a massive and systematic love jihad. It explains the tragedy that befalls many Hindu women who marry Muslim men in the mistaken belief that “what happened to others will not happen to me. My Abdul is different.” This book will help them understand what to expect from a Muslim husband after the veneer of amiability wears off.

Muslim Women Book Cover

Muslim Women: Through the Prism of Muslim Scholars. Author: Shruti Anerao. Publishers: Akshaya Prakashan, New Delhi. First Edition: 2026. Pages: xxiii+175. Price Rs 395 (Amazon).