On 27 August 2013, the Jesuit think-tank UCSIA inside Antwerp University (Universitair Centrum Sint-Ignatius Antwerpen) hosted, as part of its series on “Religion, Culture and Society”, a lecture by the sociologist of religion, José Casanova of Georgetown University. He spoke with a heavy Spanish accent about “Types of Secular States and Regimes of Religious Pluralism: […]Read More
(Dialogue, Vol. 18, No. 1, July-Sept. 2016 issue) In the lifetime of the older ones among us, freedom of expression in India first became a hot item with the Salman Rushdie affair, when in 1988, his novel The Satanic Verses was banned. This was done by Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress government at the request of Muslim leader Syed […]Read More
(This is chapter 1 from my book BJP vis-à-vis Hindu Resurgence, Delhi 1997. It shows how disappointments in the BJP government’s lack of enthusiasm for Hindu causes is unwarranted: eighteen years ago, it was already clear. To be sure, me too, I had been hoping against hope.) The strange thing about the BJP is that […]Read More
On 30 January 1948, after Mahatma Gandhi’s murder, India’s political landscape changed dramatically. In the preceding year, the Hindu Nationalist movement had received a strong boost due to Congress’s confused stand on Partition. But then, Nathuram Godse’s bullets squandered its newly-gained political capital in one go. It would need decades to recover. Prelude to Partition […]Read More
Abstract plus explanation I sent in for the Annual Conference of the American Academy of Religion. It was written in February 2015 and draws attention to an important phenomenon with a strong and hitherto unrefuted predictive power, viz. the BJP variety of secularism. AB Vajpayee’s NDA Government (1998-2004) heavily disappointed the experts who had predicted […]Read More
Abstract The Buddha was not the inventor of a new method in the service of a new philosophical goal. He trod into existing footsteps: seeking the goal of Liberation through the method of Meditation. This ideal was already available before he was born and that was what beckoned him into a spiritual career. Even more […]Read More
Hindus make bold to be the inheritors of a great and exceptional civilization. And they are. Indeed, a wider recognition of this ancestral greatness would solve a number of contemporary problems Hinduism faces. Separatism, the phenomenon that Hindu sects declare that they are non-Hindu and back-project that they never have been Hindus, is largely due […]Read More
Indians and Westerners who know Buddhism through Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar and other modern pamphlet literature, sometimes believe that the Buddha started a movement of social reform, mobilizing against caste and recruiting among low-caste people. As against this, Chinese and Japanese Buddhists who have studied their religion only through its source texts, think that Buddhism was an […]Read More
Was Japanese “made in Japan”? Since Japan was not the cradle of mankind, the first speakers of proto-Japanese must have come from elsewhere at any rate. Do they still have recognizable relatives there, at least linguistically? There are reasons to think so. Recently I attended a lecture at my Alma Mater by Dr. Martine Robbeets […]Read More
The easiest way before an Indian audience to get hands clapping, is to accuse the British of the Partition of India. Try it for yourself and say out loud: “Partition was engineered by the wily Britishers in their nefarious design of ‘divide and rule’”, success assured. And the applause is sure to follow no matter whether […]Read More
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