Ananya Vajpeyi 6 July 2017
All nationalism involves some historical sleight of hand, in choosing what to include and what to exclude while constructing a narrative of the nation’s past, and a shape of its essential identity.
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- Ananya Vajpeyi 20 June 2017Gandhi advocated sincere fellow-feeling, the capacity to suffer for and with someone else, without self-congratulation, as the quality that makes anyone a real Hindu.
- Ilaria Romano 1 June 2017Armed conflicts, civilians debased by both terrorist groups and dictatorial governments, a worrying repression of dissent and waves of populism and racism experiencing a staggering rise
- 24 April 2017In November 2014, six months after the Indian general election that resulted in a landslide victory for the National Democratic Alliance and consequently for the BJP’s leader Narendra Modi,
- 10 November 2016The expansion and consolidation of the Hindu Right’s political power has raised legitimate concerns about the future of India’s secularism. While criticism of secularism could be found in the public debate during the anti-colonial struggle, the sustained assault on it became particularly apparent during the Ayodhya movement. During the late 1980s and 1990s, the public campaign led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) advocated that the practice of secularism has led to the appeasement of Muslims. The BJP further argued that it has been quite harmful to India’s democratic polity because it has been institutionalising vote-bank politics, and that what is needed is in fact an attempt for a ‘positive’ secularism as opposed to ‘negative’ secularism. While these distinctions were widely used during those days, surprisingly it has vanished from the political lexicon of the Hindu Right in recent years.
- 19 October 2016The Dalits, once the caste of the untouchables, are still denied the fundamental rights to education and medical reservation. This applies in particular to the more then 21 million Christian Dalits in India, says Rowena Robinson from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, stressing that the denial of these fundamental human rights could become an even worse problem in the future by recreating generations of uneducated young, poor Christian Indians.
- 15 September 2016Two years after the publication of An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions, Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen of Harvard University returns to focus on the relationship between identity and violence. The Country of First Boys appeared a few months ago in bookstores as a collection of Sen’s essays made available with the contribution of Antara Dev Sen and Pratik Kanjilal. In it, the Bangladeshi-born economist updates his earlier reflections on ‘identity politics’ and its relationship with extremism and violence, both at the inter-ethnic as well as at the international level.
- 26 May 2015“Is the legendary Indian pluralistic ethos once again under challenge by attempts to homogenize and radicalize society around dogmas and creeds?” asks Rajeev Bhargava, interviewed during the Istanbul Seminars 2014. He contends that the threat is real, but an entrenched pluralist ethos and a democratic tradition of checks and balances should be able to contend with it. If channeled correctly, these forces may be able to be contained within reasonable limits and even serve to strengthen Indian democracy.
- 26 May 2015According to Rajeev Bhargava, interviewed during the Istanbul Seminars 2014, Ashoka’s 7th edict is a lesson about public political morality in deeply diverse societies. It encourages people to evolve in their own respective religious-philosophical perspectives towards a mutual moral growth, by which the Other can be enriched. Today, we call this notion pluralism. Toleration, on the other hand, encourages living back to back with a lack of mutual interaction.
- 26 May 2015Rajeev Bhargava, a Professor at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi and a scholar of issues concerning secularism, constitutionalism, and multiculturalism, looks at India during the 3rd century BCE to analyze the major social and intellectual transformation that took place under Ashoka’s rule. Bhargava contends that ritual sacrifice lost importance for a transcendental view in which the Other, the community, became of value. In his legendary edicts, Ashoka engaged in finding answers about how to live together in spite of difference. Bhargava was interviewed during the Istanbul Seminars 2014.
