India

Orai: Of late, religious conversion and beef have been in the news for different reasons. Now, the issues once again made headlines on Friday when a man was tonsured, garlanded with shoes and paraded on the streets as he had allegedly converted three Hindu men to Christianity and forcibly made them consume beef. According to [...]

“The two recent issues, Sabarimala and Jallikattu, … calls for a background check, because we need to exercise discrimination when we approach a matter of faith, whereas reason is enough to resolve all other matters. Especially so, because Hindu reforms invariably seem to attract Constitutional activists from every nook and corner to demand equal rights [...]

The testimony of a sanyasi or mendicant who renounced the world and follows an ascetic life cannot be accepted in a civil dispute by a court of law, the Supreme Court has held. The order came on a plea filed by the sanyasi’s family which wanted the Haryana government to return their 30 acres in [...]

Pro-Isis slogans and threats of an imminent terror attack have been daubed on a statue of Mahatma Gandhi in a small village in north-western India.Images from the scene showed the face of the white statue had been smeared with brown paint, while the rest of the statue was covered in crude writing, including the word [...]

Not one person has been convicted, leave alone punished for the massacre of more than a thousand Hindus of the Valley. January 19, 1990, a date etched in our collective memory, a date that is hard to forget no matter how hard one tries to erase the memories of that night, they come back to [...]

The death of a teenager who was set on fire by three people, including two brothers, who accused him of stealing vehicle batteries has acquired a communal colour in Pune. While the 17-year-old’s father has alleged that his son was burnt alive after he identified himself as a Hindu, a purported video of the boy [...]

DASNA/RORI/MEERUT: From the outskirts of India’s capital to the Uttarakhand border, an outfit known as Hindu Swabhiman is raising and training what it calls a “dharma sena” to wage war against the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), which it believes will occupy western UP by 2020. Its leaders claim there are already 15,000 “soldiers” who are [...]

  Tension gripped Jahanabad town in Fatehpur district after members of two communities clashed during a procession on Makar Sankranti Thursday afternoon. Four persons were injured. While locals claimed they heard gunshots, police officials denied reports of firing by the rioters. Circle Officer (CO), Fatehpur city, Poornendu Singh said that the clash happened as members [...]

In his A History of Civilisations, a classic study of the origins and evolutions of civilisations, legendary French historian Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) came up, among other things, with a simple and yet perceptive description of civilisation. “A civilisation”, he wrote, “can be approached, only in the long term, taking hold of a constantly unwinding thread—something [...]

GUWAHATI: At a time when religious conversion has emerged as one of the controversial topics, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) national general secretary, Y Raghavulu, has once again stirred the hornet’s nest with his claim that every year over eight lakh Hindus are being converted to other religions. On the sidelines of a function organized [...]