hindu bashing

The barrage of vicious propaganda unleashed by a section of the visual and print media in Kerala against the Amritanandamayi Math is obviously motivated to bring down the high respect and reputation with which millions of people across the world hold that spiritually-oriented service organisation. There is a method in this madness. Any flimsy excuse [...]

“When Germany is Christian, is India Hindu?”  got amazingly good response with thousands of facebook likes. However, some readers felt I made a mistake by not distinguishing between good, tolerant Hinduism, which is a private belief, and bad, intolerant Hindutva, which stands for the ‘communal agenda of an extreme right Hindu party’ that wants to [...]

In the framework of Europalia India, a string of institutions including my Alma Mater, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, hosts a series of exhibitions, performances, films showings, conferences and lectures. Last Tuesday and Wednesday, Tehelka editor Tarun Tejpal was to speak in Brussels and Leuven, but he didn’t show up, being detained in a sex scandal. [...]

One not uncommonly comes across the opinion today that India was never really a nation but that its nationhood was only recently invented by the British through their definition of the region as part of their empire. Similarly we are told that Hinduism was up to recently not a religion at all but merely various [...]

Barry Gardiner, Labour MP for Brent North and founder of the Labour Friends of India, has defended the invitation to the politician to address MPs on “the future of modern India”. But why would he have to ‘defend’ a respected politician and someone who one day may lead the world’s largest democracy? Adam Pasternicki of [...]

The Rg-Vedic reference to Sati The Rg-Veda contains a famous passage mentioning Sati – and preventing it. To a widow who is with her husband on his funeral pyre, the text says: rise up, abandon this dead man and re-join the living (10:18:8). The Vedic testimony proves two things: (1) Sati already existed, and (2) [...]

It was only a matter of time before the anti-Hindu elements emerged from the gutter to exploit the horrific rape and murder of the 23 year old student in Delhi. The first was Sunny Hundal who used his platform in the Guardian to launch a tirade against the worship of the sacred feminine as providing [...]

In February 2002 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) along with other international broadcast networks reported on the outbreak of communal violence in Godhra, in the Indian state of Gujarat. From the BBC report one would have got the impression that Hindus were not even victims of the violence. Instead Hindus were blamed for the violence [...]

Most racist and colonialist viewpoints of non-European cultures and history are now regarded as outdated. They are recognised as not giving an objective view consistent with responsible academic study, but merely the vehicle by which one was able to peddle the prejudices by what we can now see was a less enlightened age. [...]