There is no taint of untouchability, says Atri, when a person is touched by an untouchable in a temple, during religious processions, sacrifices, festivals, and marriages (verse 249). Śātātapa avers that there is no dosha (lapse) in touching untouchables on the public road, in a religious procession or in a … Read More
Nepal Prime Minister G.P. Koirala must be ruing the day he allowed his Seven Party Alliance to be conned into negotiating with Maoist leader Prachand. Mr. Koirala has given respectability to a bunch of armed thugs, agreeing to bring them into an interim regime and allowing them to dictate an … Read More
To its everlasting shame, the UPA has preferred to allow family members of the police martyrs who lost their lives defending a terrorist attack upon Parliament in 2001 to return their gallantry awards, rather than meet the aggrieved families and assure them that no injustice would be done to dishonour … Read More
Fourteen years after the removal of the offending Babri structure at his sacred birthplace, Sri Rama returned on 6 December 2006 to face his greatest modern iconoclast, the late EV Ramasamy Naicker. EVR or Periyar, as he was popularly called, was the most avid native votary of the colonial myth … Read More
When Chinese envoy Sun Yuxi startled New Delhi by staking claim to the north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh on the eve of President Hu Jintao’s visit, he was simply reiterating the Middle Kingdom practice of never renouncing territorial claims. Chairman Mao once graphically delineated China’s territorial vision with Tibet forming the … Read More
The mills of god grind slowly, the Bible says, but they grind exceedingly fine. The inexorability of this process ensured that the perfect timing of Saddam Hussain’s death sentence could not check the Republican Party’s freefall in America’s mid-term Congressional elections. Nemesis is a double-edged sword. Convicted with two others … Read More
The Delhi High Court’s award of death penalty to the killer of Priyadarshini Mattoo has given a sense of relief to citizens and justice to the aggrieved family, but the verdict in this high profile case that involved a grave miscarriage of justice for ten long years is still incomplete. … Read More
Muzaffarnagar District and Sessions Judge R.D. Nimesh has unwittingly brought the issue of uniform civil code to the national forefront once again by sentencing 60-year-old Ali Mohammed to ten years imprisonment for raping his daughter-in-law on 6 October 2005. Twenty-eight year old Imrana, wife of a rickshaw puller in Charthawal … Read More
Political Islam took its first mature step to recover agency from its Western tormentors by applying a healing touch to the bleeding fields of Karbala, where Mohammad’s nascent faith split irrevocably into Shias and Sunnis. While it is too early to gauge the impact of this largely ignored initiative by … Read More
Barely twenty four hours after Defence Ministry sources said the defunct Trishul surface-to-air missile project would be wound up in December this year, Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee was forced to state that the project was being extended by a year. This is despite the fact that the Defence Research and … Read More
