The Daily Guardian
For all practical purposes, it was a tussle between two ways of life and worldviews whose loci of origin and fealty were different and whose pathology and end goals couldn’t have been more different…
Author: jsaideepak
Section 295A: The ‘Blasphemy’ Provision
The Daily Guardian
Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code 1860 is commonly known as the “Blasphemy” provision. Its origin story, while dark, is extremely interesting from a civilizational perspective…
Identity politics, elections and the Representation of the People Act, 1951
The Daily Guardian
In 2017, a seven-Judge Bench of the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India in Abhiram Singh vs C.D. Commachen (Dead) By Lrs.& Ors delivered a judgement on Section 123(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951…
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Vedantic universalism, Indic civilisational renaissance & diversity
The Daily Guardian
Swami Viveknanda's teachings on Vedanta through his lectures on the subject reveal that Swamiji’s take on Vedanta could serve as a key foundational building block for an Indic Renaissance i.e. the rejuvenation of Bharat as a living civilization which still has a lot to offer to the world…
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The curious case of Indian secularism
The Daily Guardian
Over the years, the notion that religious minorities have greater religious institutional freedoms has gained a fair amount of traction in public discourse. However, there is nothing in the language of Articles 25 and 26 of the Constitution which remotely suggests that the rights recognised and guaranteed therein are more available to one community than the other…
In Re Noise Pollution and Judicial Restraint
The Daily Guardian
And so without any reference to any text or calling for any evidence, in just a handful of lines, a Bench of the Supreme Court comprising the then Chief Justice of India R.C. Lahoti and Justice Ashok Bhan concluded in 2005 in the landmark judgement of In Re Noise Pollution that there was no nexus between the bursting of firecrackers and Diwali/Deepawali…
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A feudal democracy?
The Daily Guardian
Over the past few days, a well-known and fairly accomplished Senior IPS Officer, who is currently the Home Secretary to the State Government of Karnataka, has been in the news for her public spat on Twitter with a widely followed and encyclopaedic anonymous commentator on history who prefers to go by the Twitter pseudonym, “True Indology” which is perhaps a nom de guerre…
Conversations, certitude and disagreements
The Daily Guardian
I have written 26 pieces thus far under this column, which is slightly over the halfway mark for the number of pieces I have committed to. Now is a good time to pause for a bit, think and share a few general and generic thoughts. In the process of writing under this column…
Religion, race and colonialism
The Daily Guardian
A reading of the literature on colonialism reveals that the story of European colonialism may be traced to what has been referred to as “the Age of Discovery” in the fifteenth century when Christopher Columbus set out in 1492 to “discover” the “New World”, namely the non-Christian world…
The European origins of cultural coloniality
The Daily Guardian
While political colonialism had long been done away with, it had been replaced with Western/European imperialism, whose relationship with other cultures was the same as that of the erstwhile colonizers, namely “colonization of the imagination of the dominated”…
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