Religion

Making women ‘unseeable’ to preserve monastic celibacy is not tradition, it is untouchability, and the Eiffel Tower episode revives Ambedkar’s unfinished argument with Manusmriti.

Maharashtra’s new anti-conversion law seeks to prevent coercion and fraud, but its broad regulatory framework risks placing prayer, religious association and freedom of conscience under a cloud of suspicion.

As France reacted with outrage to a demand that women be kept away from BAPS sadhus in Paris, India’s own nine-judge Sabarimala bench has yet to rule on whether religious orthodoxy can override constitutional guarantees of sex equality.

A close reading of Prof. Tahir Mahmood’s recent reinterpretation of the Manusmriti’s na striswatantrayamarhati alongside his 1986 position on Shah Bano reveals a four-decade pattern of recasting the denial of women's independence as an act of male “protection.”

Seventeen years after the Liberhan Commission's report, an honest reckoning must acknowledge not only its indictments, but also its omissions and problematic portrayals of what actually happened in Ayodhya in 1992.

Last Thursday, as the Supreme Court reserved judgment following sixteen full days of hearings, respondents discouraged relying on the doctrine of proportionality in reading Articles 25 and 26, while the Union opposed the ERP test.

As the Sabarimala Reference hearings completed a fortnight, senior advocates Jaideep Gupta, Sanjay Hegde, Vijay Hansaria, Meneka Guruswamy and Shadan Farasat for the respondents argued on the intent of the Constitution drafters to open temples to ‘all classes’ and the perils of acceding to public morality.

On the thirteenth day of hearings, Respondents pressed that the practice of excommunication in the Dawoodi Bohra community led to suffering across generations, and that ‘morality’ in Article 25 must be construed as the Constitution’s ‘internal morality’.