Indian Christians are celebrating the result of recent elections in Karnataka, a southwestern state known for having the highest rates of violence against Christians. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist party which supports extremist groups, has finally lost power "after nine years of unchallenged rule."

"The BJP is decimated," reports AsiaNews. "Its defeat is good news especially for social and religious minorities of Karnataka, victims in these years of violence and persecution of the Hindu ultranationalist groups, openly supported by the BJP."

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Law & Legal Issues • Religion & Culture • Violence • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

Listen to it all (about 20 minutes). Those of you who are preachers, please note: this is a model of how to tell a story. It is heartwarming, hilarious, and oh so wonderful because it is true--you could not make this up if you tried--KSH (Hat tip: EDH).

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • History • Religion & Culture • Travel • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • Asia • India

(Note that last season Dickey played with the New York Mets and he will be with Toronto this season--KSH).

This is Kamathipura, the red light district of Mumbai, among the most notorious sex-trafficking locations in the world. I am here as a guest of Bombay Teen Challenge (BTC), a charity that has been fighting human trafficking for more than 20 years, one I joined forces with last year, when two friends and I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and raised $130,000 , much of it from generous and kind-hearted Mets fans. I have come with my two daughters, Gabriel, 11, and Lila, 9, to witness the fruits of our climb – the conversion of a former brothel to a health clinic. I want my daughters to share the experience not so much as a gratitude check, but to learn that each of us has a capacity to make a difference in this world, and to see that God’s grace makes that possible.

Read it all, noting please that its content may not be appropriate for some blog readers.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Globalization • Law & Legal Issues • Poverty • Religion & Culture • Sexuality • Sports • Teens / Youth • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • Asia • India • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology • Pastoral Theology

At a time when Indians are re-examining their society in the light of a single, horrific incident of gang rape, South Africa seems numb - unable to muster much more than a collective shrug in the face of almost unbelievably grim statistics - seemingly far worse than India's.

Here almost 60,000 rapes are reported to the police each year - more than double the number in India, in a far smaller country.

Experts believe the true figure is at least 10 times that - 600,000 attacks....

Read it all or watch the video report (recommended).

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Law & Legal Issues • Marriage & Family • Men • Sexuality • Violence • Women • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • Africa • South Africa • Asia • India • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology

O God of the nations, who didst give to thy faithful servant Henry Martyn a brilliant mind, a loving heart, and a gift for languages, that he might translate the Scriptures and other holy writings for the peoples of India and Persia: Inspire in us, we beseech thee, a love like his, eager to commit both life and talents to thee who gavest them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Church History • Missions • Spirituality/Prayer • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

Both India and China have intense national testing programs to find the brightest students for their elite universities. The competition, the preparation and the national anxiety about the outcomes make the SAT testing programs in the U.S. seem like the minor leagues. The stakes are higher in China and India. The "chosen ones"—those who rank in the top 1%—get their choice of university, putting them on a path to fast-track careers, higher incomes and all the benefits of an upper-middle-class life.

The system doesn't work so well for the other 99%. There are nearly 40 million university students in China and India. Most attend institutions that churn out students at low cost. Students complain that their education is "factory style" and "uninspired." Employers complain that many graduates need remedial training before they are fully employable.

For now, the U.S. university system is still far ahead. But over the next decade, there will be a global competition to educate the next generation, and China and India have the potential to change the balance of power.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Globalization • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Corporations/Corporate Life • Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • Asia • China • India

Every six minutes, a child goes missing in India.

They are boys like Irfan, drugged and abducted at the age of 9 by two men on a motorbike as he walked home one day after playing with friends.

“It was living hell these past two years, trying to figure out where we could find him,” said his father, Iqbal Ali. “I used to run a biscuit bakery, but from the day he disappeared, I got so caught up trying to meet politicians, police and people who claim to do magic to get children back, that I had to shut down my bakery. I had no time for it.”

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Law & Legal Issues • Police/Fire • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

An official in the Indian Catholic Church has endorsed the idea that participants in sex-selective abortions should be charged with murder.

The backing by Holy Spirit Missionary Sister Helen Saldanha, secretary of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India Office for Women, comes as momentum builds to end female feticide, a practice that finds families terminating a pregnancy because the child they are expecting is a girl.

Filing criminal charges for killing a child in the womb because of its sex would "change the killer attitude" toward girls in Indian society, Sister Helen told Catholic News Service.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Law & Legal Issues • Life Ethics • Religion & Culture • Violence • Women • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Roman Catholic • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

Power was restored in India on Wednesday after two days of blackouts that had cast a huge shadow over the nation’s economic ambitions.

On Tuesday, the overburdened electrical grid had collapsed across the whole of northern and eastern India, depriving more than half the country, or around 600 million people, of power. It was the largest blackout in global history in terms of the number of people affected — about 10 percent of the world population.

“Superpower India, RIP,” said the banner headline in The Economic Times newspaper.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Globalization • Science & Technology • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • Corporations/Corporate Life • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

In the first edition of my book "The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cell Phone," I reported that, in April 2007, India set a world record by selling 7 million cell phones that month, more telephone connections than any country had ever established in one month. By the time the book was printed, bound and distributed to bookstores, that figure was already out of date. And in 2010, India sold 20 million cell phones three months in a row.

India has now overtaken the United States as the world's second-largest telephone market, with 857 million SIM cards in circulation and an estimated 600 million individual users. China has more, but India is ahead in phones per capita, is adding them faster and is projected to overtake China before the end of 2012.

What is wonderful about this capitalist "mobile miracle" is that it has accomplished something that our previous socialist policies proclaimed but did little to achieve -- it empowered the less fortunate.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Science & Technology • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

When Saraswati Devi awoke from the anesthesia, her clothes were soaked in blood. She was lying on a grass mat on the floor in excruciating pain, and there were no medical staff to answer her cries. She was one of 53 women who underwent surgeries at a “sterilization camp” sponsored by the government of India in its national campaign to drastically cut population growth.

The campaign is underwritten by tens of millions of dollars in American and British foreign-aid funds.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Life Ethics • Science & Technology • * Economics, Politics • Foreign Relations • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • Asia • India • England / UK

Recently, Nidhi Raichand, 33, and the other editors at health care Web site mDhil decided to find out how young India really feels about liberal sexual behavior.

To the Web site’s English-speaking, upper-class, Internet-savvy audience, they posed the question, “Would you marry a non-virgin?”

The answers were sharply divided, but not the way that you may think....

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Blogging & the Internet • Children • Marriage & Family • Men • Psychology • Sexuality • Women • Young Adults • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

The growth of Islamic radicalism in Maldives can be traced to the beginning of the last decade. Like in Bangladesh, Pakistani jihadi groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba have been making inroads to indoctrinate young men in a conservative Sunni society, that has been bogged down with slow growth, political authoritarianism (until 2008, certainly) and mushrooming madrassas with Arab funds.

None of this is good news for India. Intelligence circles believe this is part of Pakistan's strategic outreach, to penetrate Islamic jihadism in India's periphery, which could be a constraining factor on India's own development.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • Violence • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Islam

Often during a crisis, a single hero or small group of heroes who take action and risk their lives will emerge. But what happened at the Taj was much broader.

During the crisis, dozens of workers — waiters and busboys, and room cleaners who knew back exits and paths through the hotel — chose to stay in a building under siege until their customers were safe. They were the very model of ethical, selfless behavior.

What could possibly explain it?

Read (or better listen to) it all (another from the long queue of should-have-already-been-posted material).

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Psychology • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Corporations/Corporate Life • Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market • Terrorism • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

...[a slum called Annawadi near Mumbai’s airport]... turns out to be a gray zone whose atomized residents want nothing more than, in Primo Levi’s words, “to preserve and consolidate” their “established privilege vis-à-vis those without privilege.” Even those who are relatively fortunate, Boo writes, “improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people.”

Describing this undercity blood sport, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” (the ironic title is taken from the “Beautiful Forever” advertisements for Italianate floor tiles that hide Annawadi from view) does not descend into a catalog of atrocity — one that a defensive Indian nationalist might dismiss as a drain inspector’s report. The product of prolonged and risky self-exposure to Annawadi, the book’s narrative stitches, with much skillfully unspoken analysis, some carefully researched individual lives. Its considerable literary power is also derived from Boo’s soberly elegant prose, which only occasionally reaches for exuberant neologism (“Glimmerglass Hyatt”) and bright metaphor (“Each evening, they returned down the slum road with gunny sacks of garbage on their backs, like a procession of broken-toothed, profit-minded Santas”).

But “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” is, above all, a moral inquiry in the great tradition of Oscar Lewis and Michael Harrington. As Boo explains in an author’s note, the spectacle of Mumbai’s “profound and juxtaposed inequality” provoked a line of questioning: “What is the infrastructure of opportunity in this society? Whose capabilities are given wing by the market and a government’s economic and social policy? Whose capabilities are squandered? . . . Why don’t more of our unequal societies implode?” Her eye is as shrewdly trained on the essential facts of politics and commerce as on the intimate, the familial and, indeed, the monstrously absurd: the college-going girl who struggles to figure out “Mrs. Dalloway” while her closest friend, about to be forced into an arranged marriage, consumes rat poison, and dies (though not before the doctors attending her extort 5,000 rupees, or $100, from her parents).

Read it all.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Books • Poverty • Psychology • Urban/City Life and Issues • Violence • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

Internet giants Google Inc (GOOG.O) and Facebook removed content from some Indian domain websites on Monday following a court directive warning them of a crackdown "like China" if they did not take steps to protect religious sensibilities.

The two are among 21 companies ordered to develop a mechanism to block material considered religiously offensive after private petitioners took them to court over images deemed offensive to Hindus, Muslims and Christians.

Two cases have been brought by individuals against internet companies in India, stoking fears about censorship in the world's largest democracy.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Blogging & the Internet • Religion & Culture • Science & Technology • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Corporations/Corporate Life • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

Kashmir's small Christian community is in a state of panic. A fortnight ago, a self-styled sharia court issued a fatwa calling for the expulsion of three Christian priests from Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) for "luring the Valley's Muslims to Christianity".

The decree by the Islamic court, which has come in the wake of alleged conversion of a handful of Kashmiri Muslims to Christianity, has opened up a new conflict in this strife-torn Indian state.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Law & Legal Issues • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches

Pakistan's civilian government fired its Defense Secretary Wednesday in a rare show of defiance against the country's powerful Army, which had earlier publicly rebuked Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and ignited speculation the government may fall.

Retired Lt. Gen. Naeem Khalid Lodhi, a senior bureaucrat seen as close to the Army, was dismissed by the government for “gross misconduct and illegal action.” He was replaced by a bureaucrat close to the prime minister.

It’s not yet clear whether Pakistan’s powerful Army will be sufficiently moved to launch a coup and directly rule the country as it has done for approximately half of Pakistan’s 65 year history. But if Mr. Gilani's defiance pays off, that could indicate a boost for the country’s democratic institutions.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Law & Legal Issues • * Economics, Politics • Defense, National Security, Military • Economy • The U.S. Government • Foreign Relations • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • Asia • Afghanistan • India • Pakistan

Buddhists from around the world chose India on Wednesday as the headquarters of a new international Buddhist organization and united in their criticism of the Chinese government for trying to prevent the Dalai Lama from speaking at their meeting here in New Delhi.

It was something of a victory for India in what observers increasingly see as a contest with China to win the favor of Buddhists around the world. India is the land where Buddha gained enlightenment and taught, but China has the largest population of Buddhists today.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * Economics, Politics • Foreign Relations • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • Asia • China • India • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Buddhism

A priest has been arrested in the Indian state of Kashmir and charged with promoting religious enmity and outraging religious feelings after he baptised 15 Muslim young men who had converted to Christianity.

The Rev. Chander Mani Khanna, rector of All Saints Church in Srinigar in the Church of North India’s Diocese of Amritsar was jailed on 19 Nov 2011 by police following complaints laid against him by a local Muslim leader.

While India does not have a law forbidding religious conversions, a police official told the Hindustan Times Mr. Khanna had been booked for having violated laws against offering “allurements” to converts and for breaching the peace by having baptised the young Muslims.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Islam • Muslim-Christian relations

Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg were a typical Chabad couple—devout, devoted to the Rebbe's principles, and with a strong sense for self-sacrifice for their fellow Jews. They also suffered from personal tragedy. Their first child was born with Tay-Sachs disease, a genetic disorder that took his life at the age of two.

In another community, the violent deaths of such a young and promising couple might have sent shivers through the leadership, prompting them to pull other emissaries from the field. But Chabad's leadership did the opposite, immediately sending another couple to take their place.

"It was almost instantly reflexive for some, especially from knowing Gabi and Rivki," observes Rabbi Chanoch Gechtman, who together with his wife Leah now runs the Chabad House in Mumbai. "Great darkness must be challenged with bright light."

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • History • Religion & Culture • * Economics, Politics • Terrorism • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Judaism

Irom Sharmila's mother has a simple dream: sitting down to a meal with her daughter.

Irom hasn't willingly ingested food or water for 11 years, in protest of a law granting legal immunity to the armed forces for human rights abuses. As the anniversary of her hunger strike nears, her mother imagines what might be.

"I'm still waiting for her to come home," said Shakhi Devi, 78, holding an album of her daughter's photos. She rarely visits the 39-year-old, the world's longest-serving hunger striker, because it's too painful.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Dieting/Food/Nutrition • Law & Legal Issues • Marriage & Family • * Economics, Politics • Defense, National Security, Military • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

The delegates of the 14th Ordinary Synod have elected The Most Revd. Dr. Philip P. Marandih, Bishop of the Diocese of Patna, as the Moderator and The Rt. Rev. Pradeep Kumar Samantaroy, Bishop of the Diocese of Amritsar, as the Deputy Moderator of the Church of North India for the next triennium.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches

Hari Kondabolu was born in 1982 in the Little India neighborhood of Flushing, Queens, New York. His parents, both medical professionals, settled there when they first emigrated from Andhra Pradesh, India.

Pursuing the American Dream, the Kondabolu family moved to Floral Park, Queens, when Hari was 8 and his younger brother Ashok was 6. Ashok Kondabolu now performs as Dap, the hype man in the hip-hop group Das Racist. Hari and Ashok occasionally team up for The Untitled Kondabolu Brothers Project, an evening of improvised comic cultural commentary. “It was not my parents’ dream to have their sons in the entertainment field,” says Kondabolu, “but they couldn’t be prouder. Our parents provided us that freedom.”

Ravi and Uma Kondabolu raised their sons to be proud of their Indian heritage, so it is not surprising that cultural identity is a prime factor in their respective arts.

Hari (pronounced HUH-ree) complains in his set that Microsoft Word spell check always tries to correct his name to “Hair.”

LOL. Read it all (page 36 ff. of the pdf).

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Psychology • Young Adults • * General Interest • Humor / Trivia • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • Asia • India

India’s best-known Islamic seminary ousted its reformist leader on Sunday, less than seven months after he assumed the post, because he was quoted as speaking favorably of a Hindu nationalist suspected of fomenting deadly anti-Muslim riots.

The reformer, Mullah Ghulam Mohammed Vastanvi, was appointed in January to lead the seminary, Darul Uloom, in the city of Deoband in Uttar Pradesh State. He had become popular in part because of the success of his madrasas, or Islamic schools, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra that bridged traditional Islamic education with the needs of the modern world by teaching students secular subjects like science and computer programming. He had hoped to bring those innovations to Darul Uloom.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Religion News & Commentary • Inter-Faith Relations • Other Faiths • Hinduism • Islam • * Theology • Seminary / Theological Education

A group of Hindus can sue an Edison restaurant for money to travel to India, where they say they must purify their souls after eating meat, a state appellate court panel ruled Monday (July 18).

The decision reinstates a lawsuit filed against Moghul Express, the restaurant that admitted it accidentally served meat-filled pastries to 16 Hindus whose religion forbids them from eating nonvegetarian food.

The diners said the mix-up has harmed them spiritually and monetarily, and that to cleanse themselves of their sin—even though it was committed unknowingly—they must participate in a purification ritual in the Ganges River.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Dieting/Food/Nutrition • Law & Legal Issues • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

...what is most striking when you talk to employers today is how many of them have used the pressure of the recession to become even more productive by deploying more automation technologies, software, outsourcing, robotics — anything they can use to make better products with reduced head count and health care and pension liabilities. That is not going to change. And while many of them are hiring, they are increasingly picky. They are all looking for the same kind of people — people who not only have the critical thinking skills to do the value-adding jobs that technology can’t, but also people who can invent, adapt and reinvent their jobs every day, in a market that changes faster than ever.

Today’s college grads need to be aware that the rising trend in Silicon Valley is to evaluate employees every quarter, not annually. Because the merger of globalization and the I.T. revolution means new products are being phased in and out so fast that companies cannot afford to wait until the end of the year to figure out whether a team leader is doing a good job.

Whatever you may be thinking when you apply for a job today, you can be sure the employer is asking this: Can this person add value every hour, every day — more than a worker in India, a robot or a computer?

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Globalization • Science & Technology • Young Adults • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Corporations/Corporate Life • Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market • * International News & Commentary • Asia • China • India • Europe

When Pooja Nath was an undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, an elite engineering school in India, she felt isolated. She was one of the few women on campus. While her male classmates collaborated on problem sets, Ms. Nath toiled in the computer lab alone.

“Back then, no one owned a laptop, there was no Internet in the dorm rooms. So everyone in my class would be working in the computer lab together,” she said. “But all the guys would be communicating with each other, getting help so fast, and I would be on the sidelines just watching.”

The experience as a young woman in that culture formed the foundation of her start-up in Silicon Valley, Piazza....

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Blogging & the Internet • --Social Networking • Education • Women • Young Adults • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Corporations/Corporate Life • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

Mara Hvistendahl is worried about girls. Not in any political, moral or cultural sense but as an existential matter. She is right to be. In China, India and numerous other countries (both developing and developed), there are many more men than women, the result of systematic campaigns against baby girls. In "Unnatural Selection," Ms. Hvistendahl reports on this gender imbalance: what it is, how it came to be and what it means for the future.

In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that's as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.

Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121—though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China's and India's populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.

What is causing the skewed ratio: abortion...

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Books • Children • Life Ethics • Marriage & Family • Science & Technology • * International News & Commentary • Africa • Asia • China • India • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

His face adorns the yellow motorized rickshaws zipping down the streets. Billboards bear his simple motto, “Love All, Serve All.” His portrait hangs in almost every shop: a tiny man with a gravity-defying crown of curly hair regarded by millions of worldwide devotees as a god.

Sri Sathya Sai Baba, who declared himself a “living god” as a teenager and spent decades assembling a spiritual empire, permeates every corner of this small Indian city. He transformed it from a village of mud huts into a faith center with a private airport, a university, two major hospitals, rising condominium towers and a stadium — a legacy now forcing a question upon his followers: What happens when a god dies?

India can sometimes seem overrun with gurus, spiritualists and competing godmen (as they are sometimes called). But when Sai Baba died last month at the age of 84, the nation paused in respect and reverence, if blended with skepticism, too....

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

Contrary to what some headlines might have suggested, [President Obama's speech to Parliament]'s central theme was not division and weakness, but strength – the strength of what has traditionally been seen as the Western way, but is really something much broader. As such, it offered an upbeat prelude to the G8 summit which concludes in Deauville today, a prelude as fitting as it was unfashionable.

Unfashionable, because the prevailing transatlantic mood is pessimism. The philosophical consensus has been that the West, as embodied by the US, is in terminal decline and the future belongs to the emerging economies, chief among them China, with India snapping at its heels. Viewed from this perspective, the only realistic task for the "old" countries is to slow their decline and use the last years of their ascendancy to fix international rules to guard their way of life....

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Globalization • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • Asia • China • India • England / UK • Europe

If it wasn’t already clear, India’s announcement of $5 billion in development deals in Africa should certainly put to rest any question of whether India is dedicated to doing business on the African continent over the long haul.

The pledge of development aid to African countries – essentially a fund to help African countries to meet their development goals – stands in stark contrast to Africa’s largest single trading partner, China.

While China trades large infrastructure projects (built mostly by Chinese labor) for access to African raw materials, India spends money on training Africans to develop their own countries. And while Indian countries certainly have come into Africa as investors, Indian diplomats are quick to stress that the relationship between India and African countries is more one of equal partners.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Globalization • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Energy, Natural Resources • Foreign Relations • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • Africa • Asia • China • India

India's 2011 census shows a serious decline in the number of girls under the age of seven - activists fear eight million female foetuses may have been aborted in the past decade. The BBC's Geeta Pandey in Delhi explores what has led to this crisis.

Kulwant has three daughters aged 24, 23 and 20 and a son who is 16.

In the years between the birth of her third daughter and her son, Kulwant became pregnant three times.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Marriage & Family • Science & Technology • Women • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

“Without sharing, we tend to stagnate.”

Canon Phil Groves of the Anglican Communion Office in London was among religious leaders from England and India who gathered at St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, Rosebank, as part of the Continuing Indaba Project.

“The Anglican Communion is no longer predominately white, no longer predominately English or American,” said Canon Groves, who organized the trip.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Church of England (CoE) • Episcopal Church (TEC) • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

Church leaders in India have called upon the government to ban the pesticide Endosulfan, saying its health hazards far outweigh its benefits to farming.

However, India’s agriculture ministry — which manufactures the pesticide via the government-owned Hindustan Insecticides Ltd — claims there is no scientific evidence the chemical agent is harmful to humans, and has so far resisted local and international pressure to stop production.

In a 20April statement Bishop Thomas K Oommen of Central Kerala, the chairman of the Church of South India’s Ecological Concerns Committee, urged the Union Ministry for Environment and Forests to ban Endosulfan.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Law & Legal Issues • Science & Technology • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Corporations/Corporate Life • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

The leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa also called for stronger regulation of commodity derivatives to dampen excessive volatility in food and energy prices, which they said posed new risks for the recovery of the world economy.

Meeting on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, they said the recent financial crisis had exposed the inadequacies of the current monetary order, which has the dollar as its linchpin.

What was needed, they said in a statement, was "a broad-based international reserve currency system providing stability and certainty" -- thinly veiled criticism of what the BRICS see as Washington's neglect of its global monetary responsibilities.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Globalization • * Economics, Politics • Economy • The U.S. Government • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • Asia • China • India • Europe • Russia • South America • Brazil

Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.

So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Science & Technology • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Corporations/Corporate Life • Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

Even in his lifetime the legend of Mahatma Gandhi had grown to such proportions that the man himself can be said to have disappeared as if into a dust storm. Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography sets out to find him. His subtitle alerts us that this is not a conventional biography in that he does not repeat the well-documented story of Gandhi’s struggle for India but rather his struggle with India, the country that exasperated, infuriated, and dismayed him, notwithstanding his love for it.

At the outset Lelyveld dispenses with the conventions of biography, leaving out Gandhi’s childhood and student years, a decision he made because he believed that the twenty-three-year-old law clerk who arrived in South Africa in 1893 had little in him of the man he was to become. Besides, his birth in a small town in Gujarat on the west coast of India, and childhood spent in the bosom of a very traditional family of the Modh bania (merchant) caste of Jains, then the three years in London studying law are dealt with in fine detail and with a disarming freshness and directness in Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Lelyveld’s argument is that it was South Africa that made him the visionary and leader of legend. He is not the first or only historian to have pointed out such a progression but he brings to it an intimate knowledge based on his years as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times in both South Africa and India and the exhaustive research he conducted with a rare and finely balanced sympathy.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Books • History • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Hinduism

Indian religious organizations across all major faiths are diversifying their "business model" to maintain the loyalty of their followers and attract new devotees. This is the finding of a Cambridge University study, carried out over two years surveying 568 Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh and Jain religions in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Gujarat.

Cambridge, one of the world's leading seats of learning, constituted a group drawn from its faculty of economics and Judge Business School, which discovered that cow-lending, computer-based learning, sewing and aerobics classes are some of the innovative non-religious services being offered by religious bodies to stay ahead of the game.

The survey is believed to be one of the first in India with researchers finding that although India is becoming more powerful and wealthy, rising social inequality — especially in the poorer states — means religious groups often fill the breach left by the lack of social welfare, especially in education and healthcare. In total, 272 Hindu religious groups were interviewed, along with 248 Muslim, 25 Christian and 23 Sikh and Jain religious organizations.

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DE SAM LAZARO: Microlending began in the nonprofit world as a means to help poor people start enterprises that would make them self-sufficient.

VIJAY MAHAJAN (Founder, BASIX): We were from the world of development, and we spent a frustrating number of years trying to get small amounts of credit for poor people. Then there’s a limit to how much you can do as a nonprofit, and then eventually we restructured as for-profit.

DE SAM LAZARO: In less than decade, microlending grew into a seven billion dollar industry. One company, SKS Microfinance, raised $350 million in an initial public stock offering. Salesmen from various new companies fanned out into rural areas like this village in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, offering money to people, no questions asked....

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Law & Legal Issues • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • The Banking System/Sector • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

Forty years after following the hippy trail to South Asia, John Butt is still living in the region, and still spreading a message of peace and love - though now as an Islamic scholar.
As our car turned around the bumpy Indian road, a gleaming white marble minaret came into view. My fellow passenger, John Mohammed Butt, could barely contain his excitement.
"Can you see it?" he asks. "It's like the Oxford University of Islamic learning. For me these minarets and domes are just like the spires and towers of Oxford.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Islam

The Karnataka High Court has directed the Bangalore Police to complete the corruption and fraud investigation of the Moderator of the Church of South India (CSI) and present their findings to the court.

On Dec 9, Justice Mohan Shantanagoudar asked the police to complete their investigations “as soon as possible, but not later than the outer limit of two months” into allegations that the Bishop in Central Karnataka, the Rt. Rev. Suputhrappa Vasanthakumar, his wife Nirmala, daughter Aparna, and his personal secretary Patricia Job stole church funds.

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Washington and Delhi's relationship will be one of the century's defining partnerships, President Barack Obama and Indian PM Manmohan Singh have said.

On a visit to Delhi, Mr Obama said India was a world power, and both countries would work together to promote stability and prosperity.

In a speech to parliament later, he said he would address Delhi's bid for a permanent UN Security Council seat.

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President Obama is likely to get a friendly but subdued welcome when he begins his visit to India on Saturday.

Many Indians feel that the United States has neglected India, while cultivating strategic relations with its military rival, Pakistan.

That perception will be tough to overcome as Obama seeks India's help on a range of issues, from helping to balance the growing power of China to supporting the government of Afghanistan.

It could also hamper the president's efforts to open some key U.S. business opportunities in India.

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Filed under: * Economics, Politics • Foreign Relations • Politics in General • Office of the President • President Barack Obama • War in Afghanistan • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • Pakistan

A Church of South India (CSI) panel has concluded that a prima facie case for fraud can be laid against the Bishop in Coimbatore.

In interim report prepared by an investigatory panel given to the CSI executive committee last month concluded Bishop Manickam Dorai was likely to have committed fraud and theft of church funds. A final report will be presented to the executive committee in December, but the interim findings determined there was probable cause to dismiss Bishop Dorai, the panel concluded.

On July 2, the executive committee of the CSI’s General Synod placed Bishop Dorai on an indefinite leave of absence and dissolved the diocese’s executive council. The bishop and his cronies are accused of embezzling diocesan funds and taking kickbacks on construction projects amounting to over £500,000.

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Filed under: * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology • Pastoral Theology

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, on Sunday laid out the road map for the growth of the South Kerala Diocese of the Church of South India (CSI), emphasising the need to be selfless in its service to society.

Delivering his message on the occasion of the golden jubilee celebrations of the South Kerala Diocese of the CSI here, the Archbishop wanted the Church to be a questioning church and a praying church, one which has learnt to trust in God.

He marvelled at the “unusual Christian diversity” in Kerala and said he was convinced that this was based on deep trust and relationship.

“Kerala is a land of great religious diversity, but not of conflict. In the last few centuries, it has been a land of unusual Christian diversity. But my stay here in the last few days has shown that it is based on deep trust and relationship. Within the spectrum of Christian differences, the South Kerala Diocese has a special place,” he said.

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For decades this central Indian city was vintage old India: crumbling Mughal-era ruins and ancient Buddhist caves surrounded by endless parched acres from which farmers coaxed cotton.

But this month Aurangabad became an emblem of an altogether different India: the booming, increasingly urbanized economic powerhouse filled with ambition and a new desire to flaunt its wealth.

A group of more than 150 local businessmen decided to buy, en masse, a Mercedes-Benz car each, spending nearly $15 million in a single day and putting this small but thriving city on the map. Frustrated that the usual Chamber of Commerce brochures were slow to attract new investment, the businessmen decided to buy the cars as a stunt intended to stimulate investment in Aurangabad, one of several largely unknown but thriving urban centers across India’s more prosperous states.

“In and around Aurangabad there are companies worth a thousand crores,” an amount of Indian rupees equivalent to about $225 million, said Sachin Nagouri, 40, a hyperkinetic local real estate mogul who came up with the idea. “But Aurangabad is not known even in this state. There is plenty of money here. We just need to show it.”

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Wrong understanding of religion and God was often the cause of terrorism and religious fanaticism, archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams observed in Thiruvananthapuram today.

There were some who think that God required us all the time defending him and the faith. God need not require us to defend him, the visiting head of the Church of England said during an interaction with students of the Kerala United Theological Seminary here.

What is important is to try to understand"the infinity, inexhaustibility and mystery of God", which will lead to a meaningful understanding of the faith, the supreme leader of the Anglican Communion said.

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You became the Archbishop of Canterbury in 2003 at a particularly difficult time in relations among the different churches that comprise the Anglican Communion. There was even talk of the Communion being on the verge of fragmentation. Yet your attempts to keep all sides talking to one another have been notable. Could you tell us how it has been going, and what you see ahead of you?

I think that after the Lambeth Conference of 2008 many people felt that we found ways of talking to one another, and perhaps exercising some restraint and tact towards one another. And it was very significant that at the next meeting of the Anglican primates, which was in the early part of 2009, all major Churches of the Communion were represented.

Unfortunately, the situation does not remain there. The decision of the American Church to go forward, as it has, with the ordination of a lesbian bishop has, I think, set us back. At the moment I'm not certain how we will approach the next primates' meeting, but regrettably some of the progress that I believe we had made has not remained steady. Alongside that, and I think this is important, while the institutions of the Communion struggle, in many ways the mutual life of the Communion, the life of exchange and cooperation between different parts of our Anglican family, is quite strong and perhaps getting stronger. It's a paradox. We are working more closely together on issues of development than we did before. We have the emergence of an Anglican health network across the globe, bringing together various health care institutions. We have also had quite a successful programme on the standards and criteria for theological education across the Communion. So, a very mixed picture.

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O God of the nations, who didst give to thy faithful servant Henry Martyn a brilliant mind, a loving heart, and a gift for languages, that he might translate the Scriptures and other holy writings for the peoples of India and Persia: Inspire in us, we beseech thee, a love like his, eager to commit both life and talents to thee who gavest them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Church of England (CoE) • * Christian Life / Church Life • Missions • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Evangelicals

The Archbishop of Canterbury Reverend Rowan Williams on Monday met the Prince of Arcot Nawab Mohammad Abdul Ali at his ancestral home “Amir Mahal”.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Archbishop of Canterbury • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

The word 'pluralism' has come to mean an uncomfortable variety of things in both the political and the religious sphere. In reference to religion, it is most often used to mean the conviction that no particular religious tradition has the full or final truth: each perceives a valid but incomplete part of it. This sort of pluralist perspective implies that no faith can or should make claims for itself as the only route to perfection or salvation. In the political context, it can refer to at least two positions. The first is an analysis of the state associated with political theorists like Harold Laski and John Neville Figgis in the early twentieth century. According to this approach, we must think of the state not as the all-powerful source of legitimate community life and action but as the structure needed to organise and mediate within a 'community of communities', a plurality of very diverse groups and associations of civil society, ranging from trade unions and universities to religious bodies. And a second political meaning is the one given currency particularly by Isaiah Berlin in his writings on political liberty (see the essays collected in Liberty, edited by Henry Hardy, Oxford University Press 2002, especially the famous 'Two Concepts of Liberty', pp.166-217). There is a genuine plurality of human goods, and they are not all compatible in any given situation: doing the right thing may involve the sacrifice of one desired good for the sake of another, and we must not deceive ourselves as to the cost, pretending that there is some ideal condition in which all genuine human moral goals are realised harmoniously. If there is such a diversity of human goals, the most realistic political aspiration is for a liberal state that does not seek to advance by legislation a programme for this or that specific vision of human improvement or self-realisation.

Diverse as these definitions are, there are clear areas of overlap. If it is true, as some claim, that no religious tradition possesses ultimate truth, no religious tradition can claim the right to be legally enforced. If the state has to broker relations between different communities, it must itself be ideologically neutral. If a religious body exists within a pluralist state, it must at least recognise that it cannot expect the state to legislate as though its religious and ethical claims were beyond dispute. It has to understand that, while it may still make the same truth claims, they are now open to scrutiny, rebuttal and attack, and cannot be taken for granted. And the interweaving of all these themes is perhaps more evident in India than in many places in our world. India, in declaring itself a secular state at independence, was making a clear option for a certain kind of public and political neutrality, acknowledging that to be a citizen in India could not be something that depended on any particular communal identity and that the state could not intervene in religious disagreements except insofar as they became socially disruptive. Furthermore, the religious context and history of India are bound to pose questions to any simplistic religious absolutism; and the oldest traditions of India have a good deal to say about the elusiveness of the divine as well as its revelation. Which is why modern India is such a fruitful context in which to examine understandings of pluralism –how they apply in practice and questions arising.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Archbishop of Canterbury • * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

Absent fathers and the breakdown of the family are the greatest threats to society in the West Indies and the root causes of crime, the leaders of the government of St. Kitts and Nevis were told at an Independence Day ceremony last week.

In an ecumenical ceremony marking the 27th anniversary of independence of the West Indian nation held at the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Basseterre, the Rev. Christopher Archibald from the Anglican Church of St Kitts told the Governor General, the Prime Minister and cabinet, members of the opposition, judiciary and chiefs of the police and army, that the government’s legislative agenda for the coming session of parliament, “Strengthening families for positive nation building” was a worthy goal.

The family was under attack in St Kitts and Nevis, and across the Caribbean, Fr. Archibald told the assembled worthies on Sept 30. “We are experiencing serious threats to our family and family life and unity by both internal and external forces.”

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Violence against Christians has helped Churches understand the need of unity, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, told a meeting today.

“Sustained violence against Christians in India has helped different denominations to bridge differences and heed the Good Shepherd’s voice,” the head of the world-wide Anglican communion said during the conclusion of the 40th anniversary celebration of the Church of North India (CNI) on Oct. 14.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Archbishop of Canterbury • * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • Violence • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

The Archbishop of Canterbury came, he spoke and he conquered with a smile on the second evening of his “mission of goodwill” trip to India.

The principal leader of the Church of England and the symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican Communion was the guest of honour during the evening church service at St Paul’s Cathedral on Sunday and the civic reception that followed.

“In the United Kingdom we often have debates on what it means to live in a multicultural society and a secular society. Many believe that to live in a multicultural society is to live in chaos and to live in a secular society is to live in an atmosphere of graveness. Which is close to saying more people from the United Kingdom ought to visit India!” smiled Rowan Williams.

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...there is still a specific and unique responsibility for Christians. They have received the Spirit in baptism and they have been given the freedom to pray to God as Jesus prayed. And the effect of this gift is that they have been drawn into the Body of Christ. They have been united not just in some sort of human society but in a community, a communion, that makes us all depend on each other so deeply that we cannot even begin to think about our own welfare without the welfare of others. When we read St Luke's account of the Spirit at work in the birth and baptism and temptation of Jesus and in his ministry in Galilee, what we are really reading about is the beginning of the Church, the birth of the Body of Christ. As we see God's agenda being proclaimed and lived out in the life of Jesus, we begin to see that as we receive the Spirit we are involved in the same story. We must allow the Spirit to sweep away the fantasies that we use to make ourselves comfortable; we must allow the Spirit to drive us into dark and difficult places where we have to let go of the things that make us feel safe. And then we can live out our baptismal calling, open to one another in the community of Christ's love, living, each one of us, from the gifts we receive from the neighbour.

The pursuit of the Millennium Development Goals should not just be a matter of solving a number of tough problems about the distribution of wealth. For Christians, these goals should be about growth in the life of the Spirit and thus in the life of a community that, in its own inner workings, shows a pattern of mutual generosity, truthfulness and faithfulness. The goals we speak about are goals for our own common life, not just for the leaders of the nations to implement by their policies. We want as churches to be a community where vulnerable people are safe, where education and nurture are guaranteed, where all have access to justice, where the material world is honoured and properly cared for, where healing is available for all. If we can go on working at becoming that kind of Church, we shall be witnessing to the Millennium Development Goals in more than words. We shall be showing that the human world can really change when the Spirit is at work.

And our prayer for the gift of the Spirit is also a prayer for the gift of integrity and realism day after day.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Archbishop of Canterbury • * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Preaching / Homiletics • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

Expressing satisfaction that the recent Ayodhya verdict was received calmly by the people of India, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said here on Saturday that it was time for people to “move on” now.

The Archbishop, who is on a 16-day-visit to India at the invitation of the Communion of Churches in India, started his tour from the city that he had “long wished to visit as a student, especially after reading about the good work done here for the poor”.

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The world’s most influential Christian leader after the Pope made Sunday mass special for the city’s churchgoers, delivering sermons soaked in simplicity and sending out a message of goodwill and hope that came from the heart rather than the pulpit.

Metro tracked Rowan Williams through a busy second day in town when he presided over church services on either side of noon, interacted with the congregation and visited homes for the aged and HIV-affected children....

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Archbishop of Canterbury • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, will embark on a 16 day visit to India from 9th to 24th October 2010 at the invitation of the Communion of Churches in India. The Archbishop will travel across several cities in India, including Kolkata, Ranchi, Nagpur, New Delhi, Chennai, Vellore, Bangalore and Thiruvananthapurum....

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Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Douglas Williams is hosting a dialogue with five Hindu swamis (ascetics) in Bangalore (India) on October 20. The aim is to “to engage in discussions for mutual understanding.”

The event is to be held at Whitefield Ecumenical Centre. The five Swamis are Tridandi Srimannarayana Ramanuja Chinna Jeeyar (Hyderabad), Sugunendra Theertha (Udupi), Harshanand (Bangalore), Shivamurthy Shivachary, Paramananda Bharati (Sringeri Math), Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (United Kingdom).

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Vinod Khosla, the billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, was already among the world’s richest men when he invested a few years ago in SKS Microfinance, a lender to poor women in India.

But the roaring success of SKS’s recent initial public stock offering in Mumbai has made him richer by about $117 million — money he says he plans to plow back into other ventures that aim to fight poverty while also trying to turn a profit.

And he says he wants to challenge other rich Indians to do more to help their country’s poor.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Poverty • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Corporations/Corporate Life • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

With the nation on high alert, an Indian court handed down a long-awaited decision on Thursday over control of the country’s most disputed religious site by splitting the land into three portions to be divided among Hindus and Muslims, according to lawyers in the case.

Much of the detail and rationale behind the decision issued late Thursday by a three-judge panel in the state of Uttar Pradesh remained unclear. The court was expected to release the complete ruling only later in the evening. But lawyers in the case, interviewed on Indian news channels, said the panel had unexpectedly ruled by dividing the land in a way that gave something to both Hindus and Muslims after a legal battle that originated six decades ago.

The case focused on a site in the city of Ayodhya, which many Hindus have long claimed as the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram, but which also was the site of a mosque, known as the Babri Masjid, built in the 16th century by India’s first Mughal ruler. In 1992, Hindu extremists destroyed the Babri Masjid, sparking riots that would claim the lives of about 2,000 people, mostly Muslims.

One of the central questions in the case had been whether a Hindu temple had existed on the site before the construction of the Babri Masjid. Lawyers in the case said the court’s ruling would reserve one-third of the land for construction of a temple to Ram, another third for another Hindu party to the case, while designating the final third for Muslims to build a mosque.

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The Indian members of Parliament left their shoes on the floor beneath a wall covered in photographs of slain Kashmiris. The five men sat cross-legged on the floor of the headquarters of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, staring into a throng of television cameras as they delivered a carefully scripted message of reconciliation.

“We have come to get your counsel,” said Ram Vilas Paswan, a member of Parliament, turning to the leader of the Liberation Front, a former guerrilla fighter named Yasin Malik. “What is the way out? What is the way to stop the bloodshed?”

For more than 100 days, in which Indian security officers have killed more than 100 Kashmiri civilians, the Indian government has seemed paralyzed, or even indifferent, as this disputed Himalayan region has plunged into one of the gravest crises of its tortured history.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Psychology • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • Pakistan

In India, there is only 1 psychiatrist for every 400,000 people, according to a recent study by the Indian government. It is one of the lowest ratios anywhere in the world.

It means that most people in India go untreated for substance abuse problems, severe depression and psychotic disorders. Or rather, they go untreated by doctors. Instead, they turn to the gods.

Many people believe one particular South Indian temple can heal the mentally ill.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Psychology • Mental Illness • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

Inside the drab district hospital, where dogs patter down the corridors, sniffing for food, Ratan Bhuria’s children are curled together in the malnutrition ward, hovering at the edge of starvation. His daughter, Nani, is 4 and weighs 20 pounds. His son, Jogdiya, is 2 and weighs only eight.

Landless and illiterate, drowned by debt, Mr. Bhuria and his ailing children have staggered into the hospital ward after falling through India’s social safety net. They should receive subsidized government food and cooking fuel. They do not. The older children should be enrolled in school and receiving a free daily lunch. They are not. And they are hardly alone: India’s eight poorest states have more people in poverty — an estimated 421 million — than Africa’s 26 poorest nations, one study recently reported.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Dieting/Food/Nutrition • Poverty • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

Kerala's communist Chief Minister, V.S. Achuthanandan, accused an Islamist opposition party of conspiring to turn Kerala into a Muslim-dominated state.

"Youngsters are being given money and are being lured to convert to Islam," he told reporters at a news conference. Opposition parties accused the government of playing the "Hindu card" ahead of local elections.

Muslims and Christian minorities in India generally enjoy good relations and see each other as fellow victims of alleged persecution by right-wing Hindu groups. Kerala's population of 31.8 million is 56 percent Hindu, 24 percent Muslim and 19 percent Christian.

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Filed under: * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Religion News & Commentary • Inter-Faith Relations • Other Faiths • Islam • Muslim-Christian relations

Polyandry has been practiced here for centuries, but in a single generation it has all but vanished. That is a remarkably swift change in a country where social change, despite rapid economic growth, leaping technological advances and the relentless march of globalization, happens with aching slowness, if at all.

After centuries of static isolation, so much has changed here in the Lahaul Valley in the past half-century — first roads and cars, then telephones and satellite television dishes, and now cellphones and broadband Internet connections — that a complete social revolution has taken place. Not one of Ms. Devi’s five children lives in a polyandrous family.

“Times have changed,” Ms. Devi said. “Now nobody marries like this.”

Polyandry has never been common in India, but pockets have persisted, especially among the Hindu and Buddhist communities of the Himalayas, where India abuts Tibet.

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The Dalai Lama lashed out at China on Wednesday, accusing it of trying to "annihilate Buddhism" in Tibet and rebuffing all his efforts to reach a compromise over the disputed Himalayan region.

China shot back, accusing the Tibetan spiritual leader of using deceptions and lies to distort its policy in the region. The passionate back-and-forth highlighted the distrust, anger and frustration that separates the two sides and leaves little hope for success in recently resumed talks.

Beijing has demonized the Dalai Lama and accused him of wanting independence for Tibet, which China says is part of its territory. The Dalai Lama says he only wants some form of autonomy for Tibet within China that would allow Tibetan culture, language and religion to thrive.

The Dalai Lama spoke Wednesday in an address marking the anniversaries of two failed uprisings against China, one 51 years ago that sent him into exile in India and the other two years ago that was quashed by a government crackdown that is still continuing.

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The above headline is from the print edition--KSH.

She was a gifted 14-year-old tennis player who idolized Steffi Graf and hoped to turn pro. He was a senior police official and president of the state lawn tennis club. He lured her to his office with a promise of special coaching that could make her tennis dreams come true, then groped her.

This encounter set in motion a saga that has taken almost 20 years to unfold. The family of the girl, Ruchika Girotra, threatened to press charges. Shambhu Pratap Singh Rathore, a senior officer in the Haryana State Police, then waged a campaign of harassment and intimidation against Ruchika so severe that she eventually committed suicide. Her brother, Ashu, was falsely accused of stealing cars, and said he had been beaten and tortured in custody.

All the while Mr. Rathore, a flamboyant, mustachioed presence with deep ties to many of the state’s top politicians, rose through the ranks, retiring in 2002 as a state police chief.

Ruchika Girotra’s ordeal is hardly unique. Girls are molested all the time in India; powerful officials often abuse their office to avoid criminal prosecution; sclerotic courts are painfully slow and often corrupt.

But the case is emblematic of the way India’s growing middle class, egged on by a lively news media hungry for sensational stories, is increasingly unwilling to accept these seemingly immutable truths and willing to fight back.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Law & Legal Issues • Sexuality • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

The Church Commissioners and the Church of England Pensions Board have sold their shares in Vedanta Resources plc on the advice of the Church’s Ethical Investment Advisory Group (EIAG). As a result, none of the three national investing bodies of the Church of England hold shares in the company.

The EIAG advised disinvestment because its engagement with the company had produced no substantive results and the EIAG believed that it would be inconsistent with the Church investing bodies’ joint ethical investment policy to remain invested given the EIAG’s concerns about the company’s approach to relations with the communities where it operates.

Allegations about Vedanta’s alumina refinery in Lanjigarh, Orissa, and planned bauxite mine in the nearby Niyamgiri hills came to the EIAG’s attention in June 2009. The EIAG has been examining the issues carefully since and has discussed them in a process of engagement with the company. The EIAG Secretary paid a visit to India in November 2009 to see the refinery and mine site at first hand.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Church of England (CoE) • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Corporations/Corporate Life • Stock Market • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

If 2009 was all about recession, for Wall Street, 2010 will be all about recovery. One of the first signs of this will be seen in bankers' pay packets. January will be the month when investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and the more diversified conglomerates such as Citigroup and Bank of America, release details of what they intend to pay the "masters of the universe".

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Globalization • * Economics, Politics • Economy • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • Asia • China • India • Europe • Russia

When the U.S. government imagines the global future, the term BRIC features prominently. The concept was created in 2001 when researchers at Goldman Sachs identified four critical emerging powers—Brazil, Russia, India and China. By 2050, claimed these experts, the BRIC powers would be challenging the U.S. for worldwide economic supremacy. U.S. officials have taken this forecast very seriously. Hillary Clinton recently listed these four "major and emerging global powers" as vital partners in any future attempts to solve the world's problems.

The BRIC theory has political, strategic and military implications, but it also raises intriguing questions about the world's religious future. The BRICs will be the scene of intense debates about faith and practice—about coexistence and rivalry between different faiths; about the proper relationship between religion and state power; and, conceivably, about the use of religious rhetoric to justify an imperial expansion.

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The fiscal 2009 budget deficit, triple that of 2008, was 10 percent of GDP. Lawrence Lindsey says probable policies will produce deficits of 7 percent of GDP for a decade. Ronald Reagan's worst deficit was 6 percent of GDP and for only one year.

Lindsey -- a former member of the Federal Reserve board of governors and director of George W. Bush's National Economic Council (2001-02) -- says Americans' net worth has dropped at least $13 trillion since the recession began in December 2007. What is to be done?

Americans could suddenly begin saving substantially more, but this would deepen and prolong the recession. Alternatively, America could reflate the value of its assets by printing money. Lindsey says it is already doing that -- printing bonds promiscuously and lending money to banks at negligible rates, money that banks can use to buy the bonds. This sharply increases the money supply, which sets the stage either for inflation -- too much money chasing too few goods -- or for recovery-snuffing higher interest rates to try to prevent inflation. Or for something like Japan's lost decade -- banks pouring money into government bonds rather than the real economy.

America, says Lindsey, will not be Weimar Germany, where hyperinflation caused people to rush to stores with satchels of rapidly depreciating currency. But, he adds, no country has successfully behaved the way the United States is behaving.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Globalization • * Economics, Politics • Economy • The Credit Freeze Crisis of Fall 2008/The Recession of 2007-- • The U.S. Government • Budget • Federal Reserve • The National Deficit • The United States Currency (Dollar etc) • Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner • Politics in General • Office of the President • President Barack Obama • * International News & Commentary • Asia • China • India

Episcopal Relief & Development (ERD) of the American Episcopal Church has filed suit against the Church of South India (CSI) to recover £1 million allegedly stolen by its former General Secretary Dr Pauline Sathiamurthy.

Detectives from the Central Crime Branch of the Madras police arrested Dr Sathiamurthy and three members of her family on Oct 13, after the church turned over the results of an internal investigation to prosecutors.

In a statement released on Oct 23, ERD said that two years ago it had “approached the local Church authorities with concerns when CSI failed to complete the financial reporting and required audits outlined in our agreement for 2005 and 2006. As a result, we suspended work with CSI and implemented an in-depth effort to account for the missing funds. After a lengthy process, we deeply regret that we have been forced to take legal action.”

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • * Culture-Watch • Law & Legal Issues • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

Around the world millions of children are not getting a proper education because their families are too poor to afford to send them to school. In India, one schoolboy is trying change that. In the first report in the BBC's Hunger to Learn series, Damian Grammaticas meets Babar Ali, whose remarkable education project is transforming the lives of hundreds of poor children.

At 16 years old, Babar Ali must be the youngest headmaster in the world. He's a teenager who is in charge of teaching hundreds of students in his family's backyard, where he runs classes for poor children from his village.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Poverty • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

Church leaders in India have welcomed the call by the Andhra Pradesh State Assembly for India’s federal government to allow Hindu Dalits who convert to Christianity to keep their protected status as members of a Scheduled Caste (SC).

On Aug 25 the legislature of the southeastern Indian state passed a resolution presented by the state’s chief minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy that petitions the national government to amend the Constitution to confer SC status on Dalit Christians.

The Indian Constitution allows quotas in educational institutions and government jobs for members of castes once considered “untouchable,” to support their social and economic advancement. According to the 1950 Presidential Order however, SC privileges are meant only for Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists, but not Christians.

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[Martin Luther] King...had this to say in 1968 about anti-Zionism at Harvard University: "When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews; you are talking anti-Semitism."

Today, Gandhi's influence is still keenly felt globally. Yet it is interesting to note that India today rejects its spiritual founder's worldview. A nuclear power, it has adopted Israel's approach to threats from suicide bombers and other terrorists.

So with all due respect to Tutu, Israel and the Jewish people are clear about the lesson of the Holocaust: that never again will the destiny of our people be placed in the hands of others. For 2,000 years, Jews depended on pity; they had no land and no army, and what they got in return were inquisitions, pogroms and the Nazi genocide. The Holocaust also taught us that freedom and justice come to those who are prepared to fight for them.

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It is rarely good to be female anywhere in the developing world today, but in India and China the situation is dire: in those countries, more than 1.5 million fewer girls are born each year than demographics would predict, and more girls die before they turn 5 than would be expected. (In China in 2007, there were 17.3 million births — and a million missing girls.) Millions more grow up stunted, physically and intellectually, because they are denied the health care and the education that their brothers receive.

Among policymakers, the conventional wisdom is that such selective brutality toward girls can be mitigated by two factors. One is development: surely the wealthier the home, the more educated the parents, the more plugged in to the modern economy, the more a family will invest in its girls. The other is focusing aid on women. The idea is that a mother who has more money, knowledge and authority in the family will direct her resources toward all her children’s health and education. She will fight for her girls.

Yet these strategies — though invaluable — underestimate the complexity of the situation in certain countries.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Globalization • Marriage & Family • Women • * International News & Commentary • Asia • China • India

Last week the four leaders of the Bric countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) formally met together in their first summit. I have been asked a number of questions about the event. First, did I really think this would ever happen? Second, would it have happened if I hadn't created the acronym? Third, what real purpose did it serve, and fourth, where do I think the Bric path is heading?

I've also beeen asked a couple of supplementary questions: why these four countries and why not Indonesia, Turkey or indeed Iran? And do I think the global credit crisis has changed the picture from our prediction a number of years ago, that the combined GDP of the Bric economies could exceed that of the G7 countries before 2040?

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Globalization • * Economics, Politics • Economy • * International News & Commentary • Asia • China • India • Europe • Russia • South America • Brazil

With public hugs and backslaps among its leaders, a new political bloc was formed yesterday to challenge the global dominance of the United States.

The first summit of heads of state of the BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China — ended with a declaration calling for a “multipolar world order”, diplomatic code for a rejection of America’s position as the sole global superpower.

President Medvedev of Russia went further in a statement with his fellow leaders after the summit, saying that the BRIC countries wanted to “create the conditions for a fairer world order”. He described the meeting with President Lula da Silva of Brazil, the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, and the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, as “an historic event”.

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Benedict XVI expressed his desire that everyone should enjoy religious freedom in a message written for the new ambassador from India, where Christians were the object of a wave of violence last year in the eastern state of Orissa.

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The good news is that Congress has found it easy to form a coalition with what looks like a stable parliamentary majority. It will thus spare the country a repeat of the past five years, in which the party squandered its energies appeasing its allies in an unwieldy coalition. The election was also heartening because it revealed the limits of divisive politics. India’s second party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), remains rooted in the Hindutva (Hindu-ness) movement, which seems to believe that India’s 160m Muslims live there on sufferance. The BJP lost ground this time, showing yet again that Hindu nationalism is enough to underpin a party, but not a government.

Still, Congress must not now fall prey to complacency. The party is a big, shapeless tent, tethered to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, which has provided three of the country’s prime ministers. The courtiers have now turned their attention to the next in line, Rahul Gandhi, the son of Sonia Gandhi, the party’s leader. But, following the example of his mother, he is in no hurry to become prime minister. That is commendable. Manmohan Singh, the Oxford-educated economist who has been prime minister since 2004, has business to finish.

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Watch it all--she is an inspiration.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Roman Catholic

At a trendy pub in this cosmopolitan IT capital, Hemangini Gupta, 28, and some of her girlfriends were recently relaxing with cocktails after work. A group of Hindu men later followed them outside, verbally accosting them for drinking in a public bar and for wearing jeans.

"These guys went psycho," Gupta said. "This isn't Afghanistan. But here in Bangalore, as a young woman on the streets, if you are driving a car or in a pub or dressed a certain way, you just feel this rising anger."

The incident was mild compared with some of the violent assaults on women that have taken place here. The attacks are part of what many see as rising Hindu extremism in much of the country over the past few years, especially in places such as Bangalore, precisely because it is a bastion of India's fast-changing culture. Bangalore is home to an explosion of software companies, a lively heavy-metal rock music scene and burgeoning gay rights and environmental movements.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Hinduism

The sunny apartment had everything Palvisha Aslam, 22, a Bollywood producer, wanted: a spacious bedroom and a kitchen that overlooked a garden in a middle-class neighborhood that was a short commute to Film City, where many of India's Hindi movies are shot.

She was about to sign the lease when the real estate broker noticed her surname. He didn't realize that she was Muslim, he said. Then he rejected her. It was just six weeks after the November Mumbai terrorist attacks and Indian Muslims were being viewed with suspicion across the country. He then showed her a grimy one-room tenement in a Muslim-dominated ghetto. She felt sick to her stomach as she watched the residents fight over water at a leaky tap in a dark alley.

"That night I cried a lot. I was still an outcast in my own country -- even as a secular Muslim with a well-paid job in Bollywood," said Aslam, who had similar experiences with five other brokers and three months later is still crashing on friends' sofas. "I'm an Indian. I love my country. Is it a crime now to be a Muslim in Mumbai?"

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Islam

India's Tata Motors on Monday launched the world's cheapest car, the Nano, hoping to revolutionise travel for millions and buck a slump in auto sales caused by the global economic crisis.

Company boss Ratan Tata said the no-frills vehicle, slated to cost just 100,000 rupees (2,000 dollars) for the basic model, will get India's middle-class urban population off motorcycles and into safer, affordable cars.

"I think we are at the gates of offering a new form of transport to the people of India and later, I hope, other markets elsewhere in the world," he said, describing the launch as a "milestone."

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If suicide-murder is deemed legitimate by a community when attacking its “enemies” abroad, it will eventually be used as a tactic against “enemies” at home, and that is exactly what has happened in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The only effective way to stop this trend is for “the village” — the Muslim community itself — to say “no more.” When a culture and a faith community delegitimizes this kind of behavior, openly, loudly and consistently, it is more important than metal detectors or extra police. Religion and culture are the most important sources of restraint in a society.

That’s why India’s Muslims, who are the second-largest Muslim community in the world after Indonesia’s, and the one with the deepest democratic tradition, do a great service to Islam by delegitimizing suicide-murderers by refusing to bury their bodies. It won’t stop this trend overnight, but it can help over time.

“The Muslims of Bombay deserve to be congratulated in taking this important decision,” Raashid Alvi, a Muslim member of India’s Parliament from the Congress Party, said to me. “Islam says that if you commit suicide, then even after death you will be punished.”

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Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to stimulate our economy: immigration.

“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate — no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.”

While his tongue was slightly in cheek, Gupta and many other Indian business people I spoke to this week were trying to make a point that sometimes non-Americans can make best: “Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.”

While I think President Obama has been doing his best to keep the worst protectionist impulses in Congress out of his stimulus plan, the U.S. Senate unfortunately voted on Feb. 6 to restrict banks and other financial institutions that receive taxpayer bailout money from hiring high-skilled immigrants on temporary work permits known as H-1B visas.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Globalization • * Economics, Politics • Economy • The 2009 Obama Administration Bank Bailout Plan • The Credit Freeze Crisis of Fall 2008/The Recession of 2007-- • The Fiscal Stimulus Package of 2009 • The U.S. Government • Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner • Politics in General • Office of the President • President Barack Obama • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

It isn't about cows or cobras, a wedding or outsourcing. It isn't about gurus or Gandhi. "Slumdog Millionaire," in fact, may be the first world-traveling film about India in a generation to discard the old, smudged lenses for seeing this country.

Its novelty has given it a dream run in U.S. movie theaters, and last week it won best dramatic picture at the Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles. It now is given a good shot at the Academy Awards next month, even though much of the dialogue is in Hindi.

But the film's freshness lies not just in how the West sees India. It lies, too, in how Indians see themselves. It portrays a changing India, with great realism, as something India long resisted being: a land of self-makers, where a scruffy son of the slums can hoist himself up, flout his origins, break with fate.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Globalization • Movies & Television • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • Asia • India

Both the Chinese and the Indians are convinced that their prosperity will only increase in the 21st century. In China it will be induced by the state; in India’s case, it may well happen despite the state. Indians expect to continue their relentless march toward a modern, democratic, market-based future. In this, terrorist attacks are a noisy, tragic, but ultimately futile sideshow.

However, Indians are painfully aware that they must reform their government bureaucracy, police and judiciary — institutions, paradoxically, they were so proud of a generation ago. When that happens, India may become formidable, a thought that undoubtedly worries China’s leaders.

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At least 800 Indian priests are working in the United States alone. India, Vietnam and the Philippines are among the leading exporters of priests, according to data compiled by researchers at Catholic University of America in Washington.

But these days the Indian prelates have reason to reconsider their generosity. With India modernizing at breakneck speed, more young men are choosing financial gain over spiritual sacrifice.

“There is a great danger just now because the spirit of materialism is on the increase,” said Bishop Mar James Pazhayattil, the founding bishop of the Diocese of Irinjalakuda, as he sat barefoot at his desk, surrounded by mementos of a lifetime of church service. “Faith and the life of sacrifice are becoming less.”

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Joining me with more about the implications of all of this is Timothy Shah, adjunct senior fellow for religion and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Tim, welcome. Tell us how religion was tied up in this.

TIM SHAH (Adjunct Senior Fellow, Religion and Foreign Policy, Council on Foreign Relations): In a number of ways, and in really two big ways in particular. First is that the group that was most likely involved in these terrible attacks in Mumbai was not just a militant group, as we often see in the press, but it was a group motivated by religious ideology. The group is known as Lashkar-e-Taiba, which means “Army of the Pure,” and it continues to operate openly in Pakistan today. It has reconstituted itself as a faith-based NGO, but it is still a radical Islamic organization motivated by religious ideology. The second way in which religion is involved is that these attacks help to intensify a very volatile mix of religion and politics in India, which especially involves the Hindu nationalist movement and its political wing, the BJP.

[KIM] LAWTON: Now where does this leave India’s Muslim population?

Mr. SHAH: It raises some questions and suspicions in the minds of many Indians and also people outside of India as to whether India’s very large Muslim community was in some way involved in this, if not as the prime instigators perhaps as accomplices. India has a very large Muslim community. It’s the third largest Muslim population in the world, making India the third largest Muslim country in the world of about 130 million people, and so there are questions —so far no concrete evidence I should emphasize — but there are questions and suspicions about the role of India’s Muslims.

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Filed under: * Economics, Politics • Terrorism • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

Indian media was itself a major news item as the Mumbai terror attacks came to a conclusion over the weekend.

The country’s broadcasters were summoned Friday by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to deal with charges that the live saturation coverage had helped the terrorists. At the same time, however, traditional media were criticized as too slow and inaccurate by legions of “citizen journalists” using Internet services such as Twitter and photo site Flickr.

The deputy commissioner of police argued that the terrorists, who were holed up in two major hotels and became involved in floor-by-floor firefights with police, were gaining tactical information from TV. Using powers under Section 19 of the country’s Cable Television Networks Act, he ordered a blackout of TV news channels.

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India’s highest-ranking security official resigned on Sunday, as the government began to reckon with the fallout from a three-day standoff with militants that raised troubling questions about India’s vulnerability to terrorism.

The day after the siege’s end, the official death toll rose to 183. But the police said they were still waiting for the final figures of dead bodies pulled from the wreckage of the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel, the 105-year-old landmark where the attackers held out the longest. Funerals in this commercial capital were scheduled to continue throughout Sunday, for the second day in a row.

As an investigation moved forward, there were questions about whether Indian authorities could have anticipated the attack and had better security in place, especially after a 2007 report to Parliament that the country’s shores were inadequately protected from infiltration by sea — which is how the attackers sneaked into Mumbai.

Home Minister Shivraj Patil, responsible for public safety and internal security as one of the most senior members of the government, resigned on Sunday to take responsibility for the failure of the country’s intelligence services and military to prevent the attacks in Mumbai.

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One of the targets in the Mumbai terrorist attacks was a Jewish community center, where at least six hostages were killed. Among the dead are Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, both directors of the center. Antony Korenstein, country director for India with the American Joint Jewish Distribution Committee, speaks about their work with the Jewish community visiting and living in Mumbai.

Listen to it all from NPR.

Filed under: * Economics, Politics • Terrorism • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Judaism

(ACNS) The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams has...[yesterday] written to the High Commissioner of India, Mr Shiv Shankar Mukherjee, expressing his shock and outrage at the appalling atrocities in Mumbai and offering on behalf of the whole Anglican Communion prayers for those who have lost loved ones, for the injured and for all those caring for them or dealing with the ongoing siege. "People everywhere", he said, "stand in solidarity with the innocent and in condemnation of those who would destroy innocent lives out of evil and misguided motives".

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Archbishop of Canterbury • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

Gunmen have opened fire at a number of sites in the Indian city of Mumbai (Bombay), killing at least 78 people and injuring about 200 more.

Police said shooting was continuing and that the incidents were co-ordinated terrorist attacks. Gunmen had taken hostages at two hotels, they said.

At least seven sites have been targeted across India's financial capital.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Violence • * International News & Commentary • Asia • India

The real cause of the violence against Christians in Orissa, and now elsewhere in India, is the fear among extremist Hindu movements that many “untouchable” and “tribal” people will turn to the Christian faith because of the appalling treatment they receive from their caste-ridden communities and the love and care they are shown by Christian humanitarian organisations. Some of those who receive such care, but by no means all, become Christians of their own free will. Is this so unacceptable in secular and democratic India?

Scores of Christians have been murdered. Their homes, churches, presbyteries, convents and charitable institutions have been destroyed, allegedly in retaliation for the murder of a Hindu swami and some of his followers, probably by Maoist insurgents. During this time, it seems that the state authorities have not allowed Christians from other parts of India, let alone elsewhere, even to bring relief to fellow believers. The Federal Government also appears to have been paralysed and ineffective.

There is an outcry when a single Hindu is killed, and Christian leaders have strongly condemned any such incident. Christians in Orissa are, however, rapidly running out of cheeks to turn.

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Beleaguered Christians in India have "run out of cheeks to be struck" a senior Anglican bishop declared yesterday, on hearing reports that a Christian mob had hacked a Hindu to death in the troubled state of Orissa.

Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, called for peace, and said that the murder, conducted by a knive-wielding mob of 50 Christians, could not be condoned. But he told The Times: “For months now, scores of Christians have been killed, homes, convents and presbyteries have been burnt down to the ground."

He said: "Now one Hindu has been killed, allegedly by Christians. We do not know under what circumstances but it suggests that the worm has turned and the Christian community has run out of cheeks to be struck."

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