Tuesday, 18 November marks the 30th anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre that shocked the world. It has been an incredible story of deception, brainwashing, thirst for meaning for one’s life and human culpability. Let me give you a short history. The People’s Temple started as a church based on apostolic socialism for all people regardless of color, national origin or past and led by the pastor Jim Jones. After the...

We have this hullabaloo over the civilian nuclear cooperation treaty between India and the United States. Both the Left Front and the NDA have been vociferously against the agreement for a long time. We have to talk about the politics behind the opposition to the agreement. Let us analyze the agreement and see where the people who oppose it stand. But before starting this discussion, let us have a look at the text of the 123 Agreement...

Anybody who has been following the US presidential race, (I hope many of you do) must have noticed that Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois is surging ahead in the past few weeks and all the Democrat has to do in the next three weeks is to coast towards victory against John McCain, the veteran senator from Arizona. We have to examine the significance of this to India, especially when the ties between the most powerful...

Thus far, we have seen what the constitution and the courts say about a common civil code and also seen how it does not target any single community. One main sentiment that we have seen in our discussions that most of our friends expressed is the difficulty of coming up with a solution that is acceptable to all. Now, the main issue of practicality of coming up with such a solution was attributed to the cultural diversity of India...

We have seen in the first post that the constitution mandates a unified civil code and then that the courts have always asked the government to step up and fulfill the constitutional mandate.  During the discussions,  and also in the national political discourse, we can sense a shade of religion coming into the discussion. This communal overtone in the debates lead us to the next question: whether a uniform civil code would...

So, from the first post, it is clear that the constitution unambiguously calls for a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India. But why do we have all these different laws, even though we are an independent nation whose laws are guided by the constitution? The key to the answer lies in the history of these laws. These laws were created and enacted, mostly during the early periods of the British rule in India and when...

The term civil code is used to cover the entire body of laws governing rights relating to property and otherwise in personal matters like marriage, divorce, maintenance, adoption and inheritance. The call for a uniform civil code for India has been gaining traction from all avenues of the society. As a modern society, we really need to come up with a unified civil code for leading our country to the next millennium and beyond. However,...