When a Dinner Menu Becomes a Political Battle

When a Dinner Menu Becomes a Political Battle: India’s Deepening Crisis of Political Trust

From Parliament to the BRICS summit, every political disagreement is increasingly interpreted through mistrust and suspicion.

Perhaps nothing illustrates how deep the trust deficit has become better than what happened at the recently concluded BRICS Summit in New Delhi. The elaborate vegetarian dinner hosted to the leaders and delegates - showcasing India's regional culinary traditions - at the Summit, which could ordinarily have been seen simply as a choice of hospitality and cuisine, has become a media headline and an unescapable political controversy.

Science and India’s own scientific experience offer a simple lesson: trust is earned by demonstrating public purpose, not merely proclaiming it.

Mumbai, the epicentre of Ganesh festivities, is continuing to celebrate the ten day Ganesh Festival with thousands lining up to seek blessings of Bhagwan Ganesh - Lalbaugcha Raja, Mumbaicha Raja and many others including the neighbourhood Ganesh mandals, each sustained by local committees, artisans, and volunteers, complete a tradition that the world now travels to witness.

Historically, the devotees look up to Ganesh as Vighnaharta” (विघ्नहर्ता), the remover of obstacles. In India we are now encountering a different obstacle - an uncomfortable one – which our democracy urgently needs to confront: the growing deficit of trust in public life. This year, I join Mumbaikars in praying Bhagwan Ganesh – Vighnaharta, to remove the obstacle of trust deficit, which unfortunately is plaguing Indian polity, which is adversely affecting Indian society.

In the prevailing political circumstances of trust deficit, no wonder vegetarian dinner menu is being interpreted as evidence of cultural exclusion, ideological imposition or political intent. That is how dangerous a trust deficit can become, which encompasses all aspects of Indian polity.

Today, the Treasury Bench and the Opposition increasingly appear to be antagonistic to each other’s thoughts, demonstrating political realities of current times. What the government presents as reform is interpreted by the Opposition as manipulation. What the Opposition presents as scrutiny is interpreted by the government as obstruction. To add to this is the sloganeering and social media trolls and viral media messages that ghettoise society on political ideological beliefs which further accentuate the political mistrust. 

Unfortunately, caught in this political cross fire, is the credibility of the constitutional and investigative institutions—from the Election Commission and judiciary to agencies such as the CBI and ED. The result is not merely an unpleasant political atmosphere, but a weakened confidence in the democratic process itself.

We must remind ourselves that Trust, once lost, cannot be restored by louder political sloganeering.

Science offers an interesting lesson in how trust is created.

In 1854, when the safety of Lift was still viewed with suspicion, Elisha Otis demonstrated his newly devised safety brake mechanism, which he had designed for the lifts, before a packed hall of curious onlookers at the Industry of All Nations exhibition at the New York Crystal Palace.  Otis, standing on a lift platform suspended 50 feet high in the air, ordered his assistant, to cut the cable holding the lift. Instead of an expected free fall, the rope snapped and the platform dropped a few inches, and then instantly jerked to a complete halt. The safety design had worked. Otis delivered one of the most famous catchphrases in industrial history:

"All safe, gentlemen, all safe!" His words demonstrated that technology could be trusted and rest is history. That demonstration helped build trust in technology that would eventually transform high rise landscapes in cities.

Science has repeatedly shown that difficult problems become manageable when evidence, leadership and collective purpose converge. The story of polio is an even more relevant Indian example.

Jonas Salk developed the first successful inactivated polio vaccine, while Albert Sabin subsequently developed the oral vaccine that became central to mass immunisation programmes. Their scientific achievements provided the tools. But science alone could not create trust to eradicate polio in a country as vast and diverse as India.

India's success came when political leadership, public health institutions, international partners, health workers, civil society and communities trusted each other and worked towards one national objective: making India polio free. In two decades, India from reporting highest cases of world polio cases, was certified polio-free in March 2014.

The achievement was not the triumph of one government, one organisation or one scientist. It was the result of many parts of society trusting each other in achieving a common goal.

That is precisely the lesson that public life needs to rediscover.

Prafulla Chandra Ray, the great Indian chemist and institution-builder, famously observed: “Science can afford to wait, but Swaraj cannot.” The statement was not a dismissal of science. It reflected a larger principle: there are moments when personal interests and professional ambitions must be subordinated to a larger national purpose.

Jagadish Chandra Bose offered another dimension of that ethic. His pioneering work in radio waves and plant physiology brought him international recognition, yet he was deeply uncomfortable with the idea of scientific knowledge being treated merely as private property. His life reflected a belief that knowledge ultimately carries a responsibility to humanity.

Democratic public life requires precisely this sense of larger purpose.

In a democracy none of the institutional positions nor the political parties own the Republic. The people do. Every institution and every political leader, therefore, has a duty to protect the trust placed on them by the people.

The government cannot build confidence merely by announcing schemes, invoking civilisational ideals or repeating slogans. Transparency, fairness, accountability and demonstrable outcomes are what convert promises into credibility.

The Opposition has an equally important responsibility. It cannot rebuild public confidence if every government action is approached with an assumption of bad faith. Opposition is indispensable to democracy; permanent disbelief is not the same as democratic scrutiny. Criticism becomes meaningful when it engages evidence and offers an alternative.

Institutions face a similar obligation. Autonomy and independence cannot merely be claimed; it must be demonstrated. Authority may confer institutional power, but only conduct confers institutional credibility.

The Indian armed forces offer another useful lesson in leadership. Their ethos recognises that responsibility flows downwards while legitimate needs and concerns flow upwards. Those who command carry greater responsibility. Political leadership could benefit from more of that understanding: public office is ultimately a responsibility, not merely an opportunity to win the next election.

The government and Opposition do not have to trust each other's politics. They do, however, need to trust the democratic process—and demonstrate that trust through their conduct.

The Parliament must show that disagreement can coexist with deliberation. Institutions must demonstrate that their loyalty is to the Constitution, not to whoever happens to occupy office. Political leaders must show that public interest can rise above partisan advantage.

Perhaps that is the real lesson of the seemingly trivial BRICS vegetarian dinner menu controversy. It would be unfortunate if an international summit intended to showcase India's civilisational diversity became another battlefield in India's domestic political war.

India is too diverse to have one compulsory idea of food, culture, identity or ideology. But India is also too important to allow every disagreement to become an accusation of bad faith.

When trust disappears, even a menu becomes political.

When trust exists, disagreement remains disagreement.

That is the difference between a functioning democracy and a deeply polarised one.

For this year’s Ganesh Festival, perhaps the most appropriate invocation is therefore not another political slogan but a simple civic prayer: remove the obstacles to trust.

And then let our political leaders do what science and India's own experience have taught us to do—not merely speak, not merely promise, not merely accuse, but demonstrate, to create trust and learn to walk the talk.

The Republic cannot live on slogans alone. It lives on trust. And trust, like science, must ultimately be demonstrated by what we do.

Image: Courtesy Gemini AI

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Shivaprasad Khened

Senior Advisor CSMVS Museum, Mumbai.

Former Director Nehru Science Centre and NGMA Mumbai & Trustee, Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, Mumbai

 

  

Correcting a 450- plus Year-Old Distortion in World Map

Correcting a 450- plus Year-Old Distortion: Why the UN Has Now Voted to Correct the Way We Represent the World.”

For most of us, who went to school anywhere in the world over the last century, the ubiquitous world map on the classroom wall was considered to be a settled fact — fixed and unquestionable.

 The African continent sat modestly in the middle of the world map and was roughly represented by the size of Greenland or Argentina on the map. Contrarily, Europe looked expansive, larger than what it ought to be.  Russia stretched across the top of the map like a colossus. But then, none of us ever contemplated to ask why the sizes of some countries/continents are larger in map than what they really are while others appear much smaller than what they ought to be, physically. We believed the map to be a gospel truth, although it was not.

Earlier this month – September 4, 2026, the world map, which we knew it to be an absolute truth and whose genesis goes back to the 16^th century, has finally been changed to be more realistic by the United Nations through its "Correct the Map" resolution, sponsored by Togo and backed by African Union (AU) members, passed with the support of 164 nations, including India, France and the UK. The US was the only nation to vote against the resolution - while there were six abstentions.

The UN vote is non-binding but will definitely see changes to the maps used by institutions around the world. The UN General Assembly in its 114^th meeting adopted the resolution in the 80^th session, on 4 September 2026, to “” Correct the map" for rebalancing global cartographic representation and promoting equitable representation of the world's regions, particularly Africa".

The corrected world map, adopted by the UN General Assembly, has now become a formal map, non-binding, which will help us move away from that familiar image of the world map that remained extant for more than four centuries. The corrected map incorporates projections that show the true relative size of the world's continents. India voted in favour of the change, with a careful caveat about neutrality and its own territorial depiction of the geographical and political boundaries of India.

It may seem quite strange that why the world body like the UN who should have been preoccupied with many more important issues on hand - war, poverty, diplomacy etc. - chose to spend a session in its General Assembly debating a 16th-century map. To understand why the UN did so and the significance of this decision, we have to go back in history to the origin of the map, which was an outcome a Flemish cartographers design prepared nearly 450 years ago.

Cartography & Earth Maps

The world maps which we see are small scale flat-surface representation of portions of the surface of the earth. The primary purpose of a map is to express graphically the relative position of points and features on the earth's surface to each other. These maps are developed using cartography - the scientific art of making maps. The earths spherical feature makes map making difficult and involves cartography in preparation of the earth map. Cartography involves the systematic representation of all or part of a circular/spherical body on a flat surface; such a representation is called a map projection. Since earth is a circular celestial body with flat surface geographical boundaries for countries and continents, cartography is used in preparing the earth map.

A sailor's problem, solved brilliantly

In 1569, Gerardus Mercator, a cartographer working in Flanders, Belgium, published a world map designed to solve a very specific and very real problem: how does a ship's navigator draw a straight line on a flat chart and have it correspond to a constant compass bearing on a curved Earth? Sailing along lines of constant bearing — "rhumb lines", an imaginary line on earths surface that crossed all meridians of longitude at the same angle — was how ships actually navigated, and every projection before Mercator's forced captains to constantly recalculate their heading as they crossed the chart. Mercator's projection made rhumb lines appear as straight lines. During the heightened period of transoceanic voyages, this was an elegant geometric breakthrough, close to magic. It became indispensable to European maritime expansion, and deservedly so.

However, the projection technique used is achieved as a mathematical trick: it stretches the map's east-west lines of latitude farther and farther apart as you move away from the equator, in order to keep angles and shapes correct at every point (this is called a "conformal" projection). The side effect of this adoption is that area gets inflated dramatically near the poles. This results in Greenland, a modest island of about 2.2 million square kilometres, ending up looking comparable in size to Africa, a continent of over 30 million square kilometres — nearly fourteen times larger. Russia and Canada appear vastly oversized relative to their physical size. Meanwhile, the equatorial and tropical belt — Africa, South America, South and Southeast Asia — where the *actual* landmass is concentrated, is visually compressed and appears much smaller than their physical size.

Mercator, the creator of the world map which we used for more than four centuries, never claimed his map was a general-purpose atlas of the world. It was a navigational instrument. The problem arose when this map which was to be used only as a hip's chart room made its foray, over the following centuries, quietly and became the default image of the Earth in atlases, classrooms, newsrooms and now on our phone screens.

 From navigation chart to mental furniture.

Why did a specialist tool become the universal picture of the world? Partly it was inertia and familiarity: once printers and schoolbooks across Europe adopted it, it was easier to keep reproducing the extant map than to explain a less familiar alternative. Partly it was convenience: Mercator map's straight, rectangular grid is simple to print, tile and reference — you can lay north-south lines as verticals and east-west lines as horizontals without the curved, tapering edges that true equal-area projections require.

And partly — this is the reason which the UN resolution leans on — it was about who was doing the mapmaking. The projection was devised in Europe, popularised by European empires with maritime and colonial interests, and it happened to make the colonising continents look large and the colonised world look small. Historians and geographers have argued for decades, most famously Arno Peters in the 1970s with his own equal-area alternative, that this was not a neutral cartographic accident but something that shaped generations of perception: children the world over grew up absorbing, without a word being said, that the temperate global North was simply *bigger* — and by unconscious extension, more central and more important — than the tropical global South.

The digital era entrenched this further rather than correcting it. When Google Maps adopted a Mercator-based projection (the "Web Mercator") for its tiling system in 2005, virtually every major online map service followed, for the same practical reasons that made it attractive in the 16th century: rectangular tiles are simply easier to build a zoomable, pannable interface around. A projection chosen for 16th-century sailors ended up, by a very different route, shaping the maps a billion smartphones use today.

 What changes, and what doesn't, with "Correct the Map"

The resolution, "Correct the Map: Rebalancing Global Cartographic Representation and Promoting Equitable Representation of the World's Regions, Particularly Africa," was sponsored by Togo on behalf of the African Union, with the Bahamas among the co-sponsors, and built on the African Union's own adoption of the Equal Earth projection as its preferred map in March 2026. It urges member states, educational institutions, media organisations and technology companies to make greater use of equal-area projections — maps that sacrifice some accuracy in shape and angle in order to keep relative land area correct — with the Equal Earth projection, developed by a team of cartographers in 2018, offered as the leading example.

In the context of the “Map Correction” receiving heightened global media coverage and attention, it is necessary to understand that the UN resolution of a new map is not legally binding. It also does not redraw a single border nor does it forbid the use of Mercator projection, which remains genuinely useful for maritime and aerial navigation, the very purpose Mercator designed it for in 1569. What the new map does is put the UN's institutional weight behind a preference: that when a map's purpose is to help people understand the comparative scale of the world's regions — in a classroom, a newsroom graphic, a corporate map of "global markets" — an equal-area projection like “Equal Earth” tells a truer picture than Mercator projection does.

The UN resolution and the new map has found emphatic support from France's foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, who has announced that France would abandon the Mercator projection in its own materials, calling the correction an "act of truth”. However, the lone dissenter, US, who voted against the resolution “dismissed the measure as ideological theatre unworthy of the General Assembly's time, arguing the body should be focused on graver matters than four-century-old cartography”.

India's vote — support with a caveat that matters

India voted in favour of the UN Resolution, and its explanation of vote at the General Assembly is worth understanding closely. Because India feels that the resolution reflects an instinct that be it history or geography or recognising the historical scientific and technological contributions of countries like India, which was one of the major nations to be colonised by the Europeans – British – has been distorted from reality looking at it from the colonisers point of view. Therefore, while welcoming and supporting the UN resolution and the principle on which the resolution was mooted, India has not signed a blank cheque on the specifics. India's representative, Raghoo Puri, told the Assembly that “New Delhi's support was for the broader principle of equal-area projections — because they preserve the true relative size of continental and national landmasses — and explicitly not an endorsement of the Equal Earth projection as the one correct map. Further “different projections, he noted, serve different cartographic purposes, and no single one is right for every application; the resolution, in India's reading, should remain "technologically and methodologically neutral."

The Ministry of External Affairs has emphasised that “any UN-endorsed map must depict India's sovereign territory — explicitly including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh — in accordance with India's own official map, and any depiction that departs from this would be unacceptable”. This statement from the MEA is a reminder that for India, questions of cartography are never only about projection mathematics. A map is also, always, a territorial claim, and India has spent decades objecting to atlases, films and corporate maps that show its borders incorrectly. Supporting a resolution about relative size was straightforward; leaving no ambiguity about boundaries was, evidently, considered essential.

Why the New Map matters beyond the classroom wall?

As a science museum professional who has spent 4 decades in museums including to explain the physical world and India’s position to the public — in planetarium shows, Science on Sphere. a gallery of Harappan trade networks, a hall of industrial technology etc. — I firmly believe that if there is one thing that experience teaches you, it is that the tools we use to represent reality are never fully innocent of the choices behind them. They come with the biases of the users of the tools which is so deeply impregnated in their minds. This could also be the case for the Mercator Maps that we use, which unwittingly favour certain nations and continents while doing injustice to others, when it comes to representing their relative sizes on the map.   A projection is a decision about what to sacrifice: shape, angle, distance or area cannot all be preserved simultaneously on a flat map of a round Earth, so every cartographer chooses what matters most. Mercator, for his purpose, chose angle and shape, and his choice is quite reasonable looking at the time when he did this and for the purpose for which he did this, sailing the seas. What is, however, less reasonable was letting the 16th-century sailor's choice silently become every child's unexamined image of how large their own continent or country is in relation to the other world.

The Equal Earth projection will not solve global inequity, and no one seriously claims it will. What a fairer map can do — modestly, but not trivially — is stop quietly telling a few generations of schoolchildren in countries like India or African continent, and Indonesia that their part of the world is smaller and, by visual implication, less consequential than it actually is. "A fair map does not change the geography of the world," Togo's foreign minister said at the UN, "it changes how we see the world." After nearly 450 years of an unexamined convention, that seems a modest enough ask — and a correction well worth making.

Let us welcome the new map, which in some sense tries to correct the wrong perception of the relative sizes of the nations that was reflected in the old maps.

It must also be remembered that the distortion was not just in map representation which intentionally or unqittingly, favoured an eurpean narrative but also in most aspects of history more particularly history of science and technology, where contributions of ancient civilisations like India, have more or less forgotten or at best find a foor note mention, which too needs to be corrected. When and how will this be done to correct the long held distortion is something which time alone will reveal, until then let us welcome the UN change in map correction. 

29 August, Anniversary of the Drafting Committee Remembering Unsung heroes, B. N. Rau and his Compatriots.

On 29 August 1947, the Constituent Assembly of India, in just two weeks after attaining Independence, resolved and approved the appointment of a Drafting Committee, with Dr. B. R. Ambedkar as its Chairman, to finalise and give shape to the Indian Constitution for making India a Republic.

 History remembers the framers of our Constitution, and more importantly Dr BR Ambedkar, the Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution who is remembered as the father if Indian Constitution, rightly so. It must however, also be known and remembered that by the time the Drafting Committee sat for its meeting towards fulfilling its task of scripting the draft Constitution, much of the intellectual framework - scaffolding - for the Drafting Committee had already been developed by a quiet, scholarly civil servant from Mangalore, named Benegal Narsing Rau (BN Rau) and others.

Unfortunately, contributions of Rau and his compatriots remain largely unnoticed or find not much more than a foot note reference when recognising the framers of our Constitution. This write up is therefore, an effort to pay tribute and remember the contributions of Shri BN Rau and his compatriots.

Rau was born on 26 February 1887 into a family of scholars and doctors, and his own record as a student was formidable — first in Madras Presidency at matriculation, a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, and also a Tripos that nearly won him the Senior Wranglership. He entered the prestigious Indian Civil Service in 1910, and moved into the judiciary in Bengal, and over the following decades built a fornidable reputation as one of the most respected legal minds of his generation. Rau must also be known for his contributions to revising the entire Indian statutory code - between 1935 and 1937. His contribution was recognised by the British who bestowed him with the knighthood in 1938. He also served as a judge of the Bengal High Court from 1939, and even served briefly as the Prime Minister of Jammu & Kashmir state,1944–45. His illustrious career had already set him apart from his collegues and therefore it was no wonder that he was chosen to be the Advisor for the framing of the Constitution, much before the Constituent Assembly ever met.

In July 1946, the interim government appointed Rau as Constitutional Advisor to the Constituent Assembly — a title that undersold the weight and contributions of Dr Rau, that followed.

Over the next year and more, Rau researched and worked hard to study and examine the working constitutions of more than sixty countries, from the United States, Canada and Ireland to Switzerland, Australia and several Latin American republics. He not only studied their Constitution but also examined how they actually functioned in practice. He also travelled to the US, Canada and the UK for consultations with sitting judges and constitutional scholars. Anecdotal reference confirms that during one of his visits and the meeting that followed with an expert resulted in a small but consequential result: Justice Felix Frankfurter of the US Supreme Court advised him against writing an American-style "due process" clause into the Indian Constitution, warning that it would place an undue and unpredictable burden on the judiciary. Rau took this advice. The phrase that eventually went into Article 21 — "procedure established by law" — carries the trace of that conversation in a Cambridge study room, half a world away from Delhi.

By early 1948, Rau's own draft — running to some 240 articles across twenty-five parts and thirteen schedules — was ready. It proposed a parliamentary system of government, a strong federal union, an independent judiciary with the power of judicial review, a chapter of fundamental rights, and provisions for national emergencies: the architecture that a reader of the Constitution today would still recognise instantly. When the Drafting Committee took up its work after 29 August 1947, it was this document painstakingly prepared by Rau, that was placed before the Drafting Committee.

 Dr Ambedkar's legal and intellectual brilliance and hie political judgment, command of the Assembly's debates, and his moral clarity on questions of equality and dignity, subsequently, shaped the text prepared by Rau and his team into the Constitution we know today. The secred book which the political class weilds today and everyone of us must swear on. 

Why, then, is the name of Dr Rau and his compatriots so rarely spoken alongside the framers of contributions- Ambedkar, Nehru Patel and others? 

Perhaps because Rau never served the Constituent Assembly as an elected member and more importantly he rarely spoke of his own role in public. He described what he and his small team did as "technical work" — research, structuring, drafting — carried out away from the floor of the Assembly and away from the press gallery.

Public memory tends to attach itself to the visible act of debate and decision, not to the invisible labour of preparation that makes debate possible in the first place. Yet without Rau's year of comparative constitutional study, the Drafting Committee would have had to build from first principles in far less time than the moment demanded.

Rau did not do this work alone, and it is worth naming his principal partner in this task. The Constituent Assembly Secretariat, set up in May 1946, had its own overall Secretary, H. V. R. Iyengar, but the two officers who did the closest textual work were Rau, as Constitutional Advisor, and Surendra Nath Mukherjee, an equally able ICS officer who held the office of Joint Secretary and Chief Draftsman. Where Rau's contribution was the comparative research and the first full draft, Mukherjee's work included the craft of legislative drafting — taking the reports of the Assembly's many subject committees, and later its clause-by-clause decisions, and rendering them into precise, internally consistent legal language. The two roles were complementary and both fed directly into the Drafting Committee under Ambedkar.

Ambedkar himself acknowledged their contributions in the Assembly on 25 November 1949, the day before the Indian Constitution was adopted. Dr Ambedkar told the House that the credit given to him for the Drafting of the Constitution does not really belong to him alone, and named both Rau and Mukherjee for compiling the committee reports and preparing the draft. 

This write up must therefore serve as a reminder that like many other aspects of nation building, the Indian Constitution also is not an outcome of the labour of one person, or even of two. It was the result of painstaking labour of love for the nation that must also belong to a small Section of the Secretariat, largely unnamed even in most histories, whose works laid the administrative groundwork for India's first elections on universal adult franchise.

His public life did not end with the Constitution. Rau went on to represent India at the United Nations, serving on the Security Council during the tense moments of the opening months of the Korean War. He later became a judge of the International Court of Justice at The Hague — one of very few Indians of his time to sit on that bench. Other newly decolonised nations sought his counsel as they wrote their own constitutions, an acknowledgment for Rau beyond India's borders, a recognition that curiously remained unnoticed in India. 

Rau died in Zurich in November 1953, a little over three years after the Constitution he had done so much to shape came into force.

Today, as we mark the anniversary of the day the Constituent Assembly formally handed the drafting task to Ambedkar's Committee, it is worth remembering that a Constitution — like most enduring institutions — is rarely the work of a single hand or a single moment of decision. It is built, first, out of unglamorous, painstaking preparation: reading, comparing, travelling, listening, and writing drafts that others will later argue over, amend and adopt as their own. Rau, Mukherjee and the quiet officers who worked alongside them did that work for India, largely without asking to be remembered for it. On a day set aside for the Committee that took their draft forward, they deserve to be named alongside it.

There is a lesson in this for our own moment, and it is one I would especially offer to the younger generation now finding its political voice. Much of what today's youth — loosely grouped as Gen Z, though the sentiment runs wider — are asking for is entirely legitimate: opportunity, accountability, a fairer share of a country still working through the inequalities of caste, creed and circumstance that the Constitution itself set out to correct but has not yet fully undone. Some other demands, voiced in the heat of the moment, ask for more than any constitutional democracy as vast and layered as India's can deliver overnight, and a few of the means chosen to demand them have strayed from the very constitutional norms they invoke. Both things can be true at once.

What the stories of Rau and Mukherjee offer is not a lecture on patience for its own sake, but a working example of a different route to change: unglamorous, often invisible, sustained over years and task undertaken without any expectation of credit.

The Indian Constitution built by Dr Ambedkar and others - Rau, Mukherjee - has given a framework for the nation that has now outlasted three generations. This was done not by demanding recognition, but by doing the work regardless of whether recognition ever came. That, perhaps, is the more durable form of protest — building something that lasts long after the applause, or the outrage, has moved on.

Jai Hind

Jai Bharat

 

Cincidence of Onam and Eid Milad Un Nabi Coming Together

A Rare Coincidence of Onam and Eid Milad Un Nabi Coming Together: Time to Reaffirming Unity in an Era of Division.   

Today, 26 August 2026, marks an interesting alignment and coming together of the two important festivities – Onam and Eid Un Nabi, which are dependent on the solar and lunar calendars, respectively. 

Onam marks the grand harvest festival celebrated by Malyalis across the state of Kerala and around the world, wherever they have migrated, and the Eid marks the solemn birth anniversary of Prophet Muhammad (Milad-un-Nabi),

Wishing you all a very happy Onam and Eid Milad Un Nabi

The coinciding of these two festivals -  coming together on the very same date - is nowhere more important than in the state of Kerala where these two festivities and their celebrations resonate deeply with all the Malayalis in Kerala—a state historically celebrated as a beacon of pluralism, where the call to prayer, temple bells, and church chimes harmoniously weave into the fabric of their daily life.

Onam itself has long transcended religious boundaries in the state, serving as a secular, cultural festival of abundance and social equality where every Keralite, regardless of faith, comes together as one family.

This rare convergence serves as a reminder of the often quoted “India’s Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb” and Kerala’s quintessential unity amidst diversity, proving that shared cultural heritage can comfortably coexist with individual religious beliefs and devotion that everyone must respect and appreciate.

Yet, recent reports of restrictive dictums issued in certain educational environments serve as a wake-up call. Exclusivism poses a challenge to the pluralistic values of India that built our community resilience. Progress demands that we honour our distinct faith traditions while cherishing the and respecting the common cultural heritage that binds us together.

Here I am sharing my thoughts on the genesis of these two sacred observances and why Kerala’s legacy of pluralism must be preserved and celebrated.

Eid Milad-un-Nabi: Remembering the Birth of Prophet Muhammad

 Today, 26 August 2026, corresponding to the 12th day of Rabi-ul-Awwal, 1448 AH, in the Islamic lunar calendar, is observed across India as Eid Milad-un-Nabi — the anniversary of the birth of Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam. On this occasion, I extend my warm greetings to all my Muslim friends

 What the Day Marks

Tradition holds that Prophet Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 CE — a year remembered in Islamic history as the "Year of the Elephant" — to his parents Abdullah and Bibi Amina. His exact date of birth is not settled with certainty even among Islamic scholars, but the 12th of Rabi-ul-Awwal, the third month of the Hijri calendar, has come to be widely observed as his birth anniversary. Because the Islamic calendar is lunar and runs about ten to eleven days shorter than the Gregorian year, this date drifts steadily backward each year — which is why the observance fell in late September a few years ago and has now moved to late August, and will keep moving earlier still.

The day is known by several names — Mawlid al-Nabi, Mawlid-un-Nabi Sharif, Eid Milad, and simply Milad-un-Nabi. The Arabic word *mawlid* itself means "birth." Interestingly, 12 Rabi-ul-Awwal is also traditionally regarded as the date of the Prophet's death in 632 CE, so for the majority Sunni tradition, this single day marks both events.

Not all Muslims mark the same date, however. A significant section of Shia Muslims — followers of the Twelver tradition — observe the 17th of Rabi-ul-Awwal instead, a date that in their tradition also coincides with the birth of the sixth Shia Imam, Ja'far al-Sadiq.

The Prophet's Message

Muslims believe that in 610 CE, at the age of forty, Muhammad received his first revelation in a cave near Mecca — the beginning of a series of revelations that were later compiled into the Quran, Islam's holy book. Central to his teachings was a strict monotheism, and to this day Muslims across the world orient their five daily prayers toward the Kaaba in Mecca and regard the Hajj pilgrimage there as a duty to be performed at least once in a lifetime by those who are able.

Eid Milad-un-Nabi is observed by recalling the Prophet's life and character — his teachings on compassion, his forgiveness of even his adversaries, and his conduct as a moral exemplar. Observances typically include Quran recitation, *naat* (devotional poetry in his praise), Seerah (biography) lectures, processions, and charitable giving.

A Festival with a History of Its Own

What is less commonly known is that the Mawlid celebration itself has a documented and somewhat contested history — it was not observed in the Prophet's own lifetime or by his immediate companions, and its emergence as a public festival came centuries later.

The earliest recorded court observances trace to the Shia Fatimid dynasty in Egypt at the end of the 11th century, which marked four separate mawlids — for the Prophet, for Ali, for his daughter Fatimah, and for the reigning caliph — through formal court processions. The celebration most historians credit as the first Mawlid festival in the Sunni tradition, however, was organised in 1207 CE at Erbil (in present-day Iraq) by Muzaffar al-Din Gökböri, a governor and brother-in-law of the celebrated Ayyubid sultan Salahuddin (Saladin). From there, the practice gradually spread and gained popular acceptance across much of the Sunni Muslim world over the following centuries.

That contested origin is precisely why the celebration remains a live theological debate within Islam even today. Scholars in the Salafi and, in South Asia, the Deobandi tradition regard Mawlid as *bid'ah* — an unwarranted innovation with no basis in the Quran or in the practice of the Prophet and his companions, and argue that Islam formally recognises only two festivals, Eid-ul-Fitr and Eid-ul-Adha. Against this, the Barelvi school of thought — to which a majority of Indian Muslims historically belong — holds that commemorating the Prophet's birth is a legitimate expression of devotion and love (*ishq-e-Rasool*) rather than an act of worship in itself, and has continued the practice with much enthusiasm, including public processions and the illumination of mosques and homes. This Barelvi–Deobandi difference, which took shape in 19th-century colonial India and hardened over the decades that followed, remains one of the more enduring fault lines within Indian Sunni Islam, and Eid Milad-un-Nabi is one of the clearest occasions on which it plays out publicly every year.

In parts of the Middle East too, the day is not universally celebrated: in Saudi Arabia and some neighbouring countries, where a more austere, Salafi-influenced interpretation prevails, public Mawlid celebrations are actively discouraged.

 Celebrated, Yet Debated

 In India, Eid Milad-un-Nabi is a gazetted public holiday, and large public gatherings, processions and prayer meetings mark the day in most cities. Interestingly, this coexistence of festivity and theological reservation is not unique to India — across the Muslim world, from Egypt (where certain regional mawlid gatherings, such as the one associated with the Sufi saint Ahmed el-Bedawi in Tanta, are known to draw crowds in the millions) to Southeast Asia, the day is marked with equal parts devotion and disagreement over its very legitimacy.

That the debate persists after eight centuries is, in its own way, a reflection of the diversity within Islam itself — a faith practised by nearly two billion people across vastly different cultures, each interpreting devotion to the Prophet in its own idiom.

 A Rare Coincidence: Eid Milad-un-Nabi and Onam, Together

This year brings with it a happy coincidence. Thiruvonam, the culminating and most important day of Kerala's ten-day Onam festival, also falls today, 26 August 2026 — the two calendars, one lunar and Islamic, the other solar and Malayalam, rarely align this way, and when they do, it tends to be remembered.

Onam itself is rooted in Hindu mythology — the legend of the benevolent Asura king Mahabali, whose annual homecoming from the netherworld, granted to him by Vishnu in his Vamana avatar, is what Malayalis across the world commemorate with the pookalam (flower carpet), the elaborate Onasadya feast served on banana leaf, boat races, and the Pulikali tiger dance. Yet for generations, Onam in Kerala has been something more than a Hindu festival — it has functioned as the state's unifying cultural occasion, celebrated by Hindus, Christians and Muslims alike as an expression of shared Malayali identity rather than a strictly religious observance. It is not uncommon, even today, to see Muslim students in hijab join their classmates in Thiruvathira dances, or families of different faiths exchange Onam greetings and sadya invitations with the same warmth as they would for Eid or Christmas. The Syro-Malabar Church, for its part, has formally clarified that Christian participation in Onam is a matter of cultural belonging rather than religious ritual — a framing that has historically allowed Kerala's syncretic social fabric to hold together.

It is this spirit that has, this week, made news in an unhappy way. At a residential school in Feroke, Kozhikode, a last-minute order barring students from wearing traditional attire — sarees and mundu — for their Onam function led to a group of Plus Two students being denied entry until parents and students protested; the restriction, unprecedented in previous years, was eventually withdrawn. It is one visible instance of a wider and long-standing debate: a section of religious opinion within the Muslim community, invoking Islamic theology, has for years discouraged participation in Onam festivities on the ground that they are rooted in Hindu myth, and there have been fatwas to that effect in the past. Despite this, younger Kerala Muslims have continued to participate with visible enthusiasm, and it is this quiet, everyday coexistence — not the occasional controversy — that has defined Kerala's reputation for communal harmony.

What is worth pausing on is why this now attracts more attention than it once did. Malayalis have long taken a certain pride in narrating Kerala's communal amity as something exceptional within India — a state where language, not religion, has historically been the stronger marker of identity, and where festivals of one community have routinely drawn genuine, unselfconscious participation from others. That older pattern has not vanished, but it now visibly competes, in a way it perhaps did not a generation ago, with a harder-edged religious assertiveness on more than one side — a reluctance in some quarters to be seen crossing communal lines, matched by a political climate across India in which every such gesture, or its withdrawal, is quickly read for what it signals. Neither impulse is unique to Kerala or to any one community; it is simply that Kerala's older culture of mixing makes the erosion more noticeable when it happens.

That two such different occasions — one marking the birth of the Prophet of Islam, the other the mythical homecoming of a beloved Asura king — should fall on the same day this year feels, in the end, like a gentle reminder of what is genuinely at stake. Kerala's syncretism was never built on everyone believing the same thing; it was built on people finding it entirely natural to celebrate what mattered to their neighbours as well as to themselves. That instinct is worth protecting, deliberately, in an age when it can no longer simply be taken for granted.

On this day, once again, my warm wishes to all my Muslim friends on Eid Milad-un-Nabi, and to all my Malayali friends on Thiruvonam.

Sarnath Joins the World Heritage List as India’s 45th Inscribed Site.

Earlier today, 25 July 2026, at the 48th Session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee meeting in Busan, South Korea, the “Ancient Buddhist Site of Sarnath” was formally inscribed on the World Heritage List. This welcome news finally finds the holy site of Sarnath its rightful place on the World Stage — A Timeless Sacred Landscape Recognized at Last. This landmark decision by the World Heritage Committee elevates one of humanity's most profound spiritual, intellectual, and artistic cradles onto the global stage.

This announcement has brought cheers across the country. Sarnath marks India’s 45th site on the coveted list of World Heritage — coming just a year after the inscription of the Maratha Military Landscapes of India as the 44th last year. Sarnath now stands permanently etched in the annals of world heritage, alongside places of outstanding universal value that humanity has collectively resolved to protect for future generations.

Sarnath site, located near Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, comprises two component parts: the Chaukhandi Stupa and the Archaeological Remains of Sarnath (including the Dhamekh Stupa, Dharmarajika Stupa, Mulagandhakuti Vihara, Ashokan Pillar and associated structures). Known in Buddhist tradition as Rishipatana, Ishipatana or Mrigadava (the Deer Park), this is the sacred geography where, in the sixth century BCE, Gautama Buddha delivered his first sermon — the Dharmachakra Pravartana or Turning of the Wheel of the Law — to his five disciples  (Panchavaggiya) and founded the Buddhist Sangha. It is one of the four principal destinations of Buddhist pilgrimage, a place the Buddha himself indicated as worthy of veneration. The Buddhist Sangha set in motion a philosophical and cultural movement that traversed mountains, deserts, and oceans to spread Buddha’s preachings and Buddhism across Asia and beyond.

A Brief History of the World Heritage Convention

To place this achievement in perspective, it is useful to recall the origins of the system that has now recognised Sarnath and included it in the World Heritage site. 

The World Heritage Convention was adopted by UNESCO in 1972, establishing an international framework for identifying and preserving cultural and natural sites of outstanding universal value. It emerged from two converging movements: one focused on protecting cultural monuments (catalysed by the successful international campaign to save the Nubian temples of Abu Simbel and Philae from the rising waters of the Aswan High Dam), and the other concerned with the conservation of nature. The Convention formally entered into force in 1975. The first sites were inscribed in 1978 and included the Galápagos Islands (Ecuador), Yellowstone National Park (USA), and Aachen Cathedral (Germany), among others.

India made its debut in this World Heritage list in 1983 with four entries: Ajanta Caves, Ellora Caves, the Taj Mahal, and Agra Fort. Since then the country has steadily added sites, reflecting its extraordinary cultural, historical and natural diversity. Yet, as Sudha Murty observed in her maiden speech in the Rajya Sabha in July 2024, the pace at which Indian sites are being recognised in this elite site, has often felt inadequate relative to India’s five-thousand-plus years of recorded civilisation and the sheer wealth of archaeological and architectural treasures still awaiting global recognition.

For decades, heritage nominations from India sometimes suffered from incomplete dossiers, insufficient comparative analysis, or lack of sustained institutional focus. The elaborate documentation, research, management plans and proof of integrity and authenticity that UNESCO demands for this recognition were not always prepared with the required seriousness. Fortunately, that tide has begun to turn, particularly in the past decade. Heritage is increasingly positioned as a soft-power asset and a tool of cultural diplomacy. The successful serial nomination of the Maratha Military Landscapes last year (timed with the 350th anniversary of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj’s coronation) and now Sarnath demonstrate what becomes possible when intent, rigorous scholarship and coordinated effort converge.

Sarnath: Layers of History and Enduring Spiritual Significance

Sarnath has been one of the most extensively excavated sites by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). The stratified remains span roughly sixteen centuries — from the pre-Mauryan period (5th–4th centuries BCE) through the Mauryan, Shunga, Kushan, Gupta, post-Gupta and early medieval periods until destruction in the 12th century CE (with some later additions). Emperor Ashoka marked the place with a polished sandstone pillar whose Lion Capital later became the National Emblem of India. The massive Dhamekh Stupa, the remains of the Dharmarajika Stupa, monastic complexes and countless votive stupas testify to continuous royal, monastic and lay patronage.

The site was included in India’s Tentative List as early as 1998. The formal nomination dossier for the 2025–26 cycle was submitted by ASI in January 2025. After an approximately eighteen-month process involving technical meetings with advisory bodies and an ICOMOS evaluation mission in September 2025, the World Heritage Committee inscribed the property under criteria (iii) and (vi). Criterion (iii) recognises its exceptional testimony to a cultural and spiritual tradition — one of the four principal Buddhist pilgrimage sites, demonstrated by the dense concentration of religious buildings constructed and reconstructed over many centuries. Criterion (vi) acknowledges its direct and tangible association with events of outstanding universal significance in the life of the Buddha: his first sermon and the establishment of the Sangha.

With this inscription, three of the four great Buddhist pilgrimage sites — Lumbini (Nepal), the Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya, and now Sarnath — stand on the World Heritage List, alongside other major Buddhist heritage places such as Sanchi, Nalanda and Ajanta.

World Heritage status is more than a badge of prestige. It reinforces India’s identity as the birthplace of Buddhism and strengthens cultural diplomacy with nations across Asia — Japan, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, South Korea, Mongolia and beyond — for whom Sarnath remains a living place of reflection and inspiration for hundreds of millions.

Yet recognition also brings responsibility. The inscription commits India to sustain the Outstanding Universal Value of the site through careful management of tourism, protection of the buffer zone against unplanned development, and continued scientific conservation. ASI’s century-and-a-half of excavation and preservation work — from the pioneering efforts of the 19th and early 20th centuries that recovered the Lion Capital and hundreds of sculptures, to ongoing scientific interventions on the brick structures — provides a strong foundation. The Sarnath Site Museum, established in 1904 and one of India’s earliest site museums, continues to house masterpieces that illuminate the artistic and spiritual genius of successive centuries.

Just as the Maratha forts nomination required deep historical research, careful selection of representative components and a cohesive narrative, the Sarnath dossier reflects the same seriousness of purpose. Serial nominations — bundling related sites under a unifying theme — have emerged as an effective strategy. They allow the inscription of cultural landscapes rather than isolated monuments. This approach holds promise for other clusters still waiting: the Deccan strongholds, the rock-cut and temple complexes of the south, the lesser-known but profound archaeological landscapes scattered across the subcontinent.

India is a civilisationally rich country. New archaeological discoveries continue to emerge. Sites of the quality of Sarnath, or the architectural ensembles of Bijapur that inspired the design of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in Mumbai, or countless others, deserve systematic documentation and nomination. The Ministry of Culture and ASI have shown what focused effort can achieve. The challenge now is to institutionalise that capacity — dedicated research teams, sustained funding, inter-departmental coordination, and a long-term national strategy for identifying and preparing sites of Outstanding Universal Value.

Beyond the UNESCO tag lies a deeper question: how does India view its heritage? Are these sites merely tourist attractions, or living cultural assets that inform identity, education, policy and future generations? Global recognition should trigger investment in conservation, heritage education and sustainable tourism that empowers local communities while safeguarding authenticity.

We have seen our past embossed on our currency notes, postmarked on our letters, and now, with Sarnath, further recognised by the world. The Deer Park where the Wheel of Dharma first turned has at last found its rightful place among humanity’s shared treasures. It is time we continue to inscribe the rest of our civilisational inheritance — carefully, consciously and collaboratively — into both the global record and our own collective future.