Religion Commons^™

Faith And Foreign Policy In India: Legal Ambiguity, Selective Xenophobia, And Anti-Minority Violence, Chad M. Bauman

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

As a secular democracy, India’s constitution enshrines relatively robust safeguards for religious equality and freedom. Article 25 provides all citizens the right to “freely profess, practice, and propagate” religion, and avoids assigning to Hinduism any special role or explicit privilege (in contradistinction to the situation with Buddhism in Sri Lanka, for example). Moreover, the Indian government itself has not generally engaged in any systematic or flagrant way in the direct persecution or oppression of its religious minorities.

However, India’s religious minorities do face certain challenges. Among them are several legal and judicial issues. Judicial rulings in independent India have weakened …

Political Competition, Relative Deprivation, And Perceived Threat: A Research Note On Anti-Chrstian Violence In India, Chad Bauman, Tamara Leach

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

A preliminary subnational statistical analysis of violence against Christians in contemporary India, this article suggests that whereas the data provide very little support for simple, demographic explanations of this violence, they do more robustly support theories emphasizing the relative status of ethnic and religious minorities (vis-à-vis majorities) and the perception, among Hindus, that Christians (and other minorities) represent a threat to their numerical, political and economic strength.