The Jaina and the British

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2010 im Fachbereich Politik - Sonstige Themen, , Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Dr. Schweitzer speaks in glowing terms of the principle of Ahimsa non-violence as laid down by Jainism: "The laying down of the commandment not to kill and not to damage is one of the greatest events in the spiritual history of mankind. Starting from its principle, founded on world and life denial of abstention from action, ancient Indian thought and this is a period when in other respects ethics have not progressed very far reaches the tremendous discovery that ethics know no bounds. So far as we know this is for the first time clearly expressed by Jainism.

I propose to discuss Jain minority issue as it has evolved in the last hundred years. The remarkable thing about the Jain minority issue is that it was duly noted by the contemporary British rulers as far back as in 1909. Even more significantly the Census of India has been counting the Jains as a separate religious community right from the first census in 1873. With the dawn of the Indian freedom the Jain community did present its claim for minority status to the Constituent Assembly during the formation of the Indian Constitution.

The entire constitutional, legal and political process of the recognition of the Jain minority status is rendered confusion worse confounded by the interpretative 'Hindutva' parameters whether, political, religious and judicial-particularly as evidenced in the latest Supreme Court judgement in my Petition (Bal Patil & anr Vs. Union of India) which has in its obiter dicta stated that the "Hinduism is the common faith of India" and "Jainism is a special religion".