How Civil Society Organisations Changed the Regulation of Clinical Trials in India

ABSTRACT

In 2005 India changed its pharmaceutical and innovation policy that facilitated a dramatic increase in international clinical trials involving study sites in India. This policy shift was surrounded by controversies; civil society organisations (CSOs) criticised the Indian government for promoting the commercialisation of pharmaceutical research and development. Health social movements in India fought for social justice through collective action, and engaged in normative reasoning of the benefits, burdens and equality of research. They lobbied to protect trial participants from structural violence that occurred especially in the first 5–6 years of the new policy. CSOs played a major role in the introduction of new regulations in 2013, which accelerated a decline in the number of global trials carried out in India. This activism applied interpretations of global social justice as key ideas in mobilisation, eventually helping to institutionalise stricter ethical regulation on a national level. Like government and industry, activists believed in randomised controlled trials and comparison as key methods for scientific knowledge production. However, they had significant concerns about the global hierarchies of commercial pharmaceutical research, and their impact on the rights of participants and on benefits for India overall. Pointing to ethical malpractices and lobbying for stricter ethical regulations, they aimed to ensure justice for research participants, and developed effective strategies to increase controls over the business side of clinical research.     

The gifts of allurement: anti-conversion legislation,gift-giving,and political allegiance in South Asia

ABSTRACT

The last decade has seen an escalation of various acts of anti-conversion legislation in Nepal, Sri Lanka, and in different states of India. Several scholars comment that the upsurge of anti-conversion legislation can be linked to the ascension of religious nationalism in India and Sri Lanka, yet recent trends indicate that such laws are also proposed by moderate political forces. What is notable about this anti-conversion legislation is that it criminalizes ‘improper’ conversions along the lines of force, fraud, and allurement/inducement. While Article 18(2) of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) protects against coercion, and thus forcible conversions, and while the concepts of force and fraud are already covered by the penal codes of the respective countries, the remaining element of controversy of anti-conversion legislation is that of allurement and/or inducement. ‘Allurement’ is defined as the offer of any temptation for the purpose of converting a person professing one religion to another religion, in the form of: “(i) any gift or gratification whether in cash or kind, (ii) a grant of any material benefit, whether monetary or otherwise, (iii) the grant of employment or grant of promotion in employment” (Owens 2006–2007, 337). Yet, despite critical remarks from the UN Special Rapporteur on the Freedom of Religion or Belief, Asma Jahangir, that these anti-conversion proposals are vague in their formulations and may lead to religious persecution, the legislative attempts are persistent in their demand to criminalize the allegedly religious gifts of allurement. This article argues that the rationale behind anti-conversion legislation stems from a threefold objective: (1) the dislike of gifts from the religious Other in particular and proselytization in general, (2) legislation as a regulating mechanism of majority religious bodies vis-à-vis religious minorities, (3) anti-conversion laws demanding the complicity of the state in relation to the majority religions, accentuating state patronage as a tacit form of state religion bill.     

Between daʿwa and Dialogue: Religious Engagement in Muslim-minority Environments

ABSTRACT

Muslim engagement in interfaith and intercultural dialogue began in earnest after the turn of the twenty-first century in response to the rise of global jihad. Both dialogue and jihad are outgrowths of da?wa, the call or mission of Islam, the principal mode of modern Islamic activism. The foundations were laid in the later part of the twentieth century by Muslim intellectual-activists living in non-Muslim environments, who played a special role in conceptualizing the new notion of dialogue and its relation to da?wa. This essay focuses on four pioneering figures, two from the indigenous context of India – the modernist Asghar Ali Engineer and the reformist ?ālim Wahiduddin Khan, and two from the diaspora milieu of the West – the Palestinian-American academic activist Ismail Raji al-Faruqi and the European Muslim spokesman Tariq Ramadan. Each represents a distinct religious orientation that also reflects a different phase in the evolution of modern Islamic discourse. Taken together, these intellectual-activists chart the trajectory of modern Islam from the early pre-Islamist liberal hopes to the present post- and neo-Islamist efforts to navigate between Western-dominated globalization and Islamist jihadism.     

Religious toleration and the limits of liberal secularism: The case of India

ABSTRACT

In recent years there has been a resurgence of public discourse about the role of tolerance as one of the key elements of the Western philosophical heritage. The fact that Western societies remain largely oblivious to the importance and benefits of diversity points to the pitfalls of the liberal model of religious toleration. Jakob De Roover’s monograph ‘Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism’ offers a new analysis of the deficiencies of secularism and demonstrates why its application to other societies, such as India, is a problematic enterprise. This article argues that Comparative Political Theory has the potential to help forge new conceptual categories and analytical tools that can be utilized to explore diverse modes of tackling religious diversity and fostering tolerance.     

An Integration of Feminist and Psychoanalytic Theory

No abstract available for this article.     

Holistic processing in mother’s face perception for infants

In this study, we created composite faces using mothers’ faces to examine holistic face processing in infants aged 5–8 months. The composite-face effect occurred only in infants aged 7–8 months, suggesting that infants older than 7 months are able to process familiar faces holistically.     

Electrophysiological responses in mothers to their own and unfamiliar child's gaze information

An attachment bond between a mother and her child is one of the most intimate human relationships. It is important for a mother to be sensitive to her child's gaze direction because exchanging gaze information plays a vital role in their relationship. Furthermore, recent studies have revealed differential neural activation patterns in mothers when presented the faces of their own children or the unfamiliar child of other people. Based on these findings, in the present study, we investigated whether mothers show differential neural responses to gaze information of their own child compared to that of an unfamiliar child. To this end, event-related-potentials elicited by the faces of one's own or an unfamiliar child with straight or averted gaze directions were measured using an oddball-paradigm. The results showed that peak amplitudes of the N170 component were enlarged by viewing the straight gazes compared to the averted gazes of one's own child, but not of an unfamiliar child. When the gaze was directed straight, the P3 amplitude elicited by one's own child's face is smaller than that elicited by an unfamiliar child's face. P3s elicited in viewing one's own child's face with averted gaze and in viewing an unfamiliar child's face with straight gaze were positively correlated with state-anxiety. These results bolster the hypothesis that processing the gaze information of one's own child elicits differential neural activation compared to the gaze information of an other person's unfamiliar child at both perceptual and evaluative stages of face processing.     

Christian values in education: teachers in India narrate the impact of their faith and values on practice

ABSTRACT

India’s education system is complex because it has to meet the needs of a population which is culturally, geographically, politically, religiously and economically diverse. The principal investigator spent two summers in India talking with teachers and learners. This paper reports on the impact of Christian values in the secular but arguably Hindu nationalist education system. Working within an interpretivist paradigm and through an ethnographic lens, an interpretive phenomenological analysis approach was adopted to make sense of 34 interviewees’ narratives from five Indian states. The narratives were mapped onto an adaptation of a ‘tree metaphor’ to illustrate how values underpin decision-making and action in the school context. Five of the narratives are presented as keyhole examples to exemplify the similarities and contrasts in reported beliefs, values and behaviours set within the context of teachers’ professional practice. Findings reveal that all 34 participants drew on their Christian faith, and Indian cultural context, in their decision-making both in how they made sense of education policy, and how they interpreted school events and behaviours. Despite their common faith (Christianity), the 34 interpretations, decision-making and actions varied as demonstrated in the five selected narratives. We explore how the variance manifested and was influenced by the geographical, cultural, post colonial and school context.