Babu Gogineni

From Philosopedia

Babu Gogineni (14 April 1968 - )

Rajaji Ramanadha Babu Gogineni, or Babu, as most people call Mr. Gogineni, was once was the youngest certified French language teacher in Hyderabad, India. He served as Joint Secretary of the Indian Radical Humanist Association until his 1996 appointment as Executive Director of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). As such, he is one of the best-known humanists in international circles.

At the time of moving to London, Babu was General Secretary of the South Asia Humanist Network; Trustee of the Indian Renaissance Institute; a secretary of the Indian Radical Humanist Association; and General Secretary of the Rationalist Association of India.

He has contributed articles to the French and English language press in India and Europe and co-edited two books, Rationalist Essays published in Chirala and The Humanist Way.

Babu has participated in international humanist conferences at Brussels in 1990, in Amsterdam in 1992, in Mexico City in 1996, in Mumbai in 1999, and annually elsewhere around the world.

In 1999, he became editor of the International Humanist News. Also he edits that journal's annual French version, known as Informations Humanistes Internationales.

In Birmingham, England, at the centenary conference of the Rationalist Press Association in 1999, Babu, who thinks one’s outlook would do well to include humor, jocularly entitled his lecture, “Humanism and Ketchup.” {International Humanist News, December 1996}

Gogineni fund-raised and helped establish the IHEU-Appignani Humanist Center for Bioethics in New York in 2004, a center that focuses on creating an awareness of issues relating to bioethics at the United Nations as well as develops a program for lobbying.

In 2006, Gogineni wrote in International Humanist News,

• Europe has to learn how to handle its multicultural identity with a ferless and firm commitment to the principles of democracy. It would also greatly help integration of immigrants if European countries stopped selling arms to impoverished nations and adopted a more civilised foreign and trade policy. Meanwhile, Muslims - at least the ones who are vocal and whose claims to represent the community go uncontested - have many centuries to travel to modernise and to learn to be responsible citizens in modern democracies. We await enlightened policies from Europe, and we await an Enlightenment in Islam.
• How can such an Enlightenment be fostered? An honest and open discussion about Islam is needed, and the basis for such a discusion has to be universal human values, not arrogant claims of superior civilisation or superior religion. But will it be possible, and can it be successful at all, even after the hysteria [over published Danish cartoons showing Prophet Mohammed of Islam as a terrorist] dies down?
• For several centuries Christianity and Islam have had an unfriendly interaction, through crusades and jihads. Adding an interesting twist to this, Christians in India protested the 'blasphemous' burning of Danish flags, because the flags depict the Holy Cross. This was a reminder that despite its secular protestations, institutionally Europe remains a continent where the Church and State are close allies. After decades of cosy relationship with the religious, the European Commission at its highest level has finally acknowledged the existence of Humanists, but several political parties in Europe swear by a Christian ethic and genuflect to the power and influence of the Church - a Church which, when not playing a reactionary role, is absorbed in its own comically irrelevant agenda.

When Dr. Younus Shaikh was arrested 4 October 2000 in Pakistan on trumped up charges of blasphemy, he was sentenced to death in August 2001. He appealed, and in October 2003 the death sentence was annulled but he was sent back to a lower court for retrial. He was finally acquitted after having languished in jail for over three years and was released on 21 November 2003. It was Gogineni who, with IHEU backing, maintained communications with Dr. Ahaikh during the entire time he was imprisoned in a cramped, fetid cell in Death Row in temperature sometimes reaching 46 degrees Centigrade. Upon his release, the doctor gave Gogineni and the IHEU special thanks, and thanked officials from Norway, France, Switzerland, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Nations who had made representations on his behalf to the government of Pakistan. Dr. Shaikh, using a pseudonym, now lives somewhere in Europe.

In 1999, he married Sahana, an award-winning presenter on Telugu Satellite Channel Gemini TV.

Gogineni is a signer of Humanist Manifesto 2000.

{WAS}