Aseem Shukla at On Faith: “Why No Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, or Jain Representation on the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Task Force on Religion?” March 1, 2010

Over at On Faith, Aseem Shukla, Associate Professor in urologic surgery at the University of Minnesota Medical School and co-founder and board member of Hindu American Foundation, rightly asks: “Why no Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh or Jain representation on the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Task Force that recently made recommendations to the U.S. government about developing a strategy to make religion “integral to American foreign policy?”

Of 32 religious leaders, academics and consultants that made the cut, not a single one belongs to a Dharma tradition–Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism or Jainism, let alone many thriving indigenous traditions. Not one. Hindus and Buddhists comprise a growing portion of our foreign service establishment, and the current administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Rajiv Shah, is Hindu. But not one made the cut to sit on this task force recommending how our country should deal in a world where more than one in five persons is Hindu or Buddhist. (Tom Wright, the task force’s project director, said “We did reach out to leaders in those religious communities but they weren’t able to participate.”)

Read Shukla’s whole post here.

Not long ago, I wrote about a related topic for Religion Dispatches:  the lack of a Buddhist representative on the Obama administration’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.  Read that article here.