India, June 27 -- Last week, I sat through a mock trial of my own making. Three young people played prosecutors and a particularly theatrical bailiff, charging the Bhagavad Gita with crimes against caste and gender in front of a judge. I played the accused. The cuffs were mimed, the gavel borrowed from a prop box, but the charges were not invented for the occasion. They are the same charges that circulate constantly now, in reels and comment threads and the kind of confident paragraph that gets forwarded without anyone checking the verse it claims to summarise. Two accusations dominate that circulation more than any other: that the Gita is a casteist text, and that it is a misogynist one. Both charges, when actually placed next to the ver...