Indian Rationalist Association

The Indian Rationalist Association is a voluntary organisation in India whose 100,000 members promote scientific skepticism and critique supernatural claims. It publishes books and magazines, organises seminars and lectures and its representatives regularly appear in television and print media exposing superstitions.

The Indian Rationalist Association was founded in 1949 at Chennai (then Madras). The founding president was R.P. Paranjpye (later High Commissioner of India in Australia and vice-chancellor of Bombay University). Sanal Edamaruku, well-known broadcaster and author, became its president in 2005.

The Indian Rationalist Association has branches in different states of India, with the headquarters of the association located in New Delhi. The Indian Rationalist Association took the initiative to form the Rationalist International in 1995 and organised three International Rationalist Conferences in co-operation with it.

The association was founded in 1949 by R.P. Paranjpye.

The Divine Miracle Exposure Campaign conducted across India during the period 1975-76 had given unprecedented popularity for the rationalist movement. Organized rationalist associations came up in each and every State and each of the State units got affiliated to IRA as parent body of rationalists and atheists in the Country.

Jyothi Shankar dedicated his work for more than three decades to build IRA as a powerful movement to spread scientific attitude and to live life freed from superstitious belief. He left for Canada on domestic and personal grounds around the time that Joseph Edamaruku, a staunch rationalist activist and writer of atheist literature, was made one of the Vice-Presidents of IRA. Edamaruku along with his family had already shifted from his home town at Kottayam in Kerala to New Delhi and settled there. Edamaruku vented his strong desire to shift the headquarters of IRA to New Delhi, the capital city of India. Since there were no responsible activists available in Madras at that point of time to look after the affairs of IRA, his request was conceded and the headquarters of IRA thus became the residence of Edamaurku clan at Delhi.

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