The point being made originally, which got Mohsin etc riled up because of the comparison to Islam, is that Hinduism is orthopraxic and thus has a bigger space in Hindu life than, say, Christianity. You can not go to church, have premarital sex, etc, and still be a Christian, because the definition is faith or orthodoxy (Muslims were shocked when I brought up that you don't have to follow any of Christ's teachings and you'd still be considered a Christian; recall the infamous injunction to turn the other cheek and how no one actually follows that).
If we're talking Indians, as opposed to Tibetans, the point is that the fact that so many Indian social features have a puranic justification suggests that India has difficulty modernizing its culture beyond Westernized elites. They can point to Ambedkar's "Abolition of Caste", but the caste system is baked into the religion, and the religion is relatively strong because of its orthopraxic nature. Caste in India can't simply be treated as a feudal relic for that reason; intellectually most educated Indians understand that caste is detrimental to the society, and they have affirmative action programs, but say, look at a Bollywood director list. It's all Brahmins / Kshatriya / Kayastha.
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