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From: S G Naravane
From: S G Naravane
Let's instead pretend that the various social problems of the planet faces can be cured by a mode of multiculturalism that trumps hard fought liberties and civic mores.
Intolerance has been in the news these past several months, from a pontificating president who bowed to religious despots in their backyard the very day after lecturing the democratic unwasheduntermensche of India about how to treat minorities [1], the sustained tirade of the scandalous "award waapsi" brigade over the Bihar polls, and more recently by the framed up interrogation of an BJP spokesman by a reactionary Islamist with a record of misogyny, homophobia, and outright discrimination, using his position in the media to impose his preconceived notions, which, at their core, profess that some people are less human than others because of their religion [2].
To see how all of these, together with endless one-eyed editorials and op-ed pieces in the western bastions of liberalism at the BBC, Guardian, and the NYT, not to mention the long going saga over "Caste legislation" fuelled by the increasingly insignificant Church of England [3] in collusion with their rather unexpected friends at the Secular Society in the UK, it would appear to Spielberg's E.T., fresh off his spaceship, that some new and poisonous evil had surfaced on a previously peaceful planet. And that this evil incarnate was distinctly polytheistic, pagan Hindu. Vamsee Juluri neatly sums up this seemingly viral effect that Hindus and India seem to have had in 2015 in "Year of living intolerably" [4]
Let's momentarily ignore the loss of millions of lives as a result of violent regime change and displacement of despotic though previously stable rule in Iraq and Libya which had held together disparate groups of people at relative peace with each other within established national borders.
Let's also dismiss the plight of the Yazidis, Kurds, and assorted minorities who suffer rape, beheadings and worse under the cosh of fundamentalists in the Middle East, or the atrocities in Paris, about which some intellectually challenged liberals navel gazed on BBC Newsnight, a flagship current affairs program, and surmised the attacks as drug wars between gangs or being caused by the racist nature of the French capital [5].
Let's Pretend
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