Current Events
The Emperor Has No Clothes, Part II:
India's Divide & Rule
SOURAV MITRA, Tehelka
India’s great diversity is not the driver of our feverishly proclaimed “great unity”, nor can it be the source of our much-proclaimed pride.
Our great diversity is the seed of our great divisions, antagonisms that often border on hatred, and shame, no matter how fiercely we deny it.
India wallows divided by its myriad languages, religions and castes and their respective cultures. The effects are sometimes invisible, sometimes explosive and sometimes somewhere between invisible and explosive.
The unstoppable sub-division of the original Indian states into smaller ethnic and sub-ethnic pocket-states seeks to grant oppressed minorities their liberty from ethnic injustices and unequal rights. Only in tiny pockets of truly cosmopolitan society where the distribution of ethnicities are not polarising enough, and people are left with no other choice, do we find a semblance of helpless, but refreshing unity.
This diversity has been known to disrupt families, stonewall careers, and even destroy, trouble or at least disturb whole societies. Unspoken animosities bristle in the subconscious mind, until conscious personal decisions are taken to raise the sometimes elastic, sometimes inelastic thresholds of tolerance.
And politicians never miss an opportunity to bleed this diversity in the hunt for votes.
CONTINUED TOMORROW: The Emperor Has No Clothes, Part III: Is India a religious land?
ugust 14, 2012