I've been accused when I was in Hyderabad of favoring Muslims over others, and this isn't the case. I didn't go after the Muslim goons because the people who paid them to do what they did are ultimately to blame. I even brought them to my house, and they stayed overnight and enjoyed my mom's cooking. They are just people, living ordinary lives like the rest of us, misapplied by a lack of opportunities.
The point is that to me, one religion or another are just two groups with a different set of fictions they latch on to, like I like Satyajit Ray Feluda while someone else likes Sherlock Holmes. Both Feluda and Holmes are fiction, just like our supernatural beliefs, which are the core assumptions in our religions. The ostentatiousness only bothers you when you think your god of the gaps is the true god when there's much better existential questions we could be answering. This is the fodder for the corrupt politicians in India: biologically we are all homo sapiens under the skin. My social mix-up because of segregation comes off as strange because India has regressed in secularism. In fact our ancestors were neither, before the religions took hold, and each age enforced their reigning dogma. We are Indians, the only necessary fiction.
However, it's still the case that the poor are still bearing the brunt of these divides. If India has to ever really be a prominent player and not just jingoism and cooked numbers, it can only do that by inculcating the ability to differentiate fiction from facts; this includes the many other divisions in society like caste.
I'm not a prisoner of any political ideology; they are all corrupt. Today, if you replace Modi with someone else, unless a fair atheistic vision of the leader can percolate down to every single Indian, nothing will happen. All politics is, so far as the people are concerned, a pernicious game of musical chairs, where the music has a villainous feel like the "The Ride of the Valkyries" by Richard Wagner or the theme from "Jaws" by John Williams.
What I guess I wanted to say is that we really can't have a country on false premises, ignored history, and pop-science favoring some group of people. Education is the only remedy, and rational thought has to be hand-grafted back into the society that can only benefit from the gene mix we have. The vacuous logic of distinctions is a tragedy of modern India, and unless we, the people, are better educated and alert, one political party or the other will make fools of us, and Hindu, Muslim, or any other, we'll ALL be suffering the bad infrastructure and lack of facilities while the suave leaders would send their families to western nations for a better life with Swiss bank accounts. The joke is on us if we stay naive; unfortunately, and ultimately, the superficial patina wouldn't hold because the cracks are too numerous and too deep if we aren't careful.
Anyway, what do I know? I'm just a floating head getting unpopular on LinkedIn.
