Indian Politics 
No Comments Who’s fault is it anyways?
More so often when i talk about things like minority appeasement and vote bank politics and how religion plays a destructive role in Indian politics i never fail to hear from religious apologetic that a minority of the extremists spoil it for the majority of the moderates who don’t care. I can understand where they are coming from since more so often, i’m there myself and witness it first hand.
As someone who travels to Singapore often, i can say for sure that there is a lot of anti Indian sentiment in Singapore some of the time. Notice how i worded that. The sentiment is there some of the time, with some of the people. Of course, it is justified due to some of the things we Indians tend to do. Our behavior in public space, personal hygiene etc., Of course, this anti-<ethnicity> sentiment is not reserved to Indians along but applies to the Chinese people as well. So when a few people litter, misbehave in public, pass obscene comments at women, ogle/stare and do other nonsense a section of the society sometimes reacts to all Indians or Chinese with the same yard stick.
So yeah, from that point of view, i can totally understand how fucked up this must be, since some of the times i can see someone being rude to a fellow Indian colleague or myself on the roads and we perfectly understand why they react the way they do because of the underlying problems some miscreants cause. However it is also very important to note that in Singapore, both Singaporean Indians and Singaporean Chinese folks condemn and will speak out any such misdemeanor in society. From what i have observed, largely there isn’t any sort of a racial partiality in disciplining people when they do nonsense on the streets. I have seen my Singaporean Indian friends as well as Asian friends do it more than once and it is fascinating to observe the Singaporean pride.
The reason why i had to bring the example of Singapore was because the equivalent of what happens there hardly exists, here. Firstly, the problem with being inclusive of all faith based culture is a huge task at hand and extremely subjective at that as well in implementation. Regardless of how much you try and be neutral insecurity will eventually lead to accusations of favoritism. As a country we will never get around doing something that will contribute to progress if each one of us demand special treatment because we are minority or we have very sensitive issues that will offend us to the core. A simple example would be the consumption of food. While Hindus think slaughtering the cow is offensive, it is perfectly normal for Non-Hindus to consume beef. Similar, sale of pork may offend Muslims and Jews but for the non Islamic and Jewish community this may be a no-brainer. Currently what we end up doing is ban everything and limit the options available to everyone. You can now walk into a supermarket and you wont find meat that you want to consume, instead forced to consume what the fringe extremist minorities have forced upon the moderate majority.
Being accommodating is always okay but compromises are not. Compromises bring down the quality of life eventually and lead to feelings of being victimized in the long run, thereby leading to social unrest. The problem in my opinion lies with the moderates. People like you and me who find the time to write and talk about it but do not have the energy to do something about it. If the fact of the matter, that the moderates were not in favor of the extremist ideas the minority of the fanatics want to impose on the majority of the moderates, who in their own words claim they ‘just want to get by and make a peaceful living’ then it is rather confusing to observe that the moderates mostly keep quite when the extremists react and impose. A classic example would be the vilification of valentines day in India. Even if the fact that valentines day is a commercial event and has nothing to do with the celebration of love (which quite a lot of people would disagree with) in the Indian culture, since every aspect of our culture celebrates love as per the claims that go around, attacking couples and subjecting them to violence in public when they celebrate has always been treated lightly, until recently when things took a very ugly turn and the pink chaddy campaign came into effect a couple of years ago to fight it back.
Even such a campaign hasn’t transformed into any larger agenda in terms of fighting back extremism and has silently slipped into oblivion. For all the bra burning, feminists do in the country, it is extremely important to note there is very little participation and action from women to help fight female infanticide and genocide in the form of dowry deaths which are still rampant in the country. Statistics that reveal India as a country unsafe for women is nothing sort of comforting and the troubling part is, what are we moderates doing about it apart from blogging, tweeting and updating our Facebook status?
If we need to progress forward into a developed nation, social discrimination on all fronts must be contested. Extremists may be a fringe minority but the fringe minority knows how to out yell the moderate majority. Unless we yell back at them, im afraid its a slippery slope.
