In the hurly-burly of state elections in the Hindi heartland—Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi—the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) defence of its self-styled sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur’s alleged role in the Malegaon blast case as well as her links with Lt Col Srikant Prasad Purohit, a suspect in the plot, has brought questions such as “Who is an Indian?” back to the top of the agenda.
.
To think that the debate that followed the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Godse in 1948 would have settled it by now! If Godse thought the Mahatma and his ilk in the Congress were “selling out” to the newly-created Islamic state of Pakistan, and therefore needed to be done away with, the shock of the Mahatma’s murder even made right-wing organizations such as the Hindu Mahasabha and the Jan Sangh dissociate themselves from Godse.
.
The uniqueness of the Indian experiment, as political scientists Sunil Khilnani and Ramachandra Guha have so simply said elsewhere, is that a mind-boggling plurality of faiths (and castes, creeds and colour) is still learning to give each other space within the secular, democratic republic.
.
Related : aaj tak, hindi news paper, zee news, ndtv, bbc hindi
