India blasts fascism out; a nation poised on greatness

When a people become mature, the man whose business is to evoke hatred digs his own grave. The British divided India into unfulfilled scraps of religions and languages, this to a nation which already had a stew of castes and multiple rituals. The post-independence, partitioned India continued to see this profitable politics, with southern India especially at the forefront, as even today. But methods have to change as the times change.

The sheer diversity of India, unparalleled in human experience, and yet the unity of the oldest civilisation and the oldest religion of the world running through it, make it simply impossible for the country's people to become fascists, fundamentalists. The British might well have given a democratic superstructure to India, but well before that India was always democratic from heart: every warring and unwarring clan and kingdom and population of earth was and has been welcome here, from the invading Aryans and Alexander's Greeks, to the Slavs, to the Mongols (Mughals), from the refugee Persians (Parsis) to the modern-day Bangla refugees. Islam wasn't that of other lands here till Aurangzeb happened: Kabir and Sufi saints had created a beautiful synthesis of Islam and Hinduism, which only taught love among people, sans rituals, sans rigidites. And unmindful of the heart of India, now a few politicians think they can create even more ghettoes? Hinduism's very core is plurality: the day it's finished, it has become a religion from a tradition, another rigid discipline that would spawn untold number of terrorists.

My Name Is Khan might be an ordinary film, but the spectacular slap that Shahrukh Khan single-handedly, without any support from the film fraternity at all, has given through sticking to an upright stance and that the Mumbaikars have given in going to watch him through all the commotions and fears is a complete rejection of the fascist element that swept in a restless India in the last decade, a time when India was yet developing slowly and people were dissatisfied with lives and needed bones to pick. Not so the India of today, as very evident by what happened to BJP after Gujarat: from being the ruling power of India to a party that is on the verge of extinction. The Indian voter remembers; it will remember Thackeray this time, and the strong Indian media will keep them reminded of it. A stunning reprisal from the man on the street, bringing memories of the one time earlier when people rebelled - the VP Singh's Mandal crimes - a fresh hope is born today; it's truly a time when India can be heady.