Cyclicals
Did the assassination of Gandhi make it “impossible for the anger (of Hindu hurt) to find an address”, wonders Santosh Desai . Did that one act result in the whole of Hindu hurt to be linked “with an act of violence so unpalatable that it rendered the feeling illegitimate”? All of which may not have been a bad thing, if we had become a truly secular nation. But instead this is where we ended up: “Over time secularism, became less a principled belief and more a politically useful instrument that was used to build electoral constituencies.” All of that started crumbling with Advani’s rath yatra and “his attack on pseudo-secularism”. It began the “re-legitimising of the Hindu right in political terms”. And when Islamic terrorism went global with 9/11, the anti-Muslim feeling in India began to seem like a universally felt feeling. All of which leads Desai to muse: “Perhaps the past never goes away. It waits in the shadows, gathering evidence of its relevance, and slides back i