The Intolerance Myth About India

"Is India as wretched as it is being portrayed by a section of the intellectual class?"

- Siddharth Singh

 Arguments have A shorter life in this country, and, invariably, they are more incendiary than insightful, more spectacular than substantial. Enters Aamir Khan, Hindi cinema’s Peter Pan with an oversized conscience, and we are back to the noisy theatre of intolerant India, a wretched place worth running away from. Elsewhere, debates take a longer time in words, ideas and data before coming to a conclusion—or a pause. In Britain, the rhetoric over the extension of the franchise lasted almost 60 years. Arguments over the last US war in the Middle East lasted barely a year before the Tomahawks were unchained. Even by Indian standards, the intolerance debate was pretty spontaneous. From the spate of awards being returned in protest against the murder of three activist-thinkers and a villager to the near-silence after the BJP’s electoral rout in Bihar, it lasted barely 60 days. Aamir Khan altered the script, and the noise level in the intolerance constituency has gone up considerably.

Hang on. Is there enough empirical evidence to substantiate the claim of the anguished minority? Do four killings, however horrible, make India an intolerant country? Can slogans be substitute for evidence? There is evidence but it points in the other direction. Even as the protests were reaching a high-pitch, the US think-tank, Pew Research Center released a report Global Support for Principle of Free Expression, but Opposition to Some Forms of Speech last week (on 18 November).