I heard the ‘Jai Shree Ram‘ sloganeering and cringed that this is somehow associated with Hinduism, the religion of my parents. To a sane person, this isn’t something that will fill them with pride. It is something that will make them cringe with shame. I wonder if any of the Hindus on my timeline feel that a mob shouting the Hindu religious slogan at a lone Muslim woman in hijab, all parties in this exchange being students, by the way, with the expectation of an aggressive response (which they got when she shouted back ‘Allah-hu-Akbar‘) is any standard of moral acceptable to them, whether as Hindus, Indians, or humans. I am guessing that in that moment, they alienated even more Hindus and made them question their leaders and beliefs just like, and this is a vicious cycle, they made even a non-practising, moderate, and/or I believe gone so far as ex-Muslims, feel anger and identify with the hijabi student, thereby turning them more towards their religion.
I have said this in the past, and I say again:
Nobody has made more Hindus less Hindu than a regime that wants more Hindus.
Nobody has made more Muslims more Muslim than a regime that wants less Muslims.
By the way, I hope people see the intersectionality in the Udupi college problem with male Hindu students at the forefront of the sloganeering and gheraoing female Muslim students with a specific agenda: That they are wearing too many clothes.
Now that they have the sanction of their faith and their political masters, their hormones take over and it all falls into place. They get dressed in saffron and go and intimidate girls that would not have otherwise spoken to them, and what’s more, the entire conversation is about how little of their body they are showing.
How convenient an issue to use teenage boys for. What you do not realise is that once you polarise them (which is the easy part, as I explained above), de-polarising and deprogramming them becomes almost impossible, and we have taken a rather long U-turn on the gradual, but positive, progress towards civilisation that this country had started on a path of, and was already 3 generations down since independence. How many more generations will we need to overturn this regression?
Truly, this country is going to hell in a handbasket.
