I AM BOTH PERPLEXED and amused by the aggressive response in support of your work (India Writes Back, Nov 17). Make no mistake, my soul was in peace when I saw the stories that I had hoping would see the light of day sometime in the history of this country, around elections or not.But why is all of India so suddenly horrified with these details? Gujarat is not the first carnage in our country. We have had the Partition, the anti-Sikh riots, the Babri Masjid riots, the Bombay riots%u2026 when the country burned, bled and died a thousand deaths under the hatred of its own inhabitants, brother against brother. I am an undergraduate student who has lived all his life in a Muslim-dominated residential society, studied in a school with a large number of Muslim students, and I can quite confidently say that Muslims do not face hatred and ostracism in Gujarat alone.
It is a dominant reality in supposedly secular India that Muslims are disliked, distrusted and distanced very consciously by fellow Indians. We find them a most backward and fanatic lot. We have all warned our daughters/sons against falling in love with a Muslim. In a country that hero-worships the Khans of Bollywood, we wrinkle up our noses and turn our face the other way upon passing by a burqa-clad woman or an old Muslim man with a hennaed beard and a faiz on his head. The discrimination we practice in our daily social interactions is what Gujarat took two steps ahead in connivance with the State machinery.
