The Question Beneath the Question In contemporary social discourse, "Islamophobia" is often categorized simply as irrational prejudice — a pathology to be condemned and dismissed. But dismissal is not diagnosis. To understand why communal tension persists in India, and why it periodically erupts into violence, we must ask a harder question: **why does trust break?** Trust between communities doesn't break randomly. It breaks along specific, identifiable fault lines — and in India today, several are operating simultaneously, feeding each other in ways that make the situation feel intractable. At the center of this breakdown is something deceptively simple: **fear that has never been given precise language.** Unexpressed fear doesn't dissolve. It deforms. It becomes contempt, then caricature, then violence. The architecture of anxiety in India is built not from hatred alone, but from legitimate fears that were never named honestly, expectations that were never stated cl...
Yes there will always be a castiest, sexist, racist, linguist, religious angle to a murder. And we all cry for certain type of murder, and for certain kind of people. And we also choose to hear certain type. when i read Y G mahendran post, he may be right, there is a difference between the murder of a dalit and murder of a brahmin. There will be and should be more voice for dalits, because of sheer number of dalits who gets killed. Very rarely do we see a brahmin killed because of his or her identity.
When i was a school kid, there used to be a joke about a student who wrote an essay about coconut tree. In the exam he was asked to write about a Cow, but he knew only about coconut tree so he wrote three full pages about the tree and in the last line he wrote, “we tie our beloved cow in the coconut tree”. This is certainly on a lighter note, i am not suggesting roy doesn’t know about ambedkar, it is just a feeling you get after reading the introduction, you get to know more about Gandhi than about Ambetkar. From the article Roy has written (Doctor and the Saint), i feel she is fighting an imaginary gandhians whom she feels are betraying Ambetkar’s critical role in the history of India especially in creating modern moral intellectual conscience of the nation. Why is nation obsessed with Gandhi when the future of india lies with Ambetkar seems to me her anguish. And for this she has brooded over writings of Gandhi (From the devils mouth) to prove his undeserved claims. Sh...
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