Religion in India
Religion in India
Religion in India is characterised by a diversity of religious beliefs and practices. Throughout India's history, religion has been an important part of the country's culture and the Indian subcontinent is the birthplace of four of the world's major religions, namely Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, which are collectively known as native Indian religions or Dharmic religions and represent
"For all its Muslim appeasement and anti-Hindu discriminations, the Indian state is not aggressively anti-Hindu: the Hindu-born ruling class may sell itself for petro-dollars, but it does not organize the kind of oppression which exists in Pakistan. It does not support Hinduism, but at least it passively allows Hindu culture to flourish on its own strength."
"India consists only of minorities. Hinduism is a commonwealth of many communities, each a minority. One has to be very gullible (or so absorbed by “development”, as the present BJP team claims to be) to swallow this notion of “minority” with all the privileges that go with it. So, of course a Hindu government means no harm to the minorities, and should not. As an old VHP slogan said: “Hindu India, secular India”. It is only secularist propaganda that claims an equivalence between Hindu activism and trouble for the minorities: the more Hinduism, the more oppression for the minorities. This is a false projection of the Pakistani situation: the more of the dominant religion, the more the Hindu minority suffers."
"Moreover, on top of this undeniable political and legal discrimination, Hindus perceive a serious threat to the very existence of their culture and society, when they look across the borders and into the future. Their acute sensitivity to minorityism is strengthened by the perception that the minorities indulge in aggression against the Hindus wherever they get the chance, and that they are also growing stronger by the day... Moreover, the so-called minority is in fact the Indian department of a world-wide movement, from which it effectively gets moral and financial support... However, as a citizen of a fully secular state, I strongly object to Mr. Abrahams minorityist statement. I have never heard of minorityism either as a term or as a concept somehow functional in our secular system. We do not give religious minorities a veto against decisions enacted by a democratic majority... In a secular democracy, the veto right of a religious minority is limited scrupulously to those decisions that directly the exercise of their religious freedom."
