GOD IS NEITHER A KHOMEINI NOR A MOHAN BHAGAWAT

The weaponization of religious faiths and other markers of identity for divisive political purposes is a dominant trend across the world now. This writer grew up in an india where many of us thought our country would remain a glorious exception to this trend. How a culture that produced Gandhi can metamorphose into a mirror image of Nathuram Godse, his assassin, we wondered. We soon realized how grievously wrong we were. With the help of newer technologies, the cynical instrumentalization of lies, and the manufacturing of majoritarian grievance, primitive furies snowballed into a new national common sense. The ‘m’ in the masses increasingly appeared redundant as the notion of democratic majority degenerated in practice into permanent vengeful angry monochromatic majority. Taken together, the pieces in this book constitute a coherent argument against zealotry and excluvism of all hues.