Notion of majority and minority 'un-Indian', says Tharoor

The notion of majority and minority is fundamentally un-Indian and fails to reflect the real nature of our society, said Dr Shashi Tharoor, Member of Parliament and a former Minister.

He was speaking at the fifth annual lecture of the National Commission for Minorities at the India International Centre in New Delhi.

The suggestion that only a Hindu, and only a certain kind of Hindu, can be an authentic Indian, is an affront to the very premise of Indian nationalism, said Tharoor on Tuesday.

In the backdrop of violence motivated by religious intolerance against minorities, the former Under Secretary General of the United Nations opined that an India that "denies itself to some of us could end up being denied to all of us".

He said that the reduction of any group of Indians to second-class status in their homeland is unthinkable. It would be a second Partition: and a partition in the Indian soul would be as bad as a partition in the Indian soil.

The topic of his lecture was: "Who is an Indian? A Nation of Minorities". Wajahat Habibullah, Chairman, National Commission for Minorities, Dr HT Sangliana, Vice-Chairman of the Commission and other Members of the Commission were also present on the occasion.

Dr Tharoor dwelt upon various issues relating to the challenges of diversity in a land of minorities. The Kerala MP paid rich tributes to the uniqueness of Indian unity in diversity and said that no other country in the world embraces the extraordinary mixture of ethnic groups, the profusion of mutually incomprehensible languages, the varieties of topography and climate, the diversity of religions and cultural practices and the range of levels of economic development that India does.

So the "idea of India", to use Tagore's famous phrase, is of one land embracing many, he said. It is the idea that a nation may endure differences of caste, creed, colour, culture, cuisine, conviction, costume and custom, and still rally around a democratic consensus.

"If the overwhelming majority of a people share the political will for unity, if they wear the dust of a shared history on their foreheads and the mud of an uncertain future on their feet, and if they realize they are better off in Kozhikode or Kanpur dreaming the same dreams as those in Kolhapur or Kohima, a nation exists, celebrating diversity, pluralism - and freedom. That is why India can face the future with confidence," expressed Dr Tharoor.