This is with regard to Shashi Tharoor’s piece, ‘Indian identity is forged in diversity’, first published in the Guardian, and excerpted by The Indian Express in the column ‘Printline’ (IE, August 16). By blowing up the trivial, if not the non-existent, and smothering the obvious, it causes dismay. Having gone through pages and pages of what was earlier called the Manchester Guardian, and then the Guardian, in the British Newspaper Library, Colindale, and also having gone through the private papers of Sir Charles Prestwich Scott (1846-1932), its legendary editor (1871-1929), I may make a few observations about the changing values of the British press and the unchanging attitude of the Indian intelligentsia.

If Tharoor was genuinely interested in celebrating the vibrancy of India’s pluralism, he perhaps should not have missed out, in all fairness, the only exclusivist, intolerant and violent strand which has posed the biggest threat to this country over the millennia. A quick look at the recent history of Kerala and parts of southern India, with whose history and politics he should have a greater familiarity, might show that it is not the hydra-headed “sectarian Hindu chauvinists” but others who have been playing havoc. Many incidents of sectarianism — right from the forced conversions carried out by the ‘nationalist’ Tipu Sultan and the pogroms against the Hindus of Kerala by the ‘progressive’ Moplahs, right down to the latest blasts in Hyderabad — have been the handiwork of groups whose comrades are reasonably active in places as distant as New York and Bali, Glasgow and New Delhi. The potential secretary-general of the UN, either because he is oblivious of the facts or is reticent about setting them down, may be seen on the wrong side of the civilisational clash.

... contd.