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It is not common, my dude. It is precisely what makes the rare occasions when it does happen stand out so much.
Islam and Hinduism are conceptually very different traditions. Hinduism, at least in its popular manifestation, is an open-ended, practice-oriented tradition.
It might be shocking to Pakistani Muslims but this is normal in India. Again I am not saying all or most Indian Muslims do this but it is not uncommon especially among elites.
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It is not common, my dude. It is precisely what makes the rare occasions when it does happen stand out so much.
Islam and Hinduism are conceptually very different traditions. Hinduism, at least in its popular manifestation, is an open-ended, practice-oriented tradition.
It might be shocking to Pakistani Muslims but this is normal in India. Again I am not saying all or most Indian Muslims do this but it is not uncommon especially among elites.
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simply believe that they cannot participate without compromising their religious obligations.
Religious accommodation cannot be symmetrical, because the underlying theological assumptions are not compatible to begin with.
That is the incompatibility Hindus fail to appreciate.
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There was also a reported incidence of his teenage wife offering him a ham sandwich while he was addressing a meeting and that incidence left him greatly embarassed
I am sure you think I over share. Over sharing in my case is ideological. When I was 20 I read Andrew Mango’s Ataturk and there was a poignant incident in it … Ataturk is publicly drinking and someone wants to draw the curtains. Ataturk instructs him not to saying that “unlike the Ottoman hypocrites I want the people to know that I drink”. What a liberating idea. Then I came across an incident from Jinnah’s life where he is drinking whiskey and an aide suggests he hides the glass and he responds in Urdu with great anger “mein jaisa andar hoon aisa hee bahir hoon”. I might not be a man of action like Ataturk or Jinnah, but I share their dislike for hypocrisy and pretense. That is what I imbibed from a study of their lives. So I have no shame, nothing to hide and I don’t care if you judge me as crazy, dewana or what have you. To quote that Mughal e Azam classic: Jab purdah nahin koi khuda se bandon se purdah karna kiya Piyar kiya tau darna kiya.
So by all means judge me. Love.
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There was an orderly transfer of power and no rebellion during British times either. Free and fair elections have nothing to do with it. The administrative machinery built by the British had plenty of checks and balances to make a coup a very remote possiblity
There is much debate on if Gen-Z/youth led revolutions in Sri Lanka, Nepal & Bangladesh will happen in India.
A bigger &older question is how India avoided coups/dictatorships that other developing countries fell into.
I think free &fair elections was an important safety valve.
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Individual autonomy cannot be secured by declaring inherited affiliations irrelevant. It requires institutions capable of protecting individuals from coercive collective power, enforcing impersonal rules, and ensuring that access does not depend on membership in a community.
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The question, therefore, is not simply whether individuals should be liberated from communal identities, but whether a society has developed the institutional capacity to make such liberation viable.
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Liberalism was always premised on a particular conception of the nation-state: a relatively integrated social order in which shared linguistic, cultural, and national identities superseded older forms of communal affiliation. Its ideal of the individual as an
Not my world-view (as an atheist), but nor do I care if it’s someone else’s world-view, as long as state or social power is not brought to bear to force me to ascribe to it.
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privileging those who are most effective at organizing themselves collectively. The individual who refuses to participate in these networks does not thereby become more powerful or more autonomous. He may simply surrender the means through which others secure their interests.
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Such groups can coordinate their interests, mobilize their numbers, enforce internal discipline, and bargain with the state in ways that isolated individuals cannot.
The paradox is that a social order which insists on treating everyone as an individual can end up
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Where access to resources, political representation, economic opportunities, and even personal security is mediated by kinship, caste, clan, or religious affiliation, the individual does not enter the public sphere on equal terms with collectively organized groups.
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that they would assimilate into a common civic and cultural framework, subordinating their inherited communal loyalties to a broader national identity.
The difficulty arises when liberal individualism is transplanted into societies where these underlying conditions do not exist.
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Its historical development coincided with the consolidation of national identities and the gradual displacement of older forms of social organization. Where individuals from different backgrounds were incorporated into this order, the expectation was
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