In Reply to: Re: I did say posted by Farmer on December 28, 2009 at 09:02:40:
Thank you for your more moderate tone. I apologize for mine being a tad sharp too. It was unitentional. I meant to address the way the original Pew Forum report was formulated, the wording of the original PF report and what the original PF report supposedly addresses, and there is too much room for error. I was also addressing the India Times' added meloddrama to the original report, which really doesn't do India justice, and which I find to be very untrue, according to my own observations.
Your experience is probably a lot more extensive than mine, but India today is probably different from the 1989 India you knew. The country is in many ways a better place. Dowries and immolations have decreased significantly. I have been traveling the countryside and found a lot of tolerance and plurality. Religious fervors can still be whipped up, incited just by someone putting up an activist poster, but inter-religion violence is not the norm except in places like Kashmir. And you are more likely to get political violence than religious violence.
The statement of India being far less tolerant than Saudi Arabia or Iran is plain wrong, I would say. I am surprised Northern Ireland doesn't come out on top in this regard, what with all the sectarian violence and religious intolerance going on? What about the former Yugoslavian states where there was full scale ethnic cleansing which was really based on religion rather than race? What about the other extreme religous prohibitions in many other states around the world according to PF's original report? The wording of the IT report is just too misleading. It took an already flawed PF report and added way too much spice to it.