Intolerence and India

It needs to be recalled that the original source of religious and cultural intolerance lies in the Old Testament. Due to the spread across all continents of the 3 revealed religions, this semitic intolerance now strikes even a tolerantly benevolent civilisation like India. What is dangerous is, due to the fear of vote banks, the slow, inexorable islamisation of what is left of the classical Indian culture. No one has as yet started to engage a meaningful dialogue about why those who, even after a 1000 years of co-existence with the pacifism of the Jainas, of the Buddhists (which they obliterated), with the tolerance of the Hindus, with a pluri-religious tolerance written in stone on the cave walls of Ajanta, they still pour out only anger, violence and threats of murder over such a minor "offense" as Rushdie's paragraph. Can it be that there is not even a single Indian Muslim who does not still feel as part of their glorious history punctuated the destruction of so many libraries, centres of high learning, on what do they base their easy offense over a word, a caricature, when they do not experience the slightest scruple over so much of the splendour they have subtracted from the culture of India? How long can they continue to plague the Indian democracy with the arrogance of a religious sensitivity founded on the belief of a God who actually does not exist. Is there not at least one single Indian Muslim who benefits from the secular Constitution to agree with French author Stendhal's statement: "The only excuse of God is that he does not exist!"? Without the Muslims, India - it must be said - would be more tolerant, more peaceful, more beautiful. They have added nothing to Indian civilisation, except intolerance and the holy duty of killing as the only response to difference of thought , of belief, of deed. The vote bank acts on Indian polity as the old man riding on the shoulder of Sindbad and clasping his neck with his legs with the desire to suffocate him.