The sift in direction of debate: From tolerance to Aamir Khan

I was very angry on Aamir Khan. Even reacted very strongly in facebook. Later when I sat quietly and thought seriously some different thought came in my mind. Why people got very angry on Aamir Khan and are we getting intolerant day by day?

Well, first of all doesn’t matter how strongly we claim, there is never an absolute neutral stand point. Still I try to analyze th

e situation and be as less as partial in this case.

Two major things, first why suddenly we become so angry on Aamir Khan? I think it was less because he was talking about intolerance. It was because how the news was presented and spread. Instead of full speech in the first video part of his speech was presented which totally changed the meaning of his speech.

Secondly, the most loose comment (many be unintentionally) he made is saying her wife want to go out of India. This is the point which hurt most to the common people including me. It is true that India is not a heaven where all facilities are available and all freedom of speech is there. Even it is not the case that there is no discrimination is there. But even a poor boy from a remote village who is suffering lots of problems from the childhood don’t find leaving the country is the first solution for them. It is a magical emotion among all country people. Even if somebody goes out of the country the mind always remain in his/her own country. It is like a bond. Now whether this is the ultimate feeling or not can be another debate and we can discuss it later. That’s why it hurt to most of the Indians when he told that his wife wanted to leave India. But if we just forget the exact example of leaving the country the rest of the discussion was fine.

Now another very crucial aspect of this discussion, the politics. Recently BJP government came to power and they came to a very high majority (even if the total vote is less, at least the seat is more) and we can easily assume that there are very high numbers of followers for BJP. What BJP successfully did in last one year (even if not during the election campaign) is mixing the nationality with Hinduism. Of course they did. It is good or bad, helpful or harmful that is different question. But no one can deny the fact that this is the first time in Indian history (keeping in mind the last BJP government) when a political party showed the highest level of religious influence in common people.

It is true that every country have their own sentiment to be integrated. So if Indian People become more patriotic in the name of Hinduism there is no harm in it. But the most harmful situation came for this is it directly raised a question of maintaining the diversity. Even though our prime minister always talk about diversity but in practice it is very difficult to maintain the diversity if we do not recognize it by name. Yes name matters so much sometime.

The worst situation is not that we become intolerance; it will certainly become less within few days. People don’t have that much of time to keep the hate for certain community (even if it exists). People saw many communal fight in past and we recovered.

The worst part of this tolerance and intolerance debate is we started to compare ourselves with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and even Syria to show that we are so much tolerant. With respect to Dadri incident we are giving example of Sikh riot to prove that it is less than that. Where are we heading to? It is like taking pain killer and forgets the pain. Are we not putting the country in danger to just support a government? Of course nobody resist anybody to support a party or government. But we have to remember always country is more important than a particular government. Government will come and go but at the end of the day what will remain is country. No party is perfect. If a party is 95% correct it is better to make it 100% perfect in staid of hiding that 5%.

I want to end this by repeating what our PM said in England India is the country of Buddha and Gandhi and many more great persons. If we want to compare ourselves please compare with the great thought of them not with Pakistan, Afganistan and Sirya. Come on India. If something is going wrong (not because Aamir khan told) let’s fix it. Be Indian to be patriotic.