Acceptance Best Recipe For Pluralist Democracy Like India: Shashi Tharoor
NDTV
Referring to tolerance as a patronising idea, he said it means that one will magnanimously indulge the other in their right to be wrong.
Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Friday said acceptance is the best recipe for a multi-religion, multi-cultural, multi-party and pluralist democracy like India.
From Hinduism to liberal arts studies and from fiction to how people getting offended has become the biggest human rights issue, Mr Tharoor spoke on an array of topics at the Alliance University's literary festival in Bengaluru.
Talking about how he grew up in a time when religion was one's private business and there was no need to talk about it, the former Union minister said he wrote about it in his book "India: From Midnight to the Millennium" in a reaction to the Babri masjid demolition.
"After I came back to India and saw what the BJP and its assorted members of the (Sangh) Parivar were doing to use my precious faith as a political instrument for their own advancement, I started to get troubled and angry...The book 'Why am I a Hindu' is a political reiteration of my beliefs as well as a repudiation of Hindutva, the political doctrine which I believe is a profound betrayal of Hinduism. My Hinduism has come from extensive readings," Mr Tharoor said.
