--- On Sat, 12/27/08, Miguel Braganza <miguelbraga...@yahoo.co.in> wrote:
>
> I am with you on this one. Dr. Samir Kelekar seems to have
> been wrongly certified "secular" by Dr. Selma
> Carvalho, a communal practitioner herself.
>
> The Khandhamal-Orissa issue is more about the fight for the
> ST tag by a SC community that has converted to Christianity
> and lost reservations[for education, jobs, etc], than about
> religion per se.
>
In my opinion neither Samir nor Selma are communal. What we are seeing is a
simple over-reaction to issues that are in some cases wrongly portrayed through
a unidimensional communal narrative in this forum, by means of a torrent of
one-sided political propaganda. The Kandhamal violent clashes between Pannas
and Khands with poaching by Maoists and Hindu extremists is a case in point.
However, I do notice an unhealthy trend here. In the past, we had to deal with
propaganda from the well-recognized fringes on the Hindu and Christian right,
and the atheist, Marxist and New Age left. But the new trend appears to be
radicalization of the secular moderates towards the fringes on either side. I
suspect it would lead to much greater polarization.
Cheers,
Santosh
