NEW DELHI, Sept. 14 -- For six decades or more, I believed that I belonged to India. Now, for this past one decade, I have been having creeping thoughts about my national identity, my citizenship as an Indian and, above all, my nation's own identity.
I have been noticing the emergence of a militant heat wave, which, backed by a particular ideological bend, is being forced upon the citizens, as it were, at knife point. This ideology is saturated with a narrow and sectarian notion of nationhood. It does not believe in the existence or the need for a secular democratic nation.
The proponents of this ideology unleash a propaganda that the boundaries of the nation have to be redrawn on religious parameters. And that these parameters have to be...