9 highlights
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In an editorial comment in its issue dated July 28, 1951, Economic Weekly (which preceded EPW) remarked: “Pandit Nehru is at his best when he is not pinned down to matters of detail”.
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Democracy, with all its limitations, looks for details through an in-built mechanism of moderation.
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Swamy has all the ingredients of emerging as the blue-eyed boy of the right-leaning middle class.
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And then, he fulfills the third eligibility criterion for the rightist stewardship with his xenophobic rhetoric against non-Hindu plural identities in India
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Yet the puzzle remains, why has Swamy not emerged as the poster boy of the right leaning section of the middle class?
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Swamy’s religious code has Hindutva numerals and for the rest, inclusiveness rests on a DNA-vetted Hindu ancestry.
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But the question has to get to the theme of democratic detailing – a code of co-existence and tolerating, if not respecting, pluralities.
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The democratic relevance for Swamy’s take on identity politics in India would help itself with that moderating force of democracy, that softening of hardened certitudes of religious narrative.
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Having his take on the complex mosaic of multiple realities of India, E M Foster had once said, “Every statement about India is correct. So is its opposite”.