Hindu or Muslim: India needs to do away with extremists

Friends, this has been a difficult weekend: there is a toxicity in the air: people are lynched to death because of a beef rumour; plays are banned because it hurts religious "sentiments"; a father kills his daughter allegedly because her head was not covered. On social media, there is competitive outrage: it's a case of who is more angry, who will abuse the other more stridently, whose religion is "superior": my Hinduism versus your Islam! If a terror attack like 7/11 is expected to make every Indian Muslim feel a sense of collective guilt, a Dadri murder is designed to create similar feelings among Hindus.

Why can't we come together to isolate these extremist forces, be they Hindu or Muslim? Or are we going to continue to score points by seeking to justify every act of violence through the prism of identity politics? There isn't just physical violence but violence of the mind too, which is equally dangerous. We hold onto our identities but have little tolerance for the "other".

Ironically, all this has happened on Gandhi Jayanti weekend. I guess for most of us this is now little more than a long weekend; we don't really imbibe Bapu's values. Which is why I was delighted to have interviewed Malala this weekend. In a strange way, this young Pakistani girl seems to represent the best of what Gandhi believed in: courage, non-violence, empathy. Maybe she should be prime minister of Pakistan one day and take on the Taliban. And maybe we need someone in this country too who will call the bluff of the fanatics. Not easy, not likely, but what a wonderful world that would be.

Here is the interview with Malala.