There is something profoundly worrying in the response of what might be called the secular establishment to the massacre in Godhra...Some versions ha… - Vir Sanghvi

There is something profoundly worrying in the response of what might be called the secular establishment to the massacre in Godhra. ... There is no suggestion that the karsewaks started the violence ... there has been no real provocation at all ... And yet, the sub-text to all secular commentary is the same: the karsewaks had it coming to them. Basically, they condemn the crime; but blame the victims ...

Even moderate Hindus, of the sort that loathe the VHP, are appalled by the stories that are now coming out of Gujarat: stories with uncomfortable reminders of 1947 with details about how the bogies were first locked from outside and then set on fire and how the women’s compartment suffered the most damage.

Do we realise how that hastily-ordered ban [on the book The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie] has changed India forever? .... When the Government promptly submitted to this illiterate hysteria, it convinced [Hindus] that secularism had become a code phrase for Muslim appeasement.

The answer, I suspect, is that we are programmed to see Hindu-Muslim relations in simplistic terms: Hindus provoke, Muslims suffer.