Those who are reasonably familiar with Indian social life will immediately recognize from my surname that I was born into an upper-caste Hindu family. The words, 'born into'', are used advisedly since I practise none of the rituals associated with Hinduism. I also detest the public manifestations of Hinduism on display in India today - from the raucousness of the Durga puja in Calcutta, to the venality of pandas in temples, to the murder and destruction witnessed in Gujarat recently and earlier when the Babri Masjid was brought down by thugs belonging to the sangh parivar. Yet, I have among my friends and relatives practising Hindus, who do not associate themselves with the hatred and intolerance which have become the public face of Hinduism. Their faith - in some rare cases informed by the knowledge of the philosophical underpinnings of Hinduism, but in most cases not - has provided them with sustenance. It has given them the ability to accept and respect difference and not to hate those who follow another religion. There are people of other faiths who share the same attitude: Muslims who are horror-struck at what happened in Godhra, Sikhs who loathe the terror that stalked life in Punjab in the Eighties; Jews who disapprove of the policies which the Israel government follows against Palestine; and Christians who are deeply ashamed of the violence perpetrated in the name of Christ. Such people form the silent majority in India, a country in which religion has had a hold over the minds and lives of people for over 2,000 years. It is important to rescue this sensibility for in it lies embedded the practice of religious tolerance, which in a country like India should form the basis of any civilized existence. I can see my secular friends raising their sceptical eyebrows at this. They will say that by arguing on the basis of religion, I am conceding ground to the anti-secularists. In secularism lies India's hope. This view needs to be probed and exposed. It assumes that there is a necessary correlation between secularism and the absence of religious persecution of the minorities. This is a complete misconception based on an ignorance of history. The Nazi state was completely secular; it did not rule in the name of religion; and the spheres of religion and that of the state were kept separate, the former belonging to the private sphere and the latter to the public domain. This did not stop that state from persecuting and killing Jews. The Soviet state under Stalin was secular to the extent of being anti-religion, but this did not prevent Stalin from persecuting Jews. In India under Rajiv Gandhi, a secular individual, and the Congress, a party professing secularism as part of its creed, Sikhs were butchered in Delhi in 1984. Look at the contrary case of Mahatma Gandhi who was a deeply religious man and therefore one who could not have been secular. But he was profoundly tolerant and respectful about the beliefs of other people, including that of atheists and agnostics. The point is germane to what is happening in India at the moment. The prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, despite his lifelong association with the sangh parivar, an ideological formation that does not believe in tolerance, has, in his public pronouncements, committed himself to upholding the Constitution, a document in which religious freedom, equality and secularism are inscribed. In his policies, Vajpayee has displayed a keenness to distance himself from the dictates of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the rest of the parivar: witness economic reforms. But to date, there is no evidence that he has taken any action against those who carried out the pogrom against the Muslims in Gujarat. On the contrary, the chief minister of Gujarat, a man who in any civilized society would be put behind bars as a terrorist, moves around as if he has accomplished something great. When push has come to shove, in spite of the horror stories coming out of Gujarat (including film footage of the killings), the prime minister of India, a secular country, has sat back and done nothing, not even visit the site of the crime. He has shown that his claim to uphold the Constitution and to be the prime minister of the whole of India and not just of a section of it is a sham. He cannot be unaware that the killings in Gujarat are a direct outcome of the ideology of hatred propagated by the sangh parivar, which Vajpayee serves. The prime minister of India can be anybody, but not somebody who tacitly approves of the law of the jungle. There are eminent members of Vajpayee's cabinet who have directly condoned the Gujarat killings as an inevitable response to what happened in Godhra (even Newton's law was invoked!); one went to the extent of upholding the pogrom as a sign of Hindu consolidation against Muslims. The barbarity of such statements is enough to take one's breath away. The advocates of Newton's law should remember that if every action has a reaction, then what happened in Godhra must be the product of another action. Has any attempt been made to find out what the kar sevaks, toing and froing from Ayodhya, had been doing on that stretch? There is another point to be made here. A group of enraged Muslims carried out a horrible carnage in Godhra for which Muslims in Ahmedabad and the rest of Gujarat, who had nothing to do with the crime, were punished. Can this be explained by anything other than barbarism? Mughal emperors in the 16th and 17th centuries, for their own political and economic reasons (it is established beyond doubt now, for anybody who cares to read history that they were not driven by religious motives), destroyed some temples. For this, Muslims in the late 20th and early 21st century have to pay with their lives even though they are not remotely connected to the Mughals. For what happened in the 16th century, a mosque has to be destroyed in the 20th. By this perverse way of thinking (one refuses to use the word, logic), Muslims should ask for all the land and other endowments which the Mughal emperors made to Hindu religious establishments. And they did make quite a few. If today's Muslims are to pay the price for what Muslims had done in the past, then the Dalits of today should, following the perversity of the sangh parivar, collect their dues from the caste Hindus of today for 2,000 years of oppression. If that happens, will the Vajpayees, the Joshis, the Mishras, the Mukherjees, the Dasguptas, the Sanghvis et al have a place to run? They will uphold, no doubt, the rule of law, which the sangh parivar transgresses again and again with impunity. These polemical points aside, in the rising tide of religious hatred, a certain sensibility is getting completely drowned. There is no better way to describe this sensibility except through that old-fashioned and much-abused word, humanism. Only a profound and pervasive humanism enables a human being to live and respect difference; this respect prevents him from demanding that others should account for their difference. This cannot be a matter of politics and government. It already exists in the daily lives of Indians who continue with their work and worship undisturbed by any distant cannonade. Ordinary lives often have extraordinary lessons.