Reason and calm out of fashion now in India

[hinduwoman]

It began with the arrest of an university student for sedition. Now it has snowballed into india wide controversy about who is a nationalist, traitor etc. I find the following piece sums up my feelings pretty well:

I am lost. I am constantly called upon to take sides, and to be doing that all the time in this feverish manner can be wearying and confusing. Sometimes, you are not sure which side you are on but there is no middle ground left. The earth is divided in this part of the globe.
That's why I don't open my mouth much. I am scared I will be mistaken for a right-wing bigot or a left liberal. Both are cuss words. I cannot voice an independent opinion of anything Modi does. If I have a good word for his Swachch Bharat campaign and smile with relief at the relative cleanliness of blankets and coaches in trains these days, I am smeared with the saffron brush. If I say the JNU students cannot possibly condone what Afzal Guru did, living as they are in India and on our tax payer dole, I am instantly shoved into that highly stressed corner where much-derided Modi bhakts are consigned.

If I say sedition is too serious a charge to be pressed against these aimless and misguided students, I am condemned as a liberal. If I discuss my admiration for Mahatma Gandhi, I am told, "How can you? You are a Modi supporter." The two, according to popular understanding, are mutually exclusive. This is apart from the fact that the 'Modi supporter' label, which is euphemism for "an illiterate person who will maim and murder in the name of the cow and Hindutva", is tagged to anybody who dares to approve of anything remotely connected with Modi. By implication then, you are endorsing the 2002 riots, his monogrammed suit and his entire career graph to date.
...
I would give the Hindutva supporters a long rope and expect them to look at the world only through their saffron-tinted eyes. After all, as goes the happy myth, they don't know any better. It's the well-educated and well-heeled liberals that baffle me. Their inability to differentiate between right and wrong, to analyse a situation on its merits instead of extraneous factors, to not get carried away by erroneous logic of friends and influential people. It's on them that the onus of constructive criticism and meaningful dialogue lies, not the others. Isn't this what education is all about? But for some reason, there is serious grey cell damage among these unthinking, self-appointed custodians of liberty, equality and fraternity. For them, there is just black or white. They have no room for CMYK in their well-read world-view.

Take the JNU episode, for instance. The irony implicit in foisting Kanhaiya's predicament on Modi is lost on the left intellectuals, supposedly blessed with a very discerning eye. Afzal Guru attacked Parliament when the Congress (UPA) was in power. It was the Congress government which decided to hang Afzal Guru. Yet, when Kanhaiya's friends speak in favour of Afzal Guru, Modi gets the end of their stick whileRahul Gandhi bats for them and becomes their friend. This is nothing but the sheer beauty of their lateral thinking. Everything is Modi; there is nobody else in the government or in the Opposition. So blinded are they by their hate for Modi, they see him everywhere. Like God, to the religious-minded.
...
And in their desperation to plead for freedom of expression and cover for the erring JNU students, some tell you that Afzal Guru attacked Parliament, which is a haven for gangsters in politician clothing. So, the argument goes, isn't it good that he did it?
Huh? If this is not going off on a tangent, I do not know what is. Was Afzal Guru an Indian patriot out to neutralize bad politicians a la Rang de Basanti? And doesn't Parliament symbolise the country and its democratic systems? And, if we are getting literal and prosaic, did any politician die in the attack? The men who lost their lives in the attack were poor, genuinely patriotic security guards.
...
By writing this article, I run the risk of getting in the line of fire of both ends of the political - let's not pretend it's intellectual - spectrum. That would leave me friendless, because there is hardly anybody in between. That, by itself, speaks volumes about the strange polemics of this country. Or, am I being unnecessarily cynical? You tell me

So true. Only I would go farther and say that the Left had become intellectually bankrupt long since in India. And now they are completely out of power with hardly any chance of coming back, they have become even more desperate to retain their last ideological bastions which are the universities.

The situation has become so bad that on news media the anchors are openly calling each other liars and guilty of doctoring footage.

I am also expected to swallow whatever is published on the internet and believe every video without verifying their source. If I whimper something about proof obviously I belong to the other side.