Preface Continues…

Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis, and some other small religious groups, represent the remaining 3 per cent. Though these smaller groups are also considered minorities, but are really so close to the majority community in culture that they are considered as partners of Hindu society. Unlike Islam and Christianity, these minority religions are born as dissenting theologies of Hinduism. They share the core concepts with Hindus such as reincarnation, equality of all religions, and ability to meet God in this very life by penance. That some of them feel increasingly alienated from Hindu society nowadays is also the consequence of India’s identity crisis.
The India of today would not have been in existence had the past attempts to divide Hindus succeeded. Over the last five centuries, there had been attempts to divide the Hindu community into castes and races which attempts if had been successful would have made India a Muslim or Christian majority nation. The religious tax “jazia” was one such instrument to make Hindu society capitulate and convert to Islam. Hindus bore it and by and large did not succumb to it. The fact that undivided India in 1947 was 75 per cent Hindu testifies to that. English language and mores were used by Christians to convert Hindus. But Hindus have used the same to modernize and consolidate themselves, and finally overthrow British imperialists.
In the early 20th century, a sinister attempt to divide the Hindu community on caste basis was made (in 1932) when the British imperialists offered the scheduled castes a separate electorate. But shrewdly understanding the conspiracy to divide India, Mahatma Gandhi by his fast unto death and Dr. Ambedkar, by his visionary

10 HUMAN RIGHTS AND TERRORISM IN INDIA
rejection of separate electorate, foiled the attempt by the signing of the Poona Pact between the Congress Party of Mahatma Gandhi, and brilliant scholar Dr. Ambedkar.

To be continued…