Sundaresh

when @ShekharGupta rues that a new 'enlightened' Hindu coalition is needed - he forgets that stalwarts like Tagore, Gandhi, Nehru and many Independence leaders (mostly Hindu) tried precisely this - to build a coalition across religions. And that project largely failed. Tagore in later life, became a critic of Islamic/Christian exclusivism. Instead of unity - a horrific bloody partition resulted which even Gandhi was unable to prevent. Nehru & his dynasty got a fresh start and ~40 years after Independence and that project too has also firmly run aground. A reasonable person would infer, that like the repeated failure of Communism, it was not because the execution of the idea or the people leading it were flawed. But that the idea itself doomed to fail. After all if a genius and an intellectual giant like Tagore could not leave a sustainable legacy of universalism and brotherhood behind, or even as popular and universal a leader as Gandhi prevent the Partition - who else could make these ideas work? IMO - just like Communism was fundamentally incompatible with the natural human greed, the idea of politics agnostic to religion - is fundamentally incompatible with human tribalism - and for the very necessary competition of ideas that is fundamental to how nature and evolution work. *Unless* the people have become largely irreligious or the religions reformed. The presence of unreformed originalist religions with believing masses, still competing with each other for 'souls', cannot allow this kind of politics. That is why today - we are even seeing countries like UK slip into religion based politics. Not because they have a dominant Hindu right - but much more simply because a importing of hordes of Islamist believers has gotten the centuries old 'enlightened' liberal/secular story unstuck. And this is just starting. It is amply clear where the responsibility of failure of Secular politics and Liberalism lies - and unless those who stand for these principles pull their head out of the sand and speak up and point the finger at where it should - no matter how politically incorrect and uncomfortable - religion based politics is here to stay - and to get worse in many other parts of the world.