Dear "I Nunes", 2009/10/25 lyrawmn <[email protected]>: > Size is important for fair representation in a democracy.
This presumes that the "democracy" is going to treat people on the basis of their religious affiliation, and that religious polarisations are a given. I doubt they are even helpful for the communities concerned. The examples of the UGP, MGP, BJP (and factions within the Congress) stand out starkly. Politicians can take their supporters for a ride, when they know they have their unquestioned support. All they have to do is play on their sense of "threat to the community". > Or would you rather have the community, religious, > ethic or other, seek and be classified under schedule > and protected status, and then ignored and forgotten? This is not an either-or option. The choice is definitely not a communalisation mobilisation OR scheduled and protected status. Ideally, a person's religion should be a private affair, irrelevant to those ruling the country. Anyway, apart from religious identities there are so many other identities we carry -- gender, language, region, ethnicity. We don't make a big issue of these, so why focus on religion alone? > Or seek correction through civil war? > Witness Sri Lanka, N. Ireland, Lebanon, Timor, etc and more yet to be > played out. Sri Lanka is a case of the State discriminating against the Tamil population since the 1950s. The problem was with the State's bigoted policy. I don't think any ganging up of the (linguistic) minority would have or could have solved the problem. It still hasn't. East Timor is a wholly different case, complicated by post-colonial politics, Salazar and its aftermath, Cold War realities and superpower meddling and much more. I would believe ethnicity and religion are only incidental issues here. North Ireland and Lebanon are places which have shown their inability to live with religious differences. Yet there are many other places in the globe where religion is a private affair, and not made the basis of discrimination against a section of the people (or, conversely, the rationale for ganging up against the state). Just my views, open to other perspectives... FN PS: Mario is trying his best to confuse the issue over the religious components of the Goan population in the past... so I'll ignore him for now. -- Frederick Noronha :: +91-832-2409490 Writing, editing, alt.publishing, photography, journalism Books from Goa: http://tiny.cc/goabooks
