The news read that scared youth from north-east were escaping Bangalore fearing persecution for being different. Similar emotions were pulsing through folks living in Mangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, and other southern states. Each of these people from far off distant eastern states, who had come to try their luck in the larger cities of the nation, were now abandoning their homes, hearths, and hopes to return to the desolate barren lands from where they had escaped.
It saddens to think that citizens of the democracy of India, who have the right to access all parts of the soverign nation are being denied this basic right. If the country with its political and civil machinery cannot guarantee its citizens their fundamental rights as proclaimed and prescribed by the constitution, then the country has no right to enforce its constitution over these citizens.
This may sound radical but is equally and unequivocally rational. Citizens offer their trust, loyalty, and devotion to a country in exchange for safety, equality, and identity. A singular identity that binds across disparate cultures, languages, ethnicities, and appearance. For a country as geographically vast as India, it includes the Indo-Aryan Caucasiod, Dravidian Australoid, Sino Mongoloid, and Aboriginal Negroid stock that constitutes its diverse population.
While the founding fathers of this septuagenarian nation were myopic enough to stitch across over five hundred princely states into one large grandmothers patchwork quilt, little did they foresee that within a handful of decades keeping the thread of cohesion intact would be chaotic and tenacious to say the least.
While the ruling political system has given into vox populi creating new states from erstwhile larger central ones, integrating these states together to form an stately nation is mission improbable (the optimist in me does not wish to deem it impossible while the pragmatist inside knows its far fetched).
What this country needs is absorption of its citizen diversities rather than amalgamation of its geographical jigsaw pieces mired in political apathy.
