`No one has right to define an Indian'

`No one has right to define an Indian'
EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE

CHENNAI, JANUARY 4: ``As an Indian, I cannot accept the right of any politician to tell me who is an Indian'', was the rather indignant statement by columnist, author and executive assistant to the Secretary General of the United Nations, Shashi Tharoor.

In a lecture on `Who is an Indian?' at the C P Ramaswami Aiyar Foundation on Monday, the writer was referring to the issue raked up by the likes of the three Congressmen Sharad Pawar, Tariq Anwar and P A Sangma on the nationality of Sonia Gandhi vis a vis her being a prime ministerial candidate.

Whatever the politicians may say, Sonia Gandhi is ultimately a matter of what her electorate says, said Tharoor in his definition Indianness.

He said India was an unusual country with an extraordinary set up of diversity and unity, geographically, with a million people each speaking 35 languages and scores of dialects, 80 per cent of the population subsists on the farms while congested urban agglomerations exist side by side.

The literacy per cent wasshamefully low for a country which has seen over 50 years after Independence.

He said that there are many Indians living literally in the 11th and 12th centuries alongside the fast-track 21st century lifestyles. It is a country with no stereotypes, no fixed ideas and no one-way to arrive at things.

While Italy was formed after a merger of principalities, the Italians said, ``We have created Italy, now let's create Italians''. The same is yet to be done with creating Indians out of a country which is larger than the sum of its parts, he said.

``If America is a melting pot of different cultures, India is a thali (lunch plate) with different dishes and tastes in one common plate''.

While Hinduism has a faith to reach out to the believer, there can be no Hindu heretic as there are no dogmas from which one could deviate, he pointed out noting that the travesty of the notion of Indianness getting reduced to a sectarian notion of Hindutva pained him.

``Hinduism is a way of life and has very littleroom for intolerance and dogma,'' he said stating that India was yet to absorb its religions on a par with countries like Indonesia, Java or Philippines.