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This is something very relevant on the eve of Holi. Believe it or not, people everywhere are getting splashed with colours and various shades of Hindutva. By now we have Soft Hindutva, Togadia brand of Hindutva, Thackeray's Hindutva, Vajpayee and Advani varieties of Hindutva, Vaghela 's kind and the Digvijay brand of Hindutva. But a new variety came to the fore in Kolkata during a panel discussion organised by The Telegraph group of journals.
Selected intellectuals of Kolkata had been invited to give their verdict on a discussion on Impact of Hindutva on democracy. One panel consisted of Arun Jaitley, Ravi Shankar Prasad of BJP, journalist Mark Tully and Swapan Daasgupta. The other one included Sitaram Yechuri of CPI-M, Amar Singh of Samajwadi party, Jaipal Reddy of Congress and journalist N Ram. Well-known economist Jayaram Ramesh moderated the discussion.
Considering the political temperament of Kolkata's intellectual class, the BJP panel was apprehensive initially. But once Jaitley and Prasad argued out their case, the audience responded with prolonged applause. It became clear that the elite of the City of Joy had also been bitten by the soft Hindutva bug.
Jayaram Ramesh, who belongs to the Congress, tried to keep the discussion and the audience on the 'secular track' but that raised question marks on his impartiality. At the end, 80 per cent of the audience sided with Hindutva but Jayaram Ramesh's attempt to declare it a 50:50 verdict led to protests by the audience. He was forced to correct himself and declare that supporters of Hindutva were in a majority.
The trend in Kolkata, capital of
the Left-dominated West Bengal, might have disturbed Jaipal Reddy, Yechuri
and Jayaram Ramesh but Jaitley and Prasad certainly returned convinced
that but for Togadia's off-made stinging remarks, more and more people
are accepting Hindutva as their creed.
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