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The Hindu nationalists see a religion near perfection save for the tampering of Muslims and Christians. So they fall upon these groups, rather than try to reform their own practices by drawing on India's sophisticated philosophical traditions.

The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.

The religion of the Indian is the last thing about him that the man of another race will ever understand.

It's getting worse under Prime Minister Modi. The economic miracle has failed, to a degree, and people are reaching back to a kind of imagined Hindu past for a feeling of pride. And that feeling of pride necessarily comes from denying any kind of Muslim heritage. People my age seem to be becoming illiberal in a way that I'm surprised by.

We can't deny the existence of caste in India. We have to live with it.

And it's one thing to give people freedom and something else to deny the rights of Christians to assert their faith in order to keep Hindus from feeling upset.

As for my stand, I think it has become difficult in our country to be a Hindu and a liberal at the same time.

Sadly, Indians are not very easily accepted in Pakistan, and that has a lot to do with the governments.

As far as the public is concerned, India is amazingly secular.

Though blessed with many able administrators, the British found India just too large and diverse to handle. Many of their decisions stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions, imposing sharp new religious-political identities on Indians.