Should India Worry About Its Diversity?

India, the world’s most diversified country, 565 princely states united by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (former Home Minister of India). These states with their own set of languages, food cuisines, apparels, climates, race, skin shades, religions, traditions and cultures make India vibrant and colourful. A nation that is alternate to rainbows and unexpected surprises. The only nation with a demography including almost all sets of the religions in the world, the super minority religious group of Parses too. Now the question arises, does this variance divide us or its just mix of spices that unites us with delicious flavour of nationalism, i personally prefer the latter option.

Now let us see how it is according to the recent activities in the nation. With the high tensions among certain communities in India and dozens of riots among them in the past, shows us that there had been some sort of hatred pumping into veins of many Indians. Definitely some are not happy with the partition and some seek another partition but the biggest difficulty arises when we try to see all under same umbrella, which is indeed not appropriate measure to be followed by any responsible citizen of India. Yes, there is communal hatred in India and we cannot hide it anymore, the truth should prevail over emotions and need to see where India is lagging behind, what is pulling her back from developing. With this another question arises, how do we solve it, we cannot cut another piece of land to satisfy any particular community and we know it well that 1947’s partition resulted in the biggest failure of mankind ever. It turned into huge loss for both India and Pakistan and the purpose to completely divide Hindus and Muslims could not work out.

Coming back to our topic, we certainly understand this that there’s shouldn’t be any more partitions and we are actually good with a mix of all religions living with harmony and peace. The law & order should dominate over any religion and law breakers shouldn’t be judged on the basis of their skin shade, race, state or religion.

Religion isn’t the only problem that causes distress in India. There are certain cases of cultural biases. Certain states that are unable to generate enough revenue to sustain its domiciles within the state are responsible for migration of millions. These unfortunate poor citizens of India are forced to leave their states, to be into developed cities of India for earning their bread. Who are they and why do they have leave their homes, their villages and walk thousands of miles and live in exile. The one word answer is poverty. The all the diversifying elements we discussed earlier does not divide humanity as much as poverty does. The gap between rich and poor, strong and weak, literate and illiterate, fortunate and unfortunate, happy and unhappy is unfortunately increasing day by day, year by year. There’s a saying that nothing goes for vain but life of a poor in India, yes it goes for waste.  The Biharis in general always discriminated in India and their lives are counted as meaningless. We saw a good example of this during recent impact of Covid-19 in India, where millions of labours migrated miles on their way home, majority by walk.

Does diversity really divide us or is it poverty that does so. Readers of this article should ask this question to themselves and others. Let us understand this for real, India’s diversity is not dividing, we should see it as a blend of brilliant tastes, south and north, Hindi and tamil, Idli and Paratha, Chai and Coffee, Bengali sweet and Rajasthani Salty, Delhi Rajma and Pune’s Poha and this list goes on because there’s no ending to tastes and cultures in India. India is a garden of most beautiful flowers and some weeds like any other nation would have. All we have to do is nourish these flowers so to blossom India into rich fragrance and for weeds we have use our wisdom as weedicide and should kill our differences and see every citizen of this Nation as Indian first.

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