Of a hero and his unlikely disciple

There was a recurring theme in my grandmother's stories about the partition - it was unbiased. There were no Hindus waging war on the Muslims, or Muslims up in arms against the Hindu majority - there were simply warring Indians bathing streets in blood. Every wheelbarrow filled with Hindu bodies emptied into drains were matched by Muslims in equal measure. She never blamed any one religious community. And, yet every generation removed from theirs has only gotten more and more bitter about this episode. Perhaps because they had no direct experience, their imaginations were colored by stories very similar to mine, and they chose to make what they wanted to, from childhood tales. Pity.

Did India just smite the nose to spite the face? How can citizens be more worried about corruption than genocide? How can economic progress be so important that one turns a blind eye to the skeletons in Modi's closet? Do you laud Hitler for all the planning that went into decimating a race? After all, wasn't his agenda the ethnic cleansing (leading to the betterment) of Germany? Can we condone blood on a statesman's hands if we are promised economic progress? Apparently, the great statesman's hero is Swami Vivekanda - oh, the irony. Saffron is where the similarity begins...and ends in this case.