Peacefully different.

In India, "Hindus constitute some 80% of the population, and Muslims, at over 14% are the biggest minority. Expectedly, in a competitive parliamentary democracy, where every vote counts in a first-past- the-post system, using religion for electoral gain is a temptation which no party has been able to resist," wrote Pawan K Verma. "In the early decades after 1947, there were clear attempts to appease the Muslim minority." "The amendment of Hindi personal law - even if well intentioned - in 1954-56 was another act of appeasement, since the personal law of other religions was not touched, even when Article 44 of the Directive Principles of the Constitution spoke of a Uniform Civil code applicable to all religions." In 2017, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee "appointed her close aide and Bengal Urban Development Minister Firhad Hakim as the chairman of the newly formed Tarakeshwar Development Board (TDP) in Hooghly district," news18.com. Tarakeshwar is a 288-year-old Shiva temple revered by Hindus. "Another issue that still deeply rankles is government control over Hindu temples, while places of worship of other religions remain untouched," wrote Verma. In 2017, when asked to link their scholarships to Aadhaar card number, the names of 1,97,360 children disappeared from Madrasas in Uttarakhand and the total amount spent on scholarships dropped from Rs 145 million to Rs 20 million per year, eurasiantimes.com. A survey by Pew Research Center found that, "Across the country, most people (84%) say that to be 'truly Indian', it is very important to respect all religions." "But Indians' commitment to tolerance is accompanied by a strong preference for keeping religious communities segregated." 67% of Hindus think Hindu women, and 65% think Hindu men should not marry into other religious communities, while 80% of Muslims think Muslim women, and 76% think Muslim men, should be stopped from marrying anyone from another religious community. "Some of the most controversial and divisive political positions around religion, such as the bogey of Love-Jihad sustain themselves not on facts but the widespread disapproval of such ideas in principle. These findings, if true, suggest that radical secularism of 'woke' politics is unlikely to work politically in India and mainstream politics will continue to pander to conservative values around both caste and religion," wrote Roshan Kishore. "If Hindus were taken for granted in the first phase, Muslims are directly in the line of fire in the second phase. Both in the 2014 and 2019 parliamentary elections, BJP won with an absolute majority of seats, but there was not a single Muslim among its winning candidates, certainly a first for any triumphant political party in the history of Indian democracy." "An investigation by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) found that Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), which caught the attention of the agency after the Burdwan bomb blast in 2014, had developed a different mechanism for recruiting new members in India. According to the NIA, JMB cadres used to marry Indian women to recruit their family members into the terror group, reported news agency IANS," timesnownews.com. This is a different version of Love-Jihad where law abiding people are turned into terrorists. "The good news is that while both Muslim appeasement and Hindu consolidation have succeeded in garnering electoral dividends, there are inherent limitations to the excesses of both." "The people of India know when and how to correct excess." True, but only because other political parties are adopting, what is labeled, 'soft Hindutva'. "I am a daughter of a Hindu family", asserted Mamata Banerjee and went on to recite 'Chindi Path', an ode to Goddess Durga, timesofindia. com. The same Banerjee who had appointed a Muslim in charge of a Shiva temple. Perhaps, liberalism is itself a religion. And is providing a balance between others.