Tolerance-intolerance debate: Here are some instances of acceptance throughout India

Sanjay Leela Bhansali may have never seen it coming. Protests against his film Bajirao Mastani led to shows being cancelled last week, because the protesters did not like the idea of the Maratha hero Bajirao dancing in the film. Bhansali’s movie was expected to compete at the box office with the Shahrukh Khan-Kajol starrer Dilwale, racing towards the Rs 100-crore mark.Instead, both faced violent protests. That Khan issued an apology, for hurting sentiments in the past, did not work either. Khan, after all, had spoken out against rising intolerance in early November. Bhansali had just made his characters sing and dance.
The tolerance-intolerance debate in India has often trudged such depths, with multiple protests, some of them against protestors of a different hue. Not everything is about religion either. There seems to be a general impatience for anything we cannot agree with. Movies, books, satire, an alternative sexual identity or different political views — anything can lead to violent protests and demand for a ban or a boycott (even jail, if you lampoon or question some chief ministers). Take for example the India-South Africa cricket one-day match in Cuttack on October 5. As it became clear that India was headed for a disagreeable loss, spectators started hurling bottles onto the ground.
The Cuttack match had happened within a week of a gruesome murder that defined this debate: the Dadri lynching incident. On September 28, 50-year-old Mohammad Akhlaq was lynched at Bisada village, in Uttar Pradesh, after it was alleged that he had killed a cow and stored beef in his house. This was the other end of the spectrum in the intolerance debate, with a tragic and gory outcome. The Dadri incident dominated the discourse for the next month and a half as the nation focused on the assembly elections in Bihar, and the politicians latched on. The chaotic and hyperbolic discourse around the subject led nowhere. Even after President Pranab Mukherjee and prime minister Narendra Modi spoke about it, the atmosphere refused to improve. And it carries on, waiting for its next flashpoint.
There was one unitary strain in the debate that got lost in the din. While one side claimed intolerance has increased, the other said India was perfectly tolerant and the intolerance brigade’s problem was in their political views. In effect, both meant that through history India has been a land of tolerance or rather a land of acceptance and assimilation. Truth always has shades of grey in it. ET Magazine decided to seek out this strain of the debate and test it further. We sought out instances of tolerance and acceptance throughout India, where people have reached out across various lines of acrimony. Here we present (10) stories that talk about acceptance and assimilation of the other, stories of how people participate in each other’s religions, of how powerful people tolerate being made fun of and how Indians learn to co-exist with hitherto unknown ideas of transsexuality and same-sex orientations. Also, at the end you will find an interview with Sartaj Akhlaq, elder son of Mohammad Akhlaq and find out how he and his family is trying to make peace with the tragedy.