As a side-bar link to the Ahmadiyya article Razib wrote about below, I found a similar story of outrage as American Sikhs excoriated Jay Leno for suggesting that Mitt Romney’s summer home was the Golden Temple. Usually you can find one fanatic to supply a juicy quote ripe for caricature–we are lucky, in this case, that the nut was Vayalar Ravi. He is India’s Overseas Affairs Minister and felt keenly that;
“It is quite unfortunate and quite objectionable that such a comment has been made after showing the Golden Temple….
The Golden Temple is the Sikh community’s most sacred place… The American government should also look at this kind of thing...
Freedom does not mean hurting the sentiments of others... This is not acceptable to us and we take a very strong objection for such a display.
In the title I listed two ways of characterizing the difficulty of modern liberal values to find a place within the pantheon of beliefs in South Asia. I like to think of my own as the “you kick my dog/you draw my dog having dinner with a cat” dichotomy. Vayalar Ravi is an Ezhava. He should feel, rather keenly, the long-run effects of being discriminated against, as a group, for no more than the accident of being born to Ezhava parents and know what that means to other groups within society (whether or not he thinks them to be marginalized.)
