Two senior Union ministers, finance minister Arun Jaitley and home minister Rajnath Singh, underlined that India was a multi-religious and multi-cultural country where communities including Muslims, Jews, Parsis and Christians lived and thrived.
They were reacting to Obama's comment in Washington on Thursday that "acts of intolerance" experienced by religious faiths of all types in India in the past few years would have shocked Mahatma Gandhi. Earlier too, Obama, at the end of his three-day visit here recently, had made a strong pitch for religious tolerance, saying that India will succeed so long as it was not "splintered along the lines of religious faith."
Replying to questions from the media on the issue, Jaitley said, "That any society must be a tolerant society is something that each of us has to accept. It's good to be tolerant. India has a huge cultural history of tolerance. Any aberration doesn't alter that history."
The finance minister also noted that the best example of tolerance was sitting next to Obama in the form of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, when the statement was made. "It's a part of India's tolerance that even he found it comfortable and India found it comfortable to absorb him in the society," he added.
Reacting to the US president's comments, Rajnath Singh told reporters in Uttarakhand, "as far as religious tolerance is concerned, it is embedded in our Indian tradition. India is the only country in the world where all communities including various divisions of Muslims and all sects of Christians are present...In India, Parsis and Jews are also there."
"The uniqueness of Indian culture has been that there has never been discrimination on the basis of caste, community, religion or sect," the home minister added.
http://ift.tt/1i0dy5h President Barack Obama,religious "intolerance",Rajnath Singh,Mahatma Gandhi,Barack Obama
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