Never Before Has the Country Been Divided Like This!

It's actually true that post 2014, there has been polarization. The people of the country are divided like never before. The divide between Hindu nationalists and leftist-liberals is clear, complete, absolute and deeper than before.
Earlier I had a few of them liberals in my circle and we used to hang out together, have coffee, lunch and debate and discuss this and that. People had a few things to say about every subject and that at times happened to include history, politics and religion. But most were apolitical. We could leave aside those subjects and endlessly discuss how plastic Aishwarya Rai was, whether Chetan Bhagat's books had any substance and so on.

2014 changed all that.
The atmosphere was charged with politics. No one could be apolitical anymore. Everyone had to take a stand and be on one or the other side of the fence. Fence sitters had no choice but to become part of the national discourse.
In fact the fence had been shifted to the right so that even those who had been masquerading as neutral all these years by saying meaningless things like 'I am not judgmental’, ‘I don't want to hate’, ‘all are children of God' now found themselves to the left of the fence, and left of centre!
You get the point, if you are not with us, you are against us.

So weeks and months after Modi won, my liberal connections left my FB wall one by one - unable to stand my strong pro BJP views and Islamic exposé, or else, I blocked them off.
One of them left bang on May 14 when BJP won. When the whole country was euphoric over the end of ten years of UPA and Manmohan, this Malayali’s was worried that Modi may ban beef. Seeing that on my wall, I told him not to worry, he could use Kerala Muslims who had connections with Pakistan's ISI and import his beef from there. And that was the end of ten years of our friendship. Now you understand what kind of a divide 2014 created!

What contributed to the divide most, was the leftist-liberal's sense of entitlement. The years before 2014, they were allowed to have their views - against Babri demolition, against post Godhra, against RSS and we right wingers dared not breathe a word or a whisper opposing those views or we would be dismissed as fanatics and fundamentalists. After 2014, when right wingers found their leader and their voice and started to express their views, the leftists would have none of that! They cried intolerance, saffronization, division and polarization and what not! That's when we saw how entitled the leftists were and that the politeness, courtesies, tolerance, accommodation and adjustment we had been extending to them all our lives, they were not ready to extend to us. Not an inch, not a needle tip!
And that made us angry and indignant!

Now when I bump into some liberal here or there, I don't bring up the subject of politics, in fact I don't talk to them at all, and if they happen to be discussing their beef (pun intended) in a group, I leave the place. Because they are not worth my time. I dismiss them as pseudo seculars; as low IQ cowards who piggy back on political correctness and don't have the courage for the truth, nor the intelligence to have an opinion of their own other than the media manufactured ones kept on the shelves, and hence not worth talking to. And I'm sure they dismiss me too.
As they raise the pitch and oppose even national anthem and Vande Mataram, I am offended by their very existence, and they are perhaps offended by mine. So we are divided. To the extent we don't even want to have coffee or lunch together, because we just don't see the point of it all.

But then when doodh ka doodh and pani ka pani happens, when the unmixable oil and water are separated, then you don't call that division, do you???
You call that clarity you call that disillusionment. You call that the moment of truth. Awareness. End of confusion. You call that focus. Direction and purpose. You call it the end of pretence and meandering. End of fence sitting. End of leftist hegemony over viewpoints and opinions.
And that's what Modi has done. He has mobilized even the most existentialist apolitical commoner and made him part of the national discourse, part of history writing. Even the most bovine and asinine materialist who had been content all his life with eating sleeping drinking shopping and saving money, has now awakened and become passionate about the nation and its leaders, for the first time in his life.
The right wingers who had been sidelined and even oppressed by Nehru and his likes are now confident about their views and unapologetically voicing the same.
So like I have said before, most of the good and bad aren't unconditional. Division an polarization too, can be a good thing when they divide what must never be mixed up in the first place.