Ignorance is not peculiar just to the Indian media

Most of the electronic and print media are happy to do the coverage on Christmas on the Christmas day and greet the viewers/ readers on Id and Diwali. They think that is how religion ought to be covered. There is need for greater understanding of religion to understand even contemporary political issues.

How many journalists know that the Shankara of Kaladi set up only four Peeths, though there are more than five holy men calling themselves Shankaracharyas?

Even the secular Press in the West is as dismissive of religion as the Indian media. Journalists there are as ill-equipped as Indian journalists are.

For example, the recent developments in Pakistan cannot be understood without understanding the significance of Sharia and what the Taliban stand for. Nearer home, why did lakhs of Muslims come out on the streets to protest against the Danish cartoonist who drew cartoons of the Prophet? Or, can the clashes that regularly occur in Lucknow between Shias and Sunnis be understood without knowing about the earliest schism in Islam?

As the word 'Jihad' has different connotations. There are two types of jihad, the superior and the inferior as M.J. Akbar explains in his book The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict between Islam and Christianity. The war against non-believers comes in the latter category while a person's war against the evil in his mind belongs to the former. The "Ram Ram" with which a pious Hindu villager greets another is different from the "Jai Sri Ram" heard from the BJP platforms.

In India, Nehru's death in 1964 "brought a spurt of challenge to the hegemony of the secularist Congress Party, including from Hindu-nationalist elements. (A proposal to create a new militant Hindu organisation was floated only three months after Nehru's death, and by 1966 it had taken shape as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP)".

However, In the 2006 Palestinian election, victory of Hamas was the a defining moment. One of its first acts was to replace the PLO flag flying over the Palestinian Parliament with its emerald-green banner heralding, "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet".

Earlier, Osama bin Laden of al Qaeda had left nobody in doubt when following 9/11, he declared that "this war is fundamentally religious. Under no circumstances should we forget this enmity between us and the infidels. For, the enmity is based on creed".

Osama bin Laden can never be accused of ambiguity. He has a list of grievances against the Western world. The starting point is not the creation of Israel or the invasion of Afghanistan by the erstwhile Soviet Union. In his own words: "Following World War 1, which ended more than 83 years ago, the whole Islamic world fell under the Crusader banner". Here, Gandhi and Osama are on one side, for Gandhi had launched the Khilafat movement, mainly to win the sympathy of the Muslims for his cause.

Today, Ataturk's secularism is under increasing attack in Turkey. The spectre of the Taliban haunts PakistanSri Lanka. In India, the splintering of the so-called secular parties to the advantage of the BJP is something that cannot be ruled out in the ongoing general election. while the imminent defeat of the Tamil Tigers raises fears of Buddhist Sinhala dominance in Srilanka.

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