Is India becoming an intolerant nation?

Becoming? Nope.
India has ALWAYS been an intolerant nation. Even before it was India we found way to
be and show intolerance to anything that was not 'our own': caste, religion, sex,
language, culinary habits : show me a metric and I will show you how we discriminated
and showed our intolerance.
Immediately after independence in 1947, when the leadership was avowedly secular,
India we saw a brief period when the State was not intolerant; it genuinely believed in
pluralism. We the people did not change, we continued to be intolerant but found little
help from the State. That lasted a short time only.
Within a few years we were back to habitual intolerance and sacrificing human rights at
the altar of political expediency. It does not help that we as a peoples have fragile egos
that get threatened by any small thing.

my vegetarianism way of life gets threatened by my neighbour eating meat.

my sexual urges are brought to fore because a woman I do not know and
have never met wears a short skirt.

someone's way of communing with their god, makes my god worried and
that makes me feel like lashing out.

someone making love with people of the same sex makes me worry that I
may get infected; naturally I have to stomp it out.
Given that we are a billion plus in numbers, we can find something to be intolerant
about all the time. Stupid political leadership does not help. This leadership is across
parties. Nothing specifically to do with the BJP or Narendra Modi. It is just that since
the BJP has absolute power, majoritarianism is adding fuel to intolerance.

The truth of the matter is, in my opinion, India is not getting any intolerant
but getting more noisier and insensitive.
The average Indian is neither very tolerant nor intolerant, but mostly indifferent to the
matters of caste or community, unless of course it impacts her immediate or everyday
life. Thus any average Indian, while upholding her own beliefs in her personal life and
harboring some vague stereotypes about people of other castes or communities,
generally do not indulge in riots everyday, or go on a violent killing spree.
Right from the days of partition and its bloody aftermath, major and minor communal
clashes and caste conflagrations were a periodical phenomenon in India. But even then
most of these skirmishes were strictly localized, and had personal rivalries or basic
livelihood issues than any fanatical communal frenzy for their origin. The general public
never approved of such hostilities, and the governments of the day mostly dealt with
them more as a law and order problem. The following link to a well analysed and well
argued scholarly discussion about the communal riots with documented data will make
the position clear

Page on nagarikmancha.org
Even in the recent period, according to data from the Ministry of of Home Affairs (MHA)
there had been 823 cases of communal violence in 2013, 644 in 2014, and 633 this year
up to October. It appears that there has not been any spurt in these incidents in the
recent past, and the position has remained nearly the same under both the erstwhile
UPA rule and the present NDA rule.
300 cases of communal violence in four months
So, the fact of the case seems to be that India has remained just as tolerant or intolerant
all along, but what makes the present situation more appalling is the spread and the
speed of news channels, and most importantly, their deafening decibel levels.
Particularly the role played by the social media, which seem to lack both authenticity and
accountability, in both fomenting trouble, and in the equally strident backlash to events,
has over dramatized the whole scenario, and makes it appear as though the country is
getting intolerant by the day. Absence of any strong response from the Government, and
lack of restraint on the part of opposition, have further vitiated this atmosphere.
PS : It may be interesting to note that the Ministry of Home Affairs itself in the report
quoted above cites
misuse of "social media" was the main cause of communal conflicts. It also mentioned
gender-related issues and property disputes as other major causes.
Yes, my country has become Intolerant.
-Where people can knock the doors of the court and ask for the mercy for a person who
has been convicted of murdering innocent people by the highest court of law.
Yes my country has become intolerant
- Where terrorists can attack the temple of democracy (Parliament), and still
sympathizers will petition for mercy.
Yes my country has become intolerant
- where 59 innocent people burnt alive and what people remember is all that succeeded
this tragic incident.
Yes my country has become intolerant
- where native residents were asked to convert to certain faith or flee from their beloved
native place or get themselves killed by the tolerant people.
Yes my country has become intolerant
- where a person belonged to a certain faith assassinated our beloved prime minister,
and just to avenge her death , innocent people belonged to a faith that of a murderer
were killed.

Yes my country has become intolerant

- where a person killed and seriously disabled poor pavement dwellers and the killer is
still walking free on the streets.
Yes my country has become intolerant
- where terrorists are being treated as a son in-law of the nation.
Yes my country has become intolerant
- where a hard earned money of taxpayers are being looted openly and nobody dare to
speak against the looters.
Yes my country has become intolerant
- where a nations defense minister and a superstar of a country strip searched at an
airport in a foreign nation.
Yes my country has become intolerant
- where people are killed for speaking on unity
Yes my nation has become intolerant
- where admission is given based on the cast rather than the socio-economic status of
that person.
Yes my nation has become intolerant
- where if one people makes a remark against certain community becomes anti national,
whereas if a person belonged to a certain community openly instigate people to kill
people who are not from their community.

Yes my nation has become intolerant

- where intellectuals have become selective on condemning the issues which malign the
nations image.

Filter bubbles. I was going to put this as #1 because it's a very compelling reason.
Today, as opposed to, say, 20 years ago, there are algorithms working to ensure that we
are exposed mainly to opinions that we agree with. For example, if I upvote a right-wing
Hindu fundamentalist comment on Quora, Quora detects engagement and feeds me a
bunch of similar questions with similar comments on my news feed. Similarly my
Facebook feed is biased toward points of view that I have previously endorsed by 'liking'
certain articles or pages. The Whatsapp groups I am a part of reflect primarily 'people
like me', and on Twitter I follow people who mostly say things that I agree with. More
and more communication going online, I'm in a filter bubble of communication which
makes me think that everyone in the world thinks like me. This has the effect of making
fringe opinions take on the appearance of mainstream views: if one person thinks Mani
Shankar Iyer should be assassinated for his views and vents about it online, he receives
reinforcement from his filter bubble, 'guaranteed' upvotes and likes from people who

have self-selected as sharing his opinions in general. Paradoxically, the social internet is
making us less tolerant, by exposing us to a homogeneity of views; this channels bigotry
into online and offline violence.

Celebrate reformers, junk reforms

We celebrate the life of a Saint Ramanuja or an E V Ramasamy (Periyar)
or a Mahatma Phule or a Raja Ram Mohan Roy. We hold out their lives as
examples of how a tolerant Indian society allowed them large space to
propagate their views while we conveniently forget the fact that few were
actually converted by them to support the causes they espoused. I suspect
that celebrating the reformers while junking the reforms is a way of
atoning for our guilt and shame.
There are temples that still bar the entry of dalits. Every superstition and
custom that Periyar campaigned against remains deeply entrenched and
practised. In fact, some have acquired pernicious proportions. Time was
when a Sikh and a Hindu could love, marry and live happily ever after in
Punjab and elsewhere. Marriage between a Christian Nadar and a Hindu
Nadar was common in Tamil Nadu. Today, in some parts of India, if a Hindu
(boy or girl) is friendly with a Muslim (girl or boy), they are visited with grave
consequences. The fact that there are more examples of inter-religious
consortium cannot hide the other grim truth that there are many more
examples of religious intolerance and persecution.
There is reason to believe that intolerance is on the rise. Look at the
number of things that we ban beef, jeans, books, cuss words, NGOs,
websites, Internet services.
Look at the growing exclusiveness Muslim candidates may not apply for
jobs, single women are not welcome as tenants, this apartment building is
only for vegetarians.
The intolerance brigades are now organising themselves and mutating into
movements: ghar wapasi, love jihad.
It is intolerance that brought down the Babri masjid. It is intolerance that
proclaims that all history written so far is a left-wing distortion. It is
intolerance that finds fault with a thoughtful and insightful speech of Vice
President Hamid Ansari that explored the many challenges faced by the
Islamic community in India.