This refers to the report, “Panic buttonIJ Mamata ready to embrace left to beat BJP” (November18).
It is amusing to note that while Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee were keen to forge a ‘secular front' to fight ‘communal forces', several Opposition leaders like Messrs Nitish Kumar, lalu Prasad and Mulayam Singh Yadav, and Ms Mayawati and J Jayalalithaa stayed away. CPI(M) leader Biman Bose ruled out the possibility of his party having any truck with Ms Banerjee or the Congress.
For Ms Gandhi and Ms Banerjee, secularism seems to have become a sick, compulsive mantra to be mouthed often, whereas in practice they appear fond of vote-bank politics. “There could be no India without secularism”, they say. Didn't they know that India was in existence several thousand years ago when the word ‘secularism' was not even coinedIJ India has always been secular because its overwhelming majority is broad-minded.