India displeased over Obama allegation of religious intolerance

India Friday expressed displeasure over allegation of religious intolerance in India by U. S. President Barack Obama made shortly after his high-profile visit to India last week.

Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Home Minister Rajnath Singh said that India was a multireligious and multicultural country where communities including Muslims, Jews, Parsis and Christians were present.

They were reacting to Obama's comment in Washington on Thursday that the "acts of intolerance" experienced by religious faiths of all types in India in the past few years would have shocked Mahatma Gandhi, the founder of modern India.

Last week, at the end of his three-day visit here, Obama also appealed to India to practice religious tolerance, claiming that India will succeed so long as it was not "splintered along the lines of religious faith."

"That any society must be a tolerant society is a fact 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 the history," said Jaitley.

Singh said that as far as religious tolerance is concerned, "it is embedded in our Indian tradition," adding that India is the only country in the world where all the communities including various divisions of Muslims and all sects of Christians are present... In India, Parsis and Jewish are also there."

"The biggest speciality of the Indian culture has been that there has never been discrimination on the basis of caste, community, religion or sect," the home minister added. Endi