India, protecting your prejudice

Subject: India, protecting your prejudice

If indeed we are entering a period in history when 'what is true' and 'what is a false' is indistinguishable and the media, who we rely on to disseminate the news we receive  with some sort of impartiality are complicit,  where is civilisation as we know it to go. The time honoured assumption that what we read, although biased, did address a specific subject which metaphorically lived and breathed was real and, for many, important.
Reading a book by Arundhati Roy in which she describes  in detail the political use of mis-information to stir up an already volatile society, the Hindu and the Moslem populations of India. The BJP with the connivance of Narendra  Modi, the current Prime Minister planted fake evidence of Muslim mobs killing Hindus with the sole aim of seeking to start an uprising of revenge and instability. The political platform of the BJP is heavily slanted towards law and order and therefore, creating 'disorder' suited their plan.
The India we hear about in the Western Press the largest democracy, an India of untapped economic potential, a future force but what we never hear about is the killing and the torture or the brutality meted out by the police. We never hear about the endemic deceit and corruption, the misappropriation of millions of rupees and the need to continually pay a bribe to get things done. A society which is layered like no other, where being obsequious is a prerequisite to keeping your job. Where people from a higher caste have a inbuilt disdain for people from a lower caste and continually laud their superiority over those born to be subservient.  
In fact subservience seems to be embedded in any society which designates what and who people are and, importantly, can be from birth. It fits any society in which  'class' is dominant and whilst subtly hidden within the folds of etiquette and social structure it inhibits growth in this country, just as it does in India.
A horse with its fetlock cut will never race. A man who has to doff his cap and touch his forelock will never be Prime Minister. In this country we designate attainment by school and accent, why else would that buffoon Boris Johnson hold high office and throughout the world nepotism speaks to power.
It's a sad reflection that for all our platitudes about justice, morality, ethics and fairness we still find ourselves hobbled by the family circle you were born into.
But in India it is much worse since the caste system encompasses a whole people and defines the sort of work they are "allowed" to do. It is insidiously cruel since it doesn't value the individual at all and simply stigmatises the person as a group which for the whole of their life they are destined to end as they begins.
Hindus seem to pride themselves as being compassionate and intellectually sound.
When they appear on a television to debate their religious views they seem to offer much less religious 'hype' than say the Muslim, Jew or Christian. Their image is one of benign tolerance, much like the Sikh and one often comes away with a wish that our mix of Christianity, Judaism and now the incessant noise and propaganda of the Muslim would have this tolerance.
And yet laying behind this philosophical justification for an ordered religious life lies the containment of people into caste and worse, that 'outside' even this categorisation system of caste lie people who are not even worthy of that, the Dalits the Untouchables.
How can these calm, serene religious philosophers lose their objectivity by denouncing whole swathes of people to be banished to a life of contempt, of being judged  "untouchable" as if physical contact would would defile your character.
Mankind is truly amazing by the depths it is determined to go to protect its prejudice.