The India of Old When my grandparents were my age, India's diversity and culture of inclusion were breathtaking. The country had dozens of synagogues, fire temples, towers of silence, churches and the like belonging to its various ethnic and faith minorities. One could dine with Baghdadi Jews in Madras, celebrate Norooz with Parsis in Lahore and experience the emotional depth of Easter in Peshawar.



In other words, the India of old had a lot in common with the America of today. My sincere hope is that we come to embrace this marketplace of ideas, hopes and dreams more fully than the revolutionaries of South Asia did 70 years ago this month, when violence and rioting tore apart the India my ancestors had built over 1,000 years along with their Hindu, Sikh, Armenian, Persian, Afghan, Parsi, Shia, Uzbek, Portuguese, and Jain neighbors (to name a only a few).



Today, there is no synagogue in Chennai (Madras), and the Parsis wept as they fled an intolerant Lahore beginning in 1947. The Buddhists, Hindus and Christians of Peshawar are no more. The beautiful Indian Haggadahs are museum relics, and the chants of monks infused with the smoke of incense ring out only in the minds of those of us who know that monastaries once dotted the land. The diversity of soulfulness and conscience has gone, and in its place, nativism and jingoism rule over South Asia.

Trump & The Racism of the Alt-Right

America is at a similar crossroads in our own history. The diversity of our country is astonishing. Partially because of that diversity, white supremacists banded together last year to deliver a minority-win by technicality to Republicans and Donald Trump in the elections. Trump's radical racial supremacy agenda threatens to upend America's pluralism and cultural mosaic. My family survived the exact same hubris that Trump brings to the White House during their experiences with the Partition of India in 1947. But they only barely survived Partition, and the India of tolerance, cultural exchange, rebirth and renewal was shattered in the process. Trump's divisiveness and bigotry was on full display recently as he harassed Sadiq Khan on Twitter following the London attacks. His revulsion towards non-whites in America and elsewhere has led to international incidents that have caused many to question America's place in the global system. In effect: Trump is partitioning America from the world.