Curse you, Narendra Modi.
You're shooting all my nice, simplistic binaries to bloody red rags.
Monotheism = narrow-minded, intolerant, exclusionist.
Polytheism = broad-minded, accepting, inclusionist.
Here's a nice, pat example of Binary-Think that I suspect many pagans are familiar with. History provides us with just enough buttressing examples to make it look almost convincing.
Then along comes bloody-minded Indian premier Narendra Modi with his anti-Muslim Hindutva-Think, thus proving—insofar, at least, as Hinduism may be said to be polytheistic—that polytheists are just as capable of narrow, intolerant, exclusionary thinking (and behavior) as any monotheist.
As if we didn't already know as much from our own community.
Of course, we could make excuses.
We could say: Hinduism isn't really polytheist.
We could say: Hindutva isn't Hinduism, it's a misuse of Hinduism.
We could say: They're not real Hindus.
These, of course, are the same lame, unsatisfying excuses that everyone else makes when their co-religionists act badly.
Or, with a little more thought, we could say: In the policies of the Indian Right we see polytheism aping monotheism at its worst.
We could say: Here we see polytheism reconceived monotheistically.
