Minister's War on 'Cultural Pollution': Purge or Politics?
On The Buck Stops Here, we debate: Is Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma's war on what he calls "cultural pollution" a swachh mission or saffron politics? On the show, the minister stands by his remarks on ending "cultural pollution". Explaining the phrase as "Western encroachment on Indian ideas", Dr Sharma says, "It's our misfortune that our textbooks are only in English, not in our own languages". "Old age homes", he says, is "a western idea" and an example of "cultural pollution". Author Shobhaa De asks him, "will cultural cleansing be next?"
