I am reminded of my grandfather, Mahatma Gandhi's, words: No one can oppress us more than we oppress ourselves. By submitting to tyranny, to thoughtlessness, to downright injustice and to senseless intolerance we are only encouraging the maniacs on the fringes to hijack our societies and our religious beliefs.

This is what I meant (in my earlier submission) by the Culture of Violence that pervades human society. We tend to look at violence only in terms of its physical manifestation and ignore the violence of thought, word and deed. It is this "passive" violence (or non-physical) that eventually lserves as fuel to spark physical violence. So, stopping physical violence requires us to acknowledge and eradicate the "passive" or non-physical violence that we commit in society all the time. For peace to prevail we need harmony in human society and to achieve harmony we have to build relationships that are based on respect, understanding and acceptance. If Islam is hijacked by a small group of inhuman and radical elements it is for the larger Islamic society to wake up and do something about it.

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A few months ago when I met His Holiness The Dalai Lama in Ithaca the first question he asked me was "What did your grandfather feel about secularism?" I was taken aback and asked: "Why are you asking me questions?" His Holiness said: "Wherever I speak about secularism the American audiences seem to reject the idea because secularism has come to mean rejecting your own faith." I think this is the crux of the problem. A gross misunderstanding of what secularism should mean.

For my grandfather secularism did not mean rejection of your own faith or any other faith. It meant respect of all faiths and the belief that there is only one God but people have different names and ways of identifying that one God. That is why grandfather always said to us: that religion is like climbing a mountain. We are all striving to get to the same summit so why should it matter which side of the mountain we choose to climb from?

For four generations prayers of the Gandhis have been held at home in private or with friends and others interested in joining in a neutral place where no symbols of any particular religion are displayed. There is only a candle in the middle and the prayers contain hymns from all the major religions of the world. Grandfather treated all religions as equal and with equal respect. This is something we still find very difficult to do in the United States.

The Archbishop has a valid point which has been buried under heaps of angry and ignorant responses. When a society becomes multi-cultural it stands to reason that some accommodation has to be made. I think there needs to be an honest, intelligent amalgamation of different cultural laws into the existing system so that different cultural groups can feel a sense of being accepted by the majority and also feel a sense of integration.

If a citizen of a country is made to feel like an alien then that society cannot be united and cohesive. I think the key word in the Archbishop's suggestion is "incorporation". There needs to be a dialogue with the different ethnic groups to understand what aspects of their personal law is important enough to be incorporated into the general law. This process should not lead to situations where one ethnic group claims it will be governed only by their own laws and not be the general laws established in a country.

It should also not lead to a situation where people find it convenient to escape rigorous punishment by converting to another religion and seek to be governed by that law. For example, in the seventies when I was a journalist in India I discovered that the general law that prevailed then made it very difficult for couples to get a divorce. The easy way out was for people to convert to Islam and get a divorce under the Sharia law by simply pronouncing three times in the presence of a witness "I divorce thee". The process became so easy that one could divorce and remarry in about an hour and it was all legal. This form of exploitation is what one needs to guard against.