New Delhi: No community, including Hindus, can claim majority status in India as it is essentially a country of people with various beliefs, Congress leader and former Union Minister Shashi Tharoor said here on Tuesday.

“There is no community in the country which can claim to be a majority. It is true that Hindus are majority but within the community there are caste, regional and linguistic differences. So within Hindu community also there are people with minority status and they experience it,” he said.

He was speaking at the fifth annual lecture of National Minority Commission (NCM).

Tharoor gave several examples of diversity within a common regional or caste belief. “Brahmins in Karnataka and West Bengal share the same regional belief but have distinct identities of their regions.

They get along better with people of their own places and origin even though if the other person follows a different religion,” he said.

Accepting that some minority communities do “suffer from greater disadvantages”, Tharoor said, “It will be wrong to generalise anything about India as there are 22 languages, 22,000 dialects and 85 political parties in our country. (PTI)