Crunch Time for India: Who Speaks for the People?

By Badri Raina


It should be obvious that India needs to be reclaimed and rescued both from the State and those who engage in self-defeating hinterland warfare.


What would Gandhi have done?


Walk from end to end of this beleaguered country, building bonds of self-respect, courage, love, and peaceful mass reistance.


We believe whether or not he would have succeeded (at Champaran he did, would he have at the Poscoe site?), that is the way we need to go. The cure for the ills of democracy is not a denial of democracy but insistently more democracy.


And more democracy can happen only when masses of people shame the State from its own hypocritical postulates and shame it into yielding economic control of the wealth of the nation besides the right merely to cast the vote. And when men and women of all castes and all religions come together to say “NO” to brutal obscurantisms that flourish at the behest of the haves who can provide money for unleashing both caste wars and religious riots.


And when men and women, remembering Gandhi, face those bullets, lose lives, but refuse to descend to the cruel bestialities practiced by oppressors of all persuasions and denominations.


Let the Indian democratic revolution begin.

- - -

Link to complete text:

http://www.zcommunications.org/crunch-time-for-india-who-speaks-for-the-people-by-badri-raina

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