II
So, when enterprising Indians defeated British Colonialism, they took care to absorb all the “developmental” lessons. The one new thing was the need to remember periodically that the blood, sweat, and hunger of the labouring (in whom “sovereignty” resided, don’t you know) was rewarded every five years or so with a call to elect a new set of rulers of the same old vintage. They called it Democracy.
Never more to the fore in the year of the Lord, 2010, when the democratic state fires away at the little people from one end of the double barrel and prepares to showcase the realm to the world via the Commonwealth Games through the other.
Thus, in a throwback to Pico and Shakespeare, the Indian state displays its faculties of innovation and spending in the works it gets made at less than minimum wage, and, on the other side, plays the beast to man, woman, and child who have, alas, not inherited the pedigree of Renaissance Humanism. Recall the butcheries the Conquistadors were perpetrating as they sought to make of the white race the gold-plated inheritors of God’s selective intent; and recall that even as Jefferson was inking the Declaration (all men are equal etc., with them unalienable rights) he, like most of his distinguished peers—Madison, Washington, what-have-you—owned a hundred or more slaves (of whom, Howard Zinn tells us in his People’s History of the United States of America, some 50 million died during the slave trade. Some other estimates put the figure at 60 million.)
Peace and Justice Post 
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