By Badri Raina, ZNet, July 7, 2010
I
Do you remember that day in 1836 when a desperately hungry twelve year old English orphan “asked for more”?
Yes, Oliver Twist I mean.
Neither the honourable Board of the Workhouse nor indeed the British Crown had ever before encountered a more perfidious enormity than an orphan asking, actually asking, for more “food” than the three stipulated bowls of watery thin gruel.
Like a bolt of rebellious lightning the word spread. The danger was atonce recognized to be of gargantuan proportions, leading to the sagacious decision to palm off the orphan to work for an undertaker. From whose likely clutches only Providence intervened to save the famished child.
That recalcitrant history seems now to be repeating itself in India, an erstwhile colony who was to learn great and good lessons from the canny practices of the colonizer, chiefly of how to keep the rabble just this side both of life and death. For dying, they bring disrepute to the realm, and living a human existence they threaten its continuance. But being barely alive, they cast that vote, come hustings, and return to beg for more.
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