Getting Indian Democracy Right

This is an article by Rohini Hensmen that critics Arundhati Roy's ideas. Please visit the links below:

http://kafila.org/2010/04/10/getting-indian-democracy-right-rohini-hensman/

I have posted the comment in response to it as well. It is reproduced below:

This is a brilliant critique that can come from someone as passionate
and committed as Rohini. She has done great service in warning us not
to swallow all that comes from Arundhati with mighty eloquence and
glamour. Too often we tend to take freedom in India for granted. Rohini
almost instinctively compares democracies in Sri Lanka and India and
lets her most deep rooted thoughts to flow out in this essay. I know
from my personal interactions with Rohini in 2005 as well as via my
stay in Sri Lanka in 2008; one needs more than an eloquent mind to
understand. One needs an experience of being caught in the middle of
cross-fire. This essay has that touch of deepest rooting in real world
there out and real world there within. One world is not at war against
the other.

Violence has a peculiar quality. Before it gets administered on the
target groups’ i.e Indian State for Maoists and Maoists in tribal
heartlands for the Indian State, it engulfs completely the respective
selves and only then it is able to overflow and inflict other. So I am
deeply sensitive to the deep traumas that Indian State as well as
Maoists is undergoing in this process.

Things do not stop here. It goes a step ahead and violence becomes
an addiction. Structures get formed getting used to human sacrifices
as necessarily for once own survival. Violence without any of them
knowing becomes a virus that begins to act out its visions through
Maoists as well as Indian State.

Violence is more fundamental than just a problem of adivasi people.
Violence is also the problem of corporate that have been accumulating
great amount of wealth by inflicting violence. At a very base level
violence spreads hatred, sense of revenge, spiral of misery and
accumulative guilt of all those involved in planning and executing
this irrespective of the fact as to whom it is used to defend and
under the garb of any of the isms. Violence is smart virus, it covers
itself and benefits from all the warring sides! Any war has self
defeating logic irrespective of who wins and who looses. Violence is
also very deeply attractive and seductive at the same time. It is a
lethal combination in all the senses that presents itself as solution
to grand problems of contemporary times. But people and parties who
use it irrespective of the fact that whether they ‘win’ or ‘loose’ in
violent exchanges of varying intensities both parties becomes captives
of violence.

India has produced greatest enlightened one in Sidhartha Gautama and I
owe my thoughts and actions to him. It is never difficult to overcome
temptations of violence. Where there is a will there is a way!

Sebastian Rodrigues