Going Back to Gettysburg
Autobiography of a Corrupt Indian
by
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This year marks the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther king’s long march to Washington and 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. I believe that the American Civil War was the greatest event in world history. It was the only armed conflict in the entire history and mythology of the human race that was fought for over four years over the rights of other “helpless” and oppressed people, and not over the rights and possessions of the combatants. Right from the epic wars of Troy and the Mahabharata war of India down to the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions, among so many others, those who fought for change of regime were fighting for their own rights, privileges and possessions or merely to satisfy the egos of their masters. This book deals with the “unfinished tasks” that will have to be dealt with non-violently in the manner outlined by Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address and carried forward by Martin Luther King by his Long March to Washington in 1963. The most important of these unfinished tasks is caste discrimination in India. It is worse than racial discrimination and it has been repeatedly condemned by the European Parliament as a complete violation of the Human Rights of about 260 million people in South Asia, most of whom live in India. Lincoln fought his four-year war which caused the death of over 600,000 soldiers over the rights of merely four million Blacks The book is also a comparison between Indian and Western democracies. India is supposed to be the largest democracy in the world but how has the experiment worked in practice. But is it not a return to naked feudalism in the garb of democracy? This book contains a secret note by the US embassy in India to the State Department in Washington on how corruption has become a way of life in India . It is also a deeper look into the author’s own life how what is considered respectable and acceptable in India is the anti-thesis of democratic values as they are practiced in the West. It also shows how with advances in technology, chiefly in the field of information technology many of the social evils will disappear even as the green revolution wrought by Nobel Laureate Norman Berlang and his team made us self-sufficient in food and made it possible to banish hunger provided the social and political system give enough money to the poor to buy food. One of my great regrets in the author’s life has been that his father refused to send him to our Nobel Laureate poet Ravindra Nath Tagore’s open air university in Santiniketan to be an artist when he became a matriculate in 1943. Had he conceded his son’s request this copious book on the state of Indian society would not have been necessary. Instead, he would have just drawn a caricature of it as the fattest man on earth with the restless head of a monkey, showing the leadership hungry for power, and the feet of a crane depicting the lower classes. He has to move about on a wheel chair because his feet and knees cannot support the weight of his burgeoning stomach which represents the nouveau riche middle class and is prepared to absorb everything that comes its way, from a pie or cent to a million dollars or more, to satiate its hunger for money to which there seems no end in sight. The more it receives the more it wants, laving nothing for the poorer sections who constitute the feet of the body and who have been reduced by it to the status of its ‘slaves’ with no wants of their own and denied what another Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen calls their minimum “entitlement” or wage. In the Parliamentary elections of 1967 the late Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia, the great socialist leader of olden times, had told the author in an interview that Parliamentary democracy could succeed in bringing social welfare policies in India only if it was backed by street demonstrations. Nowhere in the world had Parliament been an instrument of social change. At best it maintained the status quo. This book exhorts Indians to develop a culture of non-violent protests against acts of injustice as is done in Western democracies. The author M.B. Lal is an 85-year old retired journalist who has served The Statesman for 31 years till 1988 and has written several books.
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About the Book
The book Going back to Gettysburg will be bought like hot cakes in intellectual circles in both America and India because it is a light presentation of the uniqueness of the American Civil War (1861-1965) in which 6,00,000 American soldiers, mostly White, laid down their lives to secure the release of four million Black slaves in America. It has no parallel in the history and mythology of the world. It is the only war where combatants fought over the Rights of other oppressed beings and is one of the starting point of the Human Rights movements in the world. This book shows quoting authorities like a secret note from the U.S. Ambassy to the American State department leaked by Wikileaks and numerous reports in American and British Press of how the middle class has enriched itself. The author has given numerous shady deals of his own. Besides, the book contains his own studies of middle class corruption which no newspaper would publish because they are themselves huge beneficiaries of the general loot. The book the contrasts between the Indian habit of quietly submitting to injustice and the Western habit of staging street demonstrations on public issues.