Mainstream WeeklyLook as far back as you will, all the way to the Garden of Eden, and you will find that the chief source of the power of ruling establish-ments has been the generation and possession of knowledge.
Thus Adam and Eve were thrown out of Paradise for the sin of getting to acquire knowledge of good and evil. Prometheus was enchained by Zeus for stealing the knowledge of fire. Socrates was obliged to drink hemlock for sharing knowledge with the generation next. Vedic mantras were forbidden entry into the earholes of Shudras and women, and Sambook, the Shudra, was decapitated for daring to meditate, the Valmiki Ramayana tells us. Koranic secrets were monopolised by the male of the species. And, think how knowledge of the divine was meant to be imprisoned in classical languages to which the hoi polloi could have no access; and how those that dared to make translations into vernacular often suffered incalculable ostracisms or were burnt at the stake.
When it comes to the distribution of rights in the secular world, the story is roughly the same. Think how school and higher education have tended worldwide to be restricted to the dominant castes and classes.
The grave fault of the human rights activists who have just been arrested is that they share knowledge of the provisions of the Constitution of India with Indian citizens who, despite seven decades of practising democracy, have remained disenfranchised from the promises of constitu-tional democracy.
The arrested activists are Arun Ferreira, Sudha Bharadwaj, Varavara Rao, Gautam Navlakha and Vernon Gonsalves.
Where the ritual of voting has remained necessary in