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I shook my head. "I must admit that I had my doubts about me being able to convince someone in India of the truth that Mary has discovered in America," I said. "But then I realized that she had put the truth on the table at a time when we in America stood far away from it too, in our own narrow-minded thinking. We had our own Dalits in the form of Negro slavery. While the slavery ended to some degree, the racial segregation became actually worse. God only knows how many Negroes were burnt alive or otherwise killed by the Ku Klux Klan. There was a time when the KKK was supported directly from the White House. It took an enormous struggle for the Negro in our country to gain the most basic civil rights. In many respects, the Negroes remain still the Dalits. Mary was daring by raising the image of the whole of society to a higher level, the level of a human being with a God-reflecting divinity. She put this on the plate of society as the truth of our humanity. That truth still remains to be acknowledged, even in America. Obviously this higher truth exists on a higher level and requires a higher level of thinking that needs yet to be attained. The ugly things that are happening all around us, including in America, therefore don't represent the real dimension of our humanity. They are a part of a trap that we got pushed into by imperial processes, which we must get ourselves out of. And I think we can do this, but not by force or by terror. It can only be done by uplifting the whole society. Force and terror drag us deeper into the quagmire. The ugly things that you told me about that is happeing in India do not change the reality that we are all human beings on this planet and children of a single humanity. This fact remains, no matter what we want to believe to the contrary. The fact is that we are all together one people. We tend to deny that truth and act according to that denial, but deep down, the truth remains the truth and we all know it. Those who say that they don't, are already dead even though they still breathe."
"Try to tell this to the Dalit children," Indira replied. "The Dalit children make up the majority of the millions of children who have been sold into various types of bondage by their own parents, often for nothing more than to pay off debts to their upper-caste creditors. We have forty million people living in bondage this way, possibly for the rest of their life. To them your talk is a 'pie in the sky' fantasy. Or try to tell your truth to the Dalit women that face the triple jeopardy of their caste, their class, and their gender. The Dalit women are raped, almost at will! Do you understand what this means? Our girls are forced into prostitution to the upper-caste Thevars and to the village priests. What effect has this on a person's self-perception as a worthy human being? That is why sexual abuse and violence against women is often used for political purposes by the woman's own landlords, and also by the police. It's a means to crush their dissent, to crush their very idea of self-worth. For this end the perpetrators often resort to inflicting collective punishment. That happens routinely, Peter. They call it, 'teaching them a lesson.' Of course, women always bare the brunt of the hurt that is being dished out in collective punishment, especially when the police seek relatives that they can't find. They arrest the women in such cases. The women are being tortured in custody, in order to break them, or to inflict punishment on them in retribution for their male relatives. This happens quite often when the authorities cannot capture the men. The women are punished instead. Still, they haven't gone as far as bringing in their children and torturing them in front of their mothers by crushing their testicles in a vice as this happens in the more 'civilized' countries, by which the mothers are broken by the screams of their children. But that may yet come to India too."
"They wouldn't treat a dog as badly," I interjected. "But under the yoke of fascism this has been normal for ages. Joseph de Maistre wrote an essay once of how the rulers routinely executed people by breaking the victim's limbs with a mace and threading the broken limbs into a wheel where the victim would be left to die in unspeakable agony. Maistre said that this was necessary to keep society under control for the protection of the imperial system."
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