DAN SANDERS MEMORIAL LECTURE
13th International Symposium
Mumbai, India, December 29, 2003 - January 2, 2004
 
Towards Democratic Pluralism: Challenges for Social Development in the 21st Century

Keynote address given by
Dr. Aruna Roy

Delegates to the 13^th bi-annual symposium of the IUCISD, Professor Shankti Khinduka, Professor Charles Cowger, Rekha Mammen and Goutham Menon (I am not calling you professors -please forgive me!) and friends who have come from Mumbai city because I met some outside. I am very happy to be here. It?s an honour and a privilege to be talking on peace and justice in memory of a person who probably spent all his life struggling for it. When I am invited to such gatherings I always have a struggle. I wonder whether I should or should not come, because very often I feel that the world I live in is too far away from places like this. But in the last ten years of India's history the ?poverty and affluence? debate has got subsumed in the larger issues of democracy and also in the issue of how we are going to retain democracy and fight fascist tendencies in this country.

 My dialogue with all of you is going to be as an Indian citizen with a desire for peace, a desire for harmony, the desire for justice, for equity, for equality, for a better future for all of us. Because as things stand today, borders are disappearing and smudged. It?s a peculiar thing that while all battles are for borders and national boundaries, in every way possible economic and social factors are trying to smudge those boundaries. It is really a dilemma for most of us who sit in little villages, how to reconcile the need for identities, the need for "sustainable development" - to see that our rivers and our land don?t get robbed, that we are abused, thrown out of our land, thrown out of our access to river waters, thrown out of everything - and yet be responsible. Really we are responsible for keeping the democratic debate alive. I don?t think in this country - I don?t know about the rest of the world - but in this country if the genuine democratic debate, if the genuine issue of people's politics is kept alive, it's kept alive by these little communities that are willing to fight, willing to struggle, willing to give up their lives, while the larger part of India just goes by.

So I think I have come here to share my concerns with all of you who are equally concerned about these things and somewhere sometime for a little bit - maybe one hour, two hours, maybe five days - boundaries disappear, colour disappears, nationalities disappear and we are all one large family  getting together to think about peace where we need to understand each other, perhaps disagree, and allow for disagreement and allow for differences because they will persist and therefore pluralism is important for me and important for all of you.

I am very glad to share with you some of the ideas that were developed. These ideas are not mine. They are ideas of several people. There is no such thing as intellectual property rights in my life. Every thought I have has been culled from innumerable things including talking to lots of illiterate men and women whom we think are uneducated. But we draw a line between literacy and education. They are definitely illiterate but they are not uneducated - they are my gurus. I don't think I have really had a set of such excellent gurus, not even in the institutions in which I studied in New Delhi or elsewhere or even trained for the IAS as these people have been. So I would acknowledge my debt to all those people and to people like Dan Sanders, that we are here today and talk.

If we talk about democratic pluralism, India is a challenge for India. Because in India we have really succeeded with one institution of democracy, which is electoral politics. We systematically go to the polls. Every five years we go and elect somebody to power. And therefore at one level if you look at the world India is a democracy and we can't dispute that. Because in a sense for the poor in this country, for all the people I represent and work with today, democracy is vital. It is the only system in which we can get our voices heard, in which we can make even a small difference to the people who rule us. Yet, the dilemma is that it is the same system, which assures us of equality and justice, that perverts it. So now we are in a catch-22 situation because we want democracy but we don?t want it the way it is today. So what do we do?

For India without pluralism there is no India- 17 languages? I am not a Bengali, which is a person born in Bengal, in the East of Bengal. I carry the name because my husband is from                      Bengal. I was born in Tamil Nadu that is in the south of India. If I talk my language my husband simply can?t understand a word of what I am saying. I live in Rajasthan, which is part of the ?Cow Belt?, where if I speak in English they think I am a colonial overhang. So I have to explain why English can be spoken and you?re still not a 'Christian' or a missionary or somebody who has come to convert or somebody who thinks that she should be a colonial overhang on India.

I really do think that some of us in my generation have become pan Indian, but the rest of India is not so. As we continue to merge and break these barriers in a very, very small part of India, in the rest of India, what is dominant today is caste. We are amazed to hear that in the recent elections in Rajasthan, we have had the largest number of caste parties. The caste in India, I don?t know how many of you know about it but anyway, since you are all sociologists and anthropologists you must know a little bit about caste. It is a pre-ordained social group into which you are born and from which you can never move. There is no mobility from caste, its worse than class. So you are simply fixed in that category. And now the need to get local identities has pushed us into a democratic politics in which we use that caste, so therefore we get narrower and narrower. We use religion, which is also to my mind a very limiting factor and should not be part of political debate. It is something, which is personal, which is important, which is part of our social and cultural heritage but should not be part of politics.

So, in the country with six major religions, with 17 major languages and hundreds of dialects, different ways of dressing, different ways of eating, it is impossible not to be pluralistic. So for us in India we can never ever stop the debate from creeping into practically everything we do. Whether it is the way we dress - the saree is draped in seven, eight, nine different ways. In Sri Lanka it?s worn differently, amongst the Coorgs, amongst the Gujaratis it is worn differently, amongst the South Indians and the Maharashtrians it is worn differently. So even the saree is worn differently. So we simply cannot think about it. And of course there are other modes of dressing. There is salwar kameez and there is the lehenga and there is the mekhla chadar and there are innumerable forms of dressing. Impossible! Impossible! Whatever you touch in this country has to be pluralistic. So I am very glad that I am with you here today to talk about what I see not only as a nationalist and a regional desire for unipolar decision making but an international kind of wave that everybody should be standarised. We all drink Coca-Cola, we all drink Pepsi Cola, we all go to McDonalds. We do all the same things in the same way. If there are any deviants from that then that's not right. So for us there is an international link to all our small local debates.

The most frightening thing that has happened to us in this country is the misuse of what is apparently democratic for completely fascist ends. We mustn?t forget that Hitler also won elections and he won popular elections. He was a popular leader. So where do you have social justice, the rule of law also come in somewhere? How do you get electoral politics to be responsible and accountable to law? How do you get systems of governance to be accountable to people? It is a big debate. Corruption, which is the outside façade of all sorts of things, is now rampant in this country. Electoral politics is rampant with corruption - there is liquor that is supplied, there is money that is given, the electoral ballot papers that are mismanaged, voting machines are tampered with - so even at an electoral level, at the level of fighting for an election, there is corruption. So when a politician pays money or bribes his way into seats of power, how can you expect that politician to be accountable, and how, and in what manner? And believe me it?s not just the politician. We blame the politician, but behind every corrupt politician there are four civil servants. Somebody puts up the file, somebody signs it, one man or woman who is responsible for the accounts also gives the accounts and the financial sanction, somebody goes and withdraws the money from the bank, somebody disperses it. So it is the civil services as well as politicians.

So for us to take for example what happened in Gujarat, two years ago last year, if you look at a popularly elected leader through the democratic process, we come into what we call ?majoritarianism? in this country today. Because it is, you have been elected. We can?t deny that. Somebody has been elected through the democratic process, but is that person - and because there is a majority, can you just upturn the law of the land? Can you just deny the rule of law? Can you deny justice? Can you just deny equality in a country in which the forefathers of this country, when they framed the constitution, really laid down all these as basic democratic values on which the country would thrive? Therefore we come to another major issue, which I think we have all shelved.

I read a very interesting book which said that politics cannot survive with ethics. We have shoved ethics, just buried it deep. In this country where we are inheritors of the most comprehensive, ethical political philosophy that we saw in the last century through Gandhi- how can we in this country talk about politics without ethics? But it is the current coinage. If you talk about ethics, they call you fools. Only fools talk about ethics, the wise don?t. Because if you get into the business of garnering votes, entering politics and are aspirants of power, then ethics is a handicap. So you shouldn?t talk about ethics. You know you must make do with what it is, you?re foolish, you are not practical. But there is no rule of law without ethics, there is no pluralism without ethics, there?s no tolerance without ethics and there is no peace without ethics. And none of us are willing to go onto a public platform and talk about the lack of social ethics, lack of political ethics. When I say us, I don?t mean you and me. I mean these politicians who use phrases which are very catchy to get votes and when you really go down to it, in every scam that has been exposed in the last so many years in this country, the people who have exposed the scams are in deeper trouble than the people who are really behind the scams. So, if you look at this country then you are really confused and you come to a conclusion that if you really work hard and you expose scams then all that happens to you is that you become individual victims, so the best thing is that you don?t do it.

So it is a vicious cycle. Somewhere, somehow this vicious cycle has to be broken. I come to you with a small example of what happened in a small village and - not a small village, but about 100 villages or so in a small part of India, when we got together to talk about electoral politics. We have to break some of the barriers of the so-called parochial mindset that I have been talking about - parochialism is really one of the most vicious binds into which we can get - if we want to have a better world, a better India, better Rajasthan, a better anything. And parochialism has really got us into the bind? And this is not only India and I would like to go a little beyond India and talk about all the various binds we?ve got into. Whether now every Muslim is a Talibanite? That is what many people think, which is ridiculous. Not all Muslims are Taliban. Nor all Hindus are Hindutava. We have differences even though we might be born a Hindu. And not all Christian's are ?X?. But we tend to club everybody together and there is a common - it?s not what we perhaps even write, but the way we use the language - getting more and more fragmented. I remember my brother, 25 years ago went to Belfast in Ireland and some of them caught hold of him and said, ?Are you Roman Catholic or a Protestant?? He said, ?I am not. I am neither a Roman Catholic nor Protestant. I was born a Hindu?. They said, ?That?s perfectly all right, but are you a Hindu Roman Catholic or are you a Hindu Protestant?? So that?s become our mindset. On the other side there are people like me, ?Are you pro or anti WTO. If you are pro WTO, I'll have nothing to do with you. I will not talk to you, I will not entertain you, I will not eat food with you?. We also get into rigid mindsets like that. Though mind you I would still think that the WTO is not a good idea, but I don?t see why I shouldn?t eat with you, if you think it is a good idea. So we have stopped dialoguing and that?s been a real tragedy in this country and, I think, elsewhere. I think we need to dialogue.

The more we get polarised, whether it is this issue or that issue, whether it is religion or development, whether it?s politics, whether it is culture, I don't think democracy or larger systems of peace are going to survive. I think we have a great point for dialogue and so what happened in Rajasthan, with the poor workers and peasants organisation? I'll just take two minutes off and I?ll go into it and I?ll just tell you a little bit - shrink myself into a small organisation, which is called the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan and tell you MKSS for short. It?s too much of a mouthful for others. ?Mazdoor? means worker, ?Kisan? means peasant, ?Shakti? means empowerment and ?Sangathan? means organisation.

Three or four of us went there in the beginning. We wanted to work in a paradigm which is quite popular in this country now, which are called non-party political groups. We also call ourselves people's organisations. We have a paradigm in which we don't take foreign funding at all. We don't take project funding, we don?t take institutional funds even from our own country. We exist on raising funds through other sources, and we can talk about it later if you are interested, but I'll just say that we raise it from other sources. We are accountable, we should be accountable, we should be transparent and we work through democratic politics to see that it works better.

We have all chosen different areas. We are called ?movement wallas?(people), because we have movements - we have the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the Fish Workers Forum, the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, and many others. So we pick up issues and on that issue we build a movement and it is people's politics. So we are political animals. We don?t consider ourselves NGOs in that sense. We don't think we are apolitical. We are definitely political but what we define is people's politics. The reason why we exist is because of the failure of representative democracy to raise our issues anywhere. We also exist because of the trade union movements? failure to organise the unorganised labour, to really take their issues further. We are really there because of the failures of many systems and we try to fill the gap.

In this whole thing the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan started working with issues like minimum wages, wages paid to workers, issues like land because we were deprived of land -  all the traditional issues. Every time we went to the government because, after all, the government holds the records and we have to get it from the government - we sat on hunger strikes, we did sit-down strikes, we sat on all sorts of strikes - but every time we went to the government, we were told we were liars.

There were always versions of the truth. There was one version, which was our version and there was one which was the officials? version, and there were many other popular versions. Now what was fact and what was fiction one could never make out. Finally, a small group of people - some ?illiterate? people ? said, ?Till those records come out we will never know who the liar is. So we must get the records out of the government.? And when we went and asked them and said to them,  ?Please can we see the records?? we were told, ?They are secret documents. You can't have access to it.? It's amazing!

All the British colonies have something called an Official Secrets Act which denies us access to any government document that they don?t want to show us. So it can be a list of poor people and they will tell you it is covered by the Official Secrets Act and you can't see it.  To break that and all other such things a movement began. It was a peoples movement, supported by 400 organisations in Rajasthan. We collected lakhs of rupees from public donations. Poor people gave us grain to eat.

(I would speak of) ?Civil Society? as against the ?People?, because as a person who represents the people I will never be let indoors into this five star hotel. The man at the door will stop me and say, ?What's your business? Why are you getting inside? You have nothing to do with it?. Though I might have built this hotel I can?t get in. So we are the people and then there?s civil society. Of course I am part of both. Today I am dressed well enough to be let into this hotel, tomorrow I may not be.

So civil society also got interested in this debate. Because what was the right to live for the poor was an issue of ethics, an issue of resources, an issue of infrastructure for the middle class - they wanted school buildings, they wanted roads, they didn?t want to be duped and made fools of. There are enormously interesting stories.

I want you to see that Aruna is not the Mazdoor Kisan   Shakti Sangathan. It?s certainly not the Right to Information Campaign. There are hundreds and hundreds of very good ordinary people who constitute the campaign. I?m only here because I speak English and I come from your class. So I would like you to see a little bit of that in a short film, and then we?ll talk a little more about that and then about the larger democratic process.

All the citizens of America, who catch Enron, may realise it?s not very different. In a sophisticated country, it?s sophisticated crime. In an illiterate and growing country it is more obvious. There is corruption everywhere. The point is, are we mature enough to take up this issue and fight against it? I'll just recall a small anecdote. I've lived so long in the villages of India; I have become a storyteller, so I can never finish what I have to say without telling a story.

My friend Shankar whom you heard singing (in the film), had been to America last year. He had gone on a lecture tour of the universities, talking only to Indians, talking about what India is really like and what the right to information, right to democracy, right to accountability are about, why we should fight against fascism in India, and the various forms it is taking. Now I remember in a place in North Carolina called Charlotte - we were talking to Indians - and when we showed this film, midway through it some Indians stood up and said, ?We don't want to see it. We have had enough stories about India's corruption.  We are proud Indians. We don?t want to hear this nonsense. Stop the film?. So I said, ?Please stop it. I didn?t come on my own. You invited me so I came, but if you don?t want to see it don?t see it.? Shankar said to them in Hindi - Shankar can?t speak English but he spoke Hindi and they all understood. He said, ?We are very proud Indians. We haven't left India to stay elsewhere. We are proud Indians and we love those people whom you dismiss as riff-raff, people who don?t really have the right to call themselves Indians. We think they are wonderful people. We live with them, and we like them and we love them and we care for them. We care for India, we care for and want a better India, we care for the right values. That is why we are here to tell you that if you want to support India, you must support it in the right manner. Make sure that people like those really get on with it. If you have any clout dialogue with the governments. Make them more transparent, insist on transparency. That's what you should be doing, that's why we have come.

I am saying this because very often the question is put to us, ?Why do you show the worst of India?? I am very proud that in India there are so many people's movements and groups that talk a very mature language. These people whom you saw in the film, if you ask them they would say they are fighting a national war. They wouldn?t say they are fighting for their wage. In the fighting for that wage, in the asking for employment in a small village, they are asking for the government of Rajasthan to be accountable. You are asking the government of India to be accountable.

In our huge campaign in the last two years on Right to Food we have asked for right to employment in the villages in Rajasthan. We have questioned national policy about storing food grains in huge godowns, not sending it to us when we were starving - for three and a half years there was no rain in Rajasthan - and selling it.

So it makes for democratic education. It makes for growth. It?s the only group, I think, in India, which will come on the street, which will stay on the street, which will force people to stop and think. So we are proud of being Indians, we are happy to be Indians. We are happy to be the way we are, we are also local people but we do have a vision of a better India. And a better India is an India in which to quote Gandhi, ?There is enough for every person's need, but not for every person?s greed?.

So there is a question of the way of life. It?s a question of use of energy resources, it?s a question of use of resources and raw materials, it?s a question of policy, it?s a question of priority, it?s a question of what you put first and what you put last. It's also a question of misuse of religion for political purposes and in the recent agitation for right to food our slogan in Hindi was "Trishul nahi! Talwar nahi! Hume kaam ka adhikar chahiye!" which means ?We don?t want violence on the basis of religion, we don?t want violence on the basis of caste, what we want is food.? 

That is our real issue and how many political parties really address these issues today? In India I would say that none of them really address it, because where we are there is no Left party. At least in the Left party?s manifesto it would be there. We don?t even have a Left party. So both the parties just pay lip service to the needs of the poor and we are still 50-60% of India and in the world - if you stretch this idiom a little further and take it to the world - if you look at economic policies today, there is no equality. Our markets are open, but foreign markets are closed to us. Even if you think there should be international trade, I have no argument. We have always had international trade. But it is not on the basis of equality. Our raw materials go out but everything that we get is frightfully expensive. Protect employment in other countries and our employment goes down. Subsidies in other countries are very high for farmers, for people who produce milk, who produce butter. But for us, the weaver who lives on weaving the saree and probably gets a thousand or fifteen hundred a month to survive, the farmer who gets his subsistence from farming, all their subsidies are being slashed and we are told, that it is wrong governance, its bad governance.

Somewhere there, there is a question of equality between countries, there is a question of justice between countries, so therefore it is important to have political independence. It is important to have economic independence. It is also important to have cultural independence. We have the right to decide, how I shall cultivate, what seeds I shall sow, I also have the right to decide what clothes I shall wear, what should be available in the market. These are all decisions, which have to be localised. So somewhere the debate doesn?t end with this film, with the MKSS. It does not even end with the boundaries of India. It goes on beyond international debate as you all know. But I just thought I?d make my point here because many of us are involved in things like this.

The most important thing this film makes clear, and our campaign has made clear, to larger and larger numbers of people is that you have to make a statement in the public domain. Now the middle class is also involved, the civil society is also involved, we have people who are film makers, who are lawyers, who are academics, all involved because we have now realised that there is no way out of making a statement in the public domain. If you are filmmakers you make it through film, if you are people like us you go onto the streets and shout, if you are writers you write, if you are civil servants you dig your heels in, if you are politicians you fight your own battles. But we have to take it into the public domain, and I think it is true internationally too, for all social justice, for all the things that you have internationally been talking about, if we don?t fight this battle we lose, because policies will be made.

There will be excellent policies. You?ll talk to the civil servants and they will agree with you. They will go back and when they implement the policies - it will be just the same. So what we really need is a transparent, accountable government, and a transparent accountable government will not come to be without a movement of people, citizens of the country, which ever country it is in. And internationally too we think there should be accountability. Pepsicola, Coca-Cola goes to Kerala and draws out so many million litres of drinking water when people don?t have drinking water. Then there is a question mark as to whether that Coca-Cola factory should actually be in Kerala where it is. Or there is the beer factory that came into Alwar, in Rajasthan where the water levels are very low and then you pump out litres of water for making beer; then there is a question mark. There are many such question marks. So therefore the debate goes outside the country.

Ultimately we also have to have a debate - and we started the debate in India - between representative democracy and participatory democracy. We make a difference. If I elect somebody to the parliament or if I elect somebody to the State assembly and just send them in and then I forget about it, which is how Indian democracy runs today, then we call it representative politics because it is only that one human being and that person. We can have large debates as to whether we should have the power to recall that person or not or we are not willing any more to trust this individual. In Hindi the word for public representative is very, very stark. "jan pratinidi" we say, the person who represents the people. So we say as long as that person is fighting the election he is a ?jan pratinidi?. Then he or she goes inside the system, then 'jan' stays outside and the pratinidi works for himself f or herself inside the system.

So we need to redefine democracy and I think India is well into this phase of redefining democracy. Because all of us are debating on how democracy should be redefined so that for us it is a working system. What should we do with it? We want democracy but how should we use this? And in this I'll touch upon a large network called the National Alliance for Peoples Movements, with Medha Patkar being the co-ordinator for it and we are all called National Convenors. We had a meeting about two months ago, last month actually, in Delhi. And we now feel that we engage in these very important debates and sometimes we impact, very often we don?t. And what happens to us? We are set aside and the world goes on in the way it wants to go on. Large numbers of people vote but they never get their voices in, vote but don?t get their basic needs, vote but don?t have land, vote but don?t have education, vote but don?t have housing, hundreds of things. So somewhere we have all made a mistake.

People from my generation have made a very large mistake. I was born just a year before we got independent. We all thought that independence should have been won by people like Gandhi, Nehru, M.N. Roy, Sri Rajagopalachari, Patel, Bhagat Singh - name all hues and shades - Netaji Shubhash Chandra Bose. But after we got free our job was to be civil servants, to be professionals, to be academicians, to get on with it, to get to Harvard, to Yale, to Cambridge, to be an IAS Officer, whatever. We forgot that democracy needs people's participation to run it better. So I think my generation has failed this country in a major way. But today, in the last 15-20 years, I feel that I made it.

I would like to quote a friend of mine called Lal Singh who is a dismissed constable. (I am a resigned IAS officer and he is a dismissed constable in the Police.) Police constables are often made to do tasks, which are not in their official work role. They have to stay in the houses of senior officers and sweep the houses, and bathe the children, milk the cattle and so on and so forth. So a group of police constables went on a strike, about 15-20 years ago saying they wouldn?t do it. They said, ?you give us work that we have to do it but we will not do this?. So my friend Lal Singh joined that and they were dismissed. Because no police official can go on strike. The message is they are serfs they are not allowed to go on strike what ever the reasons. The rest of them have got themselves reinstated, but Lal Singhji is a great wonderful human being. He lives in a village called Sohangad, which is in Rajsamal district. His father and his uncle used to look after the cows for Gandhiji in Sewagram. I discovered all this much later. But in that village this family is a very important family because it is an ethical family. Any dispute, they come to them. Any problem, they come to them. I was telling you all what I had discovered about Lal Singhji and his family and his aunt and his mother who were wonderful persons.

Lal Singhji and I, Nikhil, Shankar and Narayan - five of us - went to talk to civil servants. We are often called to talk to civil servants about transparency and right to information in Jaipur. It was a bitter cold January; it can get very cold in Rajasthan. Lal Singhji had wrapped himself up in a carpet because it was so cold and we had just had some kind of public demonstration and he hadn't come prepared. We went and when we went they saw Aruna of course, a middle-class elite.

You can call me anything - access to English language, access to all resources and when I fall ill I won?t be allowed to die in the village, somebody will fish me out and take me to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi. So I am a privileged person, no matter what I do today. I am born in a class, which is privileged.

So, they saw that she has brought Nikhil who is also middle class but the other three were representatives of the mazdoors and kisans. So they gave us ten minutes each and by that time it was lunch time and they said three minutes for Lal Singhji. And he said something remarkable in those three minutes. (These are the people we say do not know how to lead India and I think with great humility I can tell you that whatever I say today I have learnt from many people and I think its people like Lal Singh who can really guide this country. There are many Lal Singh?s in this country. Not one.) He said it in Hindi. How many of you know Hindi? So, may I please say it in Hindi first and then I'll translate it into English because he said it in Hindi and it is very sankshipt (succinct) in Hindi, which the English translation kind of loses, though approximates quite well?

He said - ?Hum sochte hain ki soochna ka adhikar nahi milega to kya hum jeeyenge ya nahi jeeyenge. Hum sochte hai ki soochna ka adhikar nahi milega to kya hum jeeyenge ya nahi jeeyenge.? They  were all potential officers. ?Aap sochte hain ki soochna ka adhikar mil jaye to kya aap ki kursi rahegi ya nahi rahegi. Aap sochte hain ki soochna ka adhikar mil jaye to kya aap ki kursi rehegi ya nahi rahegi. Magar dosto hum saab ko milkar soochna chahiye ki kya yeh desh rehega ya nahi rehega - magar dosto hum saab ko milkar soochna chahiye ki yeh desh rehega ya nahi rehega.? Lalsinghji had not prepared that speech before. So, this is the quality of the Indian mind at its best.

What did he say? They gave him three minutes. He said, ?I'll say it in one minute. People like me wonder if people will survive without the right to information. People like you (because they were potential civil servants) wonder if you give us the right to information, whether you will still continue to sit in that seat of power or not because you may do wrong things. But friends we all have to get together and wonder whether this country will survive or not survive.?

That is the real issue. So friends I come to you with a plea, that now the world will have to survive. Peace will have to remain. Afghanistan and Iraq and Gujarat and many others, so many others should not happen. These are the most recent happenings in my mind, but there are many other things and no country is free from such things. It should not happen. And the most equipped to fight these battles are the citizens of that country. Nobody else can fight the battle. We fight ours and I hope you?ll fight your battles. And we will all come together maybe in the near future to see a nuclear free, peaceful, non-competitive and not a cruel militant world where people are killed, mutilated, murdered, hung because they are of a particular creed, particular class, particular religion, particular gender. That we all survive peace and amity is my New Year wish for all of us and for the whole world because you represent the world and for us in India and in Rajasthan as well. Thank you.