Dear Editor,
Mr. Dev, in his continuation of our dialogue, has so far refused to accept the multi-racial integration solution of a western polity, combined with meditative and reflective approaches by each race consistent with their religious and cultural traditions. (See article, “Moving On” in KN March 4, 2007) The western polity approach allows for a “social contract,” that Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz says, “binds citizens together, and with their government. When government policies abrogate that social contract, citizens may not honour their “contracts” with each other, or with the government. Maintaining that social contract is particularly important, and difficult, in the midst of the social upheavals that so frequently accompany the development transformation.” (Stiglitz, Globalisation and Its Discontents, p. 78)
Admittedly Stiglitz is not considering multi-racial societies, but the social contract approach allows for the development of free capitalist enterprises, which are subject to progressive taxation and to regulation that prevents greed. When we accept the social contract approach, we re-open the debate in respect of achieving democracy by the separation of governmental powers and we allow, at the same time, for bottom-up development in which multi-racial communities can grow and sink their differences as they collaborate over a period of time.
Mr Dev, by contrast, is bent on a separate Indian polity in which the exercise of the spiritual laws can find more space than they would in my suggested approach. How else can we interpret Mr Dev’s otherwise excellent summing up of where we are when he alludes to the outstanding issue of the coercive apparatus of the state which is dominated by Africans and which locks East Indians into a defensive mode vis-
