In one of my letters I had written: "I would like Bui to carry within her a healthy mistrust of government. Any government. Because the hands of every government are tainted with the blood of the innocent, and people must be prepared to question the motives and the methods of a government every step of the way." 

    Shirley Rauscher wrote later to say that: "This country, more than any other on this planet has a government 'of the people and by the people'. That is one of the things Thomas Jefferson and his cohorts gave us ... I have problems with inferring that 'government' is some big bad entity; some automaton that has a life and intention beyond the humans who comprise it. Government is us (we). If it isn't, it is our right, our requirement to make it 'us' ... " 

    It is interesting in this connection to listen to another American voice, 150 years in the past. I came across the following words by Henry David Thoreau in his essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" (1849). I have brutally edited the copy, but the essay bears reading in the original. It is available on the web, at the Project Gutenberg site for example. 

    "The government itself ... is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool ... 

    "It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right ... Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of soldiers ... marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences ... They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned ... 

    "How does it become a man to behave toward the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave's government also ... 

    "All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable ... When a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is that fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army ... 

    "Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians in the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may ...

    "Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose ..." 

    I have read it said that this essay of Thoreau inspired Mahatma Gandhi, during his Tolstoy Farm years in Natal, South Africa. And also that it inspired Martin Luther King in the sixties. 

    I also remember reading somewhere in a history book that when Thoreau was visited in prison by his friend, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson asked, "What are you doing in here?" 

    And Thoreau answered. He said: "That is not the right question. The right question is what are you doing out there?" 

    One line above that resonated with a high-Q in my Indian heart is this: "All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable." 

    That could not be a description of our Indian governments in the last few years? Could it? What a seditious thought!