Silence as sedition

We must speak up to defend not just Binayak Sen's freedom to dissent but our own right to be democratic.
     A true measure to be being democratic is not the cycles of elections ----it is the dignity given to disagreement ,to dissent.Why must we dignify dissent?
     Binayak Sen speaks.Through his actions and words,he protests,he engages,he dissents,he disagrees.His weapons are words ,ideas and actions .Everything he does ,represents a strained ,challenged but surviving faith and commitment to non-violent democratic dissentthrough everything he sees around him should and must have given him so many reasons to losew that faith.
  Sen could have remained silent . Like so many of us,he could have been safe and not facing a life term in prison today. All he had to do was to shirk his duties as a citizen and  an ethical human being and choose the easier way of remaining silent.The rest of us do so everyday in a country that is home to some the most-entrenched and deepening inequality in the world.In our everyday lives ,we stand by multiple exclusions and everyday acts of violence,homelessness,hungerthe removal of social benefits ,and a new India that measures its growth by its richest rather than its poorest.Why the poor do not revolt in arms is anyone's guess. They have no reason not to wage war against the rest of us who tolerate, sanction and reproduce their exclusion. So when those excluded and those that speak in their favour choose still to speak and to engage democratic,despite these violent exclusions,these can be nothing more important for our democracy than to listen.