WESTERN capitalist democracies lay emphasis on what are called civil and political rights, meaning the right to free speech and faith, the right to property and the right to democracy via universal adult franchise. But remain curiously silent on that most basic of all rights ¬-- the economic right of all to remunerative work and affordable food, housing, education and health care. The mainstream print and electronic media in the West that caters to the masses, but is owned by barons of big capital, understandably, sell the priorities of its masters as the needs of the masses. A considerable amount of academic scholarship is also marshalled by the all powerful western socio-political-economic elites who control western governments, to legitimise and rationalise state policies that exclusively benefit them. But what is more disturbing is the fact that sections of academic scholarship even in poverty-stricken countries as India, too, are endorsing this received wisdom from the West, either wholly or in parts. Even as stalwarts of this section acknowledge the drastic increase in poverty in India after the introduction of neo-liberal policies, and even as they acknowledge that the concept of a welfare state was introduced in the western countries to keep socialism at bay, they neither openly condemn neo-liberal globalisation nor do they advocate the socialist path of development. Their very silence thus makes them accomplices in the games of the west. Professor T K Oommen, in his new book Social Inclusion in Independent India: Dimensions and Approaches, published in 2014, amasses impressive data on nine categories of people who are socially and/or politically and/or economically excluded, in varying degrees, in contemporary India. The nine categories, he defines, are: dalits; adivasis; OBCs; cultural minorities -- religious and linguistic; women; refugees-foreigners-outsiders and North-East India; the poor; and the disabled. He deals with all categories including that of the poor in nine chapters of near equal length and emphasis. He acknowledges that the "principal agency to create and administer rights is the state", and laments that "independent India's penchant for passing legislations is proverbial but its incorrigible incapacity to implement them is abysmal" (P48). But, amazingly, nowhere in the book he asks why the Indian state has been unable to implement its declared socialist goals as spelt out in the Preamble of our Constitution. To expect a capitalist democracy (with nominal socialist features, that disappeared with Nehru), financed and governed by the country's well entrenched economic and religious elite, to deliver distributive justice is surely a contradiction in terms. The debate whether or not economic reforms have reduced poverty in India, he says, is an ideological one. Those who support or oppose economic reforms invoke data which are convenient to them; if the supporters focus on consumption poverty, the opponents focus on calorie poverty, but that either way the empirical situation remains the same -- "massive and persistent poverty in India". Tabulating the dramatic rise in calorie poverty and the corresponding fall in consumption poverty in 30 years, from 1983 to 2004-05, while criticising the government for these lapses, he acknowledges that "it is absolutely necessary to focus on calorie poverty". But while criticising the government for this situation, the author carefully keeps an equi-distance from both ideologies. This renders his many admonitions to the state as wishful thinking. Four essential steps are identified by him for creating an inclusive society in India. One, recognising and nurturing cultural diversity, by the state not privileging the religion or language of the majority and by the state giving equal respect and opportunities to the religions and languages of the minorities. Two, by institutionalising political pluralism through a multi-party democracy and effective devolution of political power through real federalism and introducing a regime of nomination at macro and micro levels, wherever needed. Third, by abandoning centre-peripheral distinction. Four, by delegitimising caste hierarchy. But nowhere does he stress the need for the Indian state or India's civil society to break away from the shackles of western neo-liberalism that feeds and nurtures the ambitions of the country's socio-economic and religious elites, and have continuously suppressed socialist and progressive movements in Asian, African and Latin American countries. His choice of textual sources for information is equally faulty. For Ancient India, he relies exclusively on Brahmanic and Colonial sources, to the exclusion of Buddhist and other Sramanic sources. This leads him to pronounce that ancient India was dominated by Brahmanical caste hierarchy, which is very misleading. Caste in ancient India, as stressed by progressive Indian historians, remained an entirely theoretical formulation voiced by a miniscule religious elite in a specific and small area. The Creation Hymn itself in the 10th book of the Rig Veda, it is well acknowledged, was a later interpolation. Caste, according to modern Indian historians, as S R Sharma, Uma Chakravarti, Gail Omveldt and others, remained theoretical well into the 3rd-4th AD, which period heralded the beginning of early medieval centuries. It was in the early medieval period that Brahmanism made its great compromise with Puranic Hinduism, to insure its own survival. The half a millennium, 200 BC to 300 AD, of mercantile supremacy in most of India formed part of the near thousand years of Buddhist domination in the country. In ancient India, Buddhism which was a peoples religion and did not believe in caste was the only other organised religion, apart from Brahmanism, the religion of the elite. The much vaster majority in India belonging to the unorganised religious sect and professing myriad folk faiths certainly did not practise caste hierarchy. Rigidity in caste did not begin before 8th AD and did not extend beyond the 11th AD. After that period, Sufi and Bhakti cults that were movements of the masses became sufficiently dominant to greatly contain the supremacy of the upper castes. Colonialism certainly patronised Brahmanism and in the process nurtured and institutionalised caste distinctions, which continued in independent India. Similarly, by seeing the entire colonial period through the lenses of colonial scribes or Hindutva ideologues of the mid-19th and 20th century, he does grave injustice to the field realities of the period. Facts are that since religious pluralism was so deeply ingrained and institutionalised in ancient and medieval Indian society and state that, despite colonial policies of divide and rule, at the grassroots level, people continued to follow plural religious and cultural traditions. This is amply reflected in the 1889 Census in which, as eminent historian Romilla Thapar notes, by far the largest number of people belonged to the category of those who practised both Hindu and Islamic faiths and cultural traditions. Mushirul Hasan, in his From Pluralism to Separatism, paints fascinating images of the Ganga-Jamuna tehzib created by the elites and the masses of both communities in the ‘qasbahs’ of UP till early 20th century. After this period in the 1920s, 30’s and 40’s, the religious and socio-political elites of the times successfully used religions and languages as political tools to keep themselves in power, again under the patronage of the colonial government. The process of garnering mass support by Hindutva ideologues began only after the 1970s and 1980s, when economic hardships created by our ‘capitalist democracy’ came to be masked with intolerance. Thirdly, by not differentiating the period of Nehruvian socialism from that of his successors and by grouping all states - the three socialist states with others - in his data on development, he does gross injustice to our socialist heritage. Nevertheless he does give useful tabulated information on India's skewed development that has led to greater economic inequality over the last four decades. Regarding dalits, the author notes three meaningful facts. One, with the liberalisation of economy the informal sector, that accounts for ‘93 percent of employment’, and where-in lower wages and insecurity of employment are the norm, has greatly expanded. This has rendered the dalits who were already economically deprived even more so. Two, although the 1993 Act made the employment of manual scavengers a punishable offence, in the last over 20 years, not a single person has been punished. In 2011, Rs 100 crore was allotted for eradication of manual scavenging and for their rehabilitation, but not a single rupee had been spent from this fund till November 2012. Regarding adivasis, the Colonial Forest Act of 1878 that was oriented more towards increasing state revenue than protection of the environment and that had also broken the symbiotic relationship between tribes and forests, was endorsed in 1952 by independent India. The new Forest Act of 1952 explicitly stated the need to utilise forests for national needs. The 2006 Act recognised rights of forest-dwellers, but big contractors and the mining mafia continued to devastate tribal lives. Bastar, the heart of Naxalism, is today in such a dismal state of under-development that it is rightly described as an "internal colony of the Indian Republic". On the issue of religious minorities in India, the author could not be more wrong when he declares that the issue of identity of religious minorities has been satisfactorily dealt with in India. With the Hindutva brigade's relentless drives towards ghar-wapsi of tribes who never were Hindu, and the Modi government's significant silence on their right to practise their ancestral tribal beliefs, the issue of minority identity is far from resolved. Even more significantly the author is silent about the way to reduce poverty. He quotes P Sainath's tabulations published in The Hindu showing revenue foregone by the government under corporate tax, income tax, excise and customs duty from 2005-06 to 2011-12. The amount is a colossal 25,74,042 crores of rupees. He admits that the process of foregoing revenue from the rich to provide subsidies to the poor is yet to begin, and that this explains "the persisting poverty of the poor and the increasing prosperity of the rich", and leaves the issue at that. One wonders why the root causes of poverty and economic inequality in India have been addressed so theoretically. Two recent studies on poverty -- one by Oxfam and the other by the World Bank -- are revealing. Both, made public in mid-January 2015, give drastically different estimates. The NGO Oxfam stated, a few days before the World Economic Forum Summit, that "the explosion of inequalities is holding back the fight against global poverty at a time when one in nine do not have enough to eat and more than a billion people still live on less than 1.25 US dollar a day", and that by far the largest number of poor live in India. It also stated that "in 2014, 85 rich individuals held more wealth than the poorest half of the population - 3.5 billion people. And that if the present trend continues, the top one percent will have more wealth than the remaining 99 per cent in just two years. The World Bank Report, Addressing Inequality in South Asia, makes the ludicrous statement that "the probability of the poor person moving out of poverty in India in 2014 was as good as in the US". And that "40 per cent of India's poor have already moved above the poverty line". Even a cursory survey of India's urban slums and its rural desolation is enough to see through the hypocrisy of the World Bank Report, released just a few days ahead of US President Obama's visit to India. It is no secret that the honourable World Bank is no more than a stooge of the US and that it is the latter's principal agency to enforce suitable structural changes in the economies of the poor countries. President Obama came and accomplished with ease his real agenda during his visit, which was to clinch the grossly one-sided and long-pending Indo-US nuclear deal that absolves US companies of any liability in case of an accident, even as it exposes the Indian people to nuclear hazards compared to which Hiroshima pales into insignificance. The gullibility of the lay man in his assessment of neo-liberalism is understandable, the greed of the global corporate world is understandable, but the deafening silence of large sections of the intellectual community in India on this issue is incomprehensible. It is, however, heartening that the struggles of the Left and other progressive groups against neo-liberal games have, despite formidable odds, not slackened. The Latin American example gives inspiration, for Latin America was the region that became the first laboratory of neo-liberalism. It was Latin America that experienced the worst damages of neo-liberalism. And it has been Latin America, again, that has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of its ruins to halt the seemingly unstoppable march of neo-liberalism. It has done so by taking to the path of socialistic development.