Amartya Sen’s felicitous metaphor which celebrated an aspect of an open middle class Indian society has been harshly disproved by no less a person than the mild-mannered Manmohan Singh when he followed the practice of Indira Gandhi in seeing a “foreign hand” behind democratic opposition. Even when the prime minister trumpeted that United States (US) and Scandinavian non-governmental organisations were behind the Koodan kulam people’s agitation against a nuclear facility, a seminar was held in Delhi