Where the ritual of voting has remained necessary in “open” societies for the legitimation of political power, nothing is more inimical to the security of that power than knowledge among the masses and the marginalised of the substance of democracy. Thus, peasants, workers, Adivasis, Dalits, women, the minorities – in short the bulk of the population of India – are expected to believe that their democratic right remains limited to voting once every five years. They are not expected to acquire knowledge about the rights the constitution furnishes them as citizens, rights that bear the potential of becoming instruments of momentous transformation. The acquiring of such knowledge clearly carries vast implications for those who are privileged, and therefore for the rearrangement of assets among the population at large. Given that such people rarely have access to the judicial system, their quiescent ignorance of the provisions of the constitution is the best guarantor of the continuance of dominant economic, social, cultural and political power.