Once democracy was a timeless test match played between Congress and the Rest of India. The Congress always won. The good teams were made up of educated players, nearly always literate in English. They paid lip service to the rules of secular democracy and cheated discreetly. The captains and most of their chief lieutenants came from the same class that supplied recruits to the higher echelons of the civil service. This elite was committed to universal adult franchise, it had written the People into the Constitution in 1950, but it tended to think of elections and the popular vote as We-the-People writing in, a card every five years that helped them keep in touch, a bit like New Year's greetings. This was democracy enough; it was even radical when you considered that before 1947 they wouldn't have been allowed to lick the stamps.