Kautilya on disaffection among subjects / Harish Khare on rights, duties and a nervous monarch who is weakening India
NB: The criterion which makes the difference between a great man and a popular one consists in the great man's searching for what is nobly human in the masses, to raise them by its means, whereas a merely popular man looks for what is low and brutal so as to raise himself; Rabbi J.S. Bloch; My Reminiscences, 1923. DS
Disaffection among subjects: - Kautilya: The Arthashastra (1992)
Impoverishment, greed and disaffection are engendered among the subjects when the king:
(i) ignores the good [people] and favours the wicked;
(ii) causes harm by new unrighteous practices;
(iii) neglects the observation of the proper and righteous practices;
(iv) suppresses dharma and propagates adharma;
(v) does what ought not to be done and fails to do what ought to be done;
(vi) fails to give what ought to be given and exacts what he cannot rightly take;
(vii) does not punish those who ought to be punished but punishes those who do not deserve to be;
(viii) arrests those who should not be arrested but fails to arrest those who should be seized;·
(ix) indulges in wasteful expenditure and destroys profitable undertakings;
(x) fails to protect the people from thieves and robs them himself;
(xi) does not do what he ought to do and reviles the work done by others;
(xii) causes harm to the leaders of the people and insults those worthy of honour;
(xiii) antagonizes the [wise] elders by lying and mischief;
(xiv) does not recompense service done to him;
(xv) does not carry out his part of what had been agreed upon; and
(xvi) by his indolence and negligence destroys the welfare of his people.
{7.5.19-26}
[A king who is profligate with ancestral wealth, spendthrift with his own wealth or miserly also practises wrong policies; see {7. 1 3 . 1 3 } in X . viii .] Therefore , the king shall not act in such a manner as would cause impoverishment, greed or disaffection among the people; if, however, they do appear, he shall immediately take remedial measures…
L. N. Rangarajan (ed); Kautilya: The Arthashastra (1992); p 159
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Harish Khare on rights, duties and a nervous monarch who Is weakening India
Why has the PM ginned up this “too many
rights and too few duties” bogey now? For seven years, he has enjoyed
unquestioned power: neither parliament nor the judiciary have posed any serious
hurdle to his imperious impulses. There is no opposition; no JNU; no critical
media. A penny should drop
whenever a sitting prime minister starts lamenting the imbalance between rights
and duties of Indian citizens. And, if the prime minister happens to be a
man who unchallengingly occupies the commanding heights of Indian politics, it
is time to prick up our ears to the autocrat’s knock on the Republic’s door.
A few days ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi argued that too much
insistence on rights and too little emphasis on duties has weakened India. This
diagnosis was delivered, ironically enough, during a celebration of the 75th
year of our birth as an independent, democratic nation. The implication, dark
and ominous, is that this perceived source of weakness ought to be plugged.
The prime minister’s
thesis – patently at odds with the basic structure of the constitution – calls
for reflection on what makes a nation strong. But how does a nation’s
“strength” or “weakness” get assessed? And who is doing the accounting?
Recent history has a
few sobering answers for us. Let it be recalled that not too long ago there was
a strong, powerful state known as the Soviet Union. Its founding leadership was
uncompromising in its conviction that the very raison d’etre of
the Soviet republic was the perpetuation of the gains and achievements of the
Russian Revolution of 1917. Accordingly, a “dictatorship of the proletariat”
was institutionalised and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union gave itself
the monopoly of power. Under the constitution, adopted in 1936, Soviet Citizens
had no civil and political rights of the kind people in democratic countries
take for granted but were assigned duties to the Motherland.
After the Second World
War, the Soviet Union did indeed become a superpower – not just a military
powerhouse but also an ideological model, inspiring millions and millions of
suppressed people in one imperial colony after another. Moscow had a voice and
veto over global governing arrangements. So far, so good. Yet within just five
decades, that strong Soviet state – characterised by a dominant leader, heading
a dominant party, flaunting a dominant ideology, insisting on unquestioned
authority for itself over all citizens – collapsed ingloriously into a heap of
a dozen odd states….
The Broken Middle - on the 30th anniversary of 1984
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काशी विश्वनाथ मंदिर के महंत ने मोदी, योगी पर लगाया बड़ा आरोप, सुनकर रह जाएंगे हैरान!
Your silence emboldens hate voices:
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The
Judiciary is the Defence of the Innocent. Or so we thought...
