Politics and the Gita - III

Ambedkar had a very critical view of Gita, which he says provides a philosophic basis to the Varna system. Ambedkar believed that the Manusmriti, the Vedas and the Gita are all woven in the same pattern and same threads run through them. He denounces those who say that Manusmriti is problematic, but Gita is good. For him, all religious books of Hinduism – other than Upanishads – were written by the Brahmins who injected the same doctrine in all these books. Ambedkar writes that it is actually Gita in which the caste system is systematically ordained and explained. Ambedkar argues that: 

If Krishna were to appear as a lawyer acting for a client who is being tried for murder and pleaded the defence set out by him in the Bhagavad Gita, there is not the slightest doubt that he would be sent to the lunatic asylum.  

For Ambedkar, Gita is a discourse on the law. He deploys the metaphors of the courtroom, and Krishna as a defending lawyer. The Gita captures that moment when the necessity of war interrupts the ethical demands of brotherhood. In Political Thought in Action: The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India, the authors say that according to Ambedkar, the Gita defends war on two grounds. 

1. It says that because the world is perishable and “man is mortal”, he is “bound to die”. What difference does it make for the wise whether “man dies a natural death or whether he is done to death as a result of violence”? “Life is unreal”, he continues, “why shed tears because it has ceased to be?"
2. It says that it is a mistake to think that the body and the soul are one. The key difference is that the body is perishable while the soul is eternal and imperishable. When death occurs it is the body that dies. The soul never dies. As the soul is never killed, killing a person can never be a matter of any movement. War and killing need therefore give no ground to remorse or to shame. 

To Ambedkar, this would actually seem to be an “unheard of defence of murder”. The representation of life as deathless abstraction provides the philosophical justification for untouchability which is the reduction of life to “mere existence” and the mystification of the law as divine will. The Gita reduces the body to mere existence and is therefore  dispensable. It justifies suffering of the self as absolute obligation to God, and in more public moments, to the nation or swaraj.

It does not differentiate between suffering caused by an ethical stand and suffering caused under force. No distinction is made between an intimate bodily injury that is not practiced by the self but inflicted by fellow men and legitimised by the law. It is explained away as the sufferer’s fate.  

 For Ambedkar, the divine status accorded to Krishna and the Gita hides the historicity of its beginnings and prevents criticism. To him, Krishna is basically a fallible warrior. Throughout the Mahabharata, for instance, Krishna remains a subject of abuse because of his “low origins” and “loose morals”. He is the classic Machiavellian figure whose name attaches to “intrigue” and violation of “rules of war”.  Interested more in its spuriously modern authority than in its scriptural antiquity, he is relentless in his emphasis of the Gita’s uncertain authorship. It is not, according to him, “a single book written by a single author”.

What is, then, according to Ambedkar, the politics of the Gita? Not only is Krishna, by deliberate mutation, made a god amongst other gods, a godliness which is inconsistent with his status as a fallible man throughout the Mahabharata, he is also suddenly made a “representative” par excellence, within the event of the Gita, of all other forms of gods.  

He accuses the Gita of reinforcing Chaturvarnya, or the Law of Four Varnas. Krishna says that a person should not create doubts in others about Karma which of course includes the observance of the rules of Chaturvarnya. That is another way of saying that you must not agitate or excite people to rise in rebellion against the theory of Karma. It tells that every one should do the duty prescribed for his Varna and no other and warns those who worship him . . . that they will not obtain salvation by mere devotion but by devotion accompanied by observance of duty laid down for his Varna. In short, a Shudra however great he may be as a devotee, will not get salvation if he has not observed the duty of the Shudra — namely to live and die in the service of the higher classes.

This advice stabilises the caste system by invoking fate. For a shudra is born a shudra by his fate, and must aspire to salvation only as a shudra. This is how the potential of any revolutionary “counter-violence”, according to Ambedkar, is suppressed in the Gita. The system is further stabilised by creating an ethics of non-violence. Not only is the shudra barred from insurgency against fate in the name of devotion; those who provoke him are barred too with the threat of retribution. It is this suppression of counter-revolution which Ambedkar argues is the “soul” of the Gita that goes by the name of fate and the trope of “salvation”.

Ambedkar's anger is apparent in the words he uses in the interpretation of both Krishna and the Gita: “absurdity”, “stupidity”, “abhorrent”, “puerile”, “fool’s errand”, “childish”, and “lunatic asylum”. I can understand his anger. Some months after my stroke, I was at the receiving end of this "God's child" stuff a couple of times and I was not amused. I saw a cartoon which states, "Oh, I know that He works in mysterious ways. If I worked so mysteriously, I will get fired."

It is often noticed that god is said to be close to people with various disabilities and ailments. I once asked the nurse to do some channel surfing when I saw a program entitled "God's children". I need not have guessed the general theme of the program - it was about a genetic disease that made teenagers look like they are seventy (Progeria, the disease that the character played by Amitabh Bachchan in the movie Paa suffered from.) God's children indeed!

Politics and the Gita - II

The first strategy in Gandhi’s reading of the Gita was to treat the text as an allegory. The battle of Kurukshetra was not, in Gandhi’s view, “a battle which took place so many thousand years ago; it is one which is raging all the time, even today". He regarded the battle between the Kauravas and the Pandavas as an allegory for the battle “between the innumerable forces of good and evil which become personified in us as virtues and vices.” Even winning the war did not bring happiness, it brought only regret and remorse to all, proving that "mere material gains never brought peace within.” 

He holds that "Every one of us is a mixture of good and evil. . . The difference that there is between human beings is the difference of degree." In interpreting the battle in the Mahabharata, he says that, "Duryodhana and his supporters stand for the satanic impulses in us, and Arjuna and others stand for Godward impulses. The battle-field is our body. The poet-seer, who knows from experience the problems of life, has given a faithful account of the conflict which is eternally going on within us." (Navajivan, 11-10-1925) 

According to him, the notion of avatar is a result of human imagination. What humans imagine Krishna to be is more important than the historical Krishna. He thought that an avatar did not mean any descent of God into human form but the ascent of humans into divine status. Those who stood against the wickedness and immorality of the time were looked on as avatars and thus it was open to every human being to be an avatar. For him, therefore, the Gita becomes above all a book of ethics, emphasising selfless devotion in the cause of human brotherhood.     

In reading the Gita in this manner, Gandhi marks a sharp distinction between his approach to the text and that of his political predecessors, particularly the Extremists. During his time in the Yerwada Jail (1922-24), he read around 150 books including the entire Mahabharata along with all the available translations of Gita including Tilak’s.  Gandhi agreed with Tilak about the importance of doing the right action and following truth as per Gita. However, he disagreed with Tilak about how to do the right action. Gandhi drew the message of non-violence and ahimsa from Gita. 

Gita advocates three paths: Karma yoga, Bhakti Yoga, and Gyana Yoga; without preferring one over the other. In Tilak’s interpretation of Gita, Karma Yoga (action) rules supreme, and takes precedence over the Bhakti Yoga (devotion) and Gyana Yoga (knowledge). He justified action, even when it became violent like killing, as long as it is without personal interest or motive. 

Gandhi however interpreted that action without expectation of fruit (anasaktiyoga) was the essence of the entire work. The crux of this difference was illustrated in Gandhi's paper Young India where he said that Tilak considered everything fair in politics, an idea of politics that he did not accept. Tilak objected to the remark and said in a letter to Young India:

I write this to you to say that my view is not correctly represented therein. Politics is a game of worldly people, and not of sadhus, and instead of the maxim "Overcome anger by loving kindness, evil by good" as preached by Buddha, I prefer to rely on the maxim of Shri Krisna "In whatsoever way any come to Me, in the same way I grant them favour". That explains the whole difference and also the meaning of my phrase "responsive cooperation". Both methods are equally honest and righteous but the one is more suited to this world than the other. 

Gandhi answered:

I naturally feel the greatest diffidence about joining issue with the Lokamanya in matters involving questions of interpretation of religious work. But there are things in or about which instinct transcends even interpretation. For me there is no conflict between the two texts quoted by the Lokamanya. The Buddhist text lays down an eternal principle. The text from the Bhagavad Gita shows to me how the principle of conquering hate by love, untruth by truth, can and must be applied. 

If it be true that God metes out the same measure to us that we mete out to others, it follows that if we would escape condign punishment, we may not return anger but gentleness even against anger. And this is the law not for the unworldly but essentially for the worldly. With deference to the Lokamanya, I venture to say that it betrays mental laziness to think that the world is not for sadhus. The epitome of all religions is to promote purushartha, and purushartha is nothing but a desperate attempt to become sadhu, i.e., to become a gentleman in every sense of the term. 

Finally, when I wrote the sentence about "everything being fair in politics" according to the Lokamanya’s creed, I had in mind his oft-repeated quotation "evil unto evil". To me it enunciates bad law. And I shall not despair of the Lokamanya with all his acumen agreeably surprising India one day with a philosophical dissertation proving the falsity of the doctrine. In any case I pit the experience of a third of a century against the doctrine underlying "evil unto evil". The true law is "truth even unto evil".