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Thursday,
April 18, 2002, Chandigarh, India  
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Political marriage in UP Rollback time again Gujarat's diplomatic fallout |
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After the BJP’s Goa conclave
Oriya haunts Orissa Chief Minister
Weather plays a role in stroke
What is religion about?
The Gita opens the whole world to us
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Political marriage in UP Haggling may continue even after a formal announcement but the overall contours of a BJP-BSP arrangement in Uttar Pradesh appear to have been finalised. The Chief Ministerial gaddi will be given to Ms Mayawati while the BJP will get the posts of Deputy Chief Minister, leader and Deputy Chairman of the Legislative Council and representation in the Cabinet in proportion to its strength it the Vidhan Sabha. In return, the BSP MPs will prop up the BJP-led government at the Centre. That support can prove crucial in case parties like the TDP and the Trinamool Congress become a little too adventurous. The arrangement is quite neat, so what if some self-righteous BJP leaders have to eat their words uttered not too long ago that the public mandate was that they should sit in the opposition! The coalition partners of the NDA government are becoming increasingly rebellious and the BJP needs the backing of each and every MP at this stage. Plus, there is also the lure of sharing power in UP. Allowing Ms Mayawati to become Chief Minister is not a prospect palatable to BJP men but since the alternative is the advent of Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav, stalwarts like Mr Rajnath Singh appear reconciled to swallowing the bitter pill. However, whatever the purported benefits may be, it is a marriage of convenience pure and simple. Knowing the volatility of the two partners and their past record, a smooth sailing is not on the cards. For one thing, the earlier alliance between the two parties had left both of them dissatisfied and had rather brought about a lot of disenchantment. The seeds of suspicion sown then have not become sterile till date. That is why the BJP is insisting that it must get the Home portfolio. Ms Mayawati, on her part, is said to be equally firm on an assurance that the kind of poaching that her party suffered in the past will not be practised now. The need is dire for both sides and as a consequence promises are gushing out wholesale. Whether these will be adhered to after the coalition comes to power is a matter of conjecture. Incidentally, the BJP has gained considerably from such arrangements in the past, of course with inglorious exceptions like Punjab and Haryana. But this time it is going to be a junior partner in Uttar Pradesh and may not find the going easy. Even otherwise, Ms Mayawati has always been an abrasive customer. A substantial chunk of the state unit of the BJP is of the view that whatever the current compulsions of the party at the Centre may be, an alliance with the BSP will be disastrous for it in the next Lok Sabha elections. They have been made to fall in line as of now, but may rebound forcefully if they get the chance to say "we told you so".
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Rollback time again Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha has begun the now familiar post-Budget rollback exercise. The BJP National Executive’s Goa meeting over the weekend seriously pondered the party’s declining electoral fortunes. It discovered the Budget was the villain. The consensus, it seems, was: reforms can wait if voters do not like them. Give the people what they want. Winning elections is more important than stemming the economy’s slide. The leadership blamed the party’s dismal performance in the recent Delhi elections on the Budget. Mr Sinha has agreed to a rollback. He has done it in the past and will do it again. He is a party man first and the Finance Minister later. When he raised the income and corporate taxes by an effective 3 per cent to net Rs 6,000, and justified the hurt caused to the taxpayers, he acted as the Finance Minister worried about the alarming fiscal deficit at 5.7 per cent of the GDP. Now, the obedient party man is justifying the rollback. Unlike in the past, this time his coalition partners are not pressing for budgetary changes. It is the party’s electoral reverses in the past and political calculations for the future driving the leadership to a volte-face. Having created a bloody mess-up in Gujarat and wanting to politically encash it, the party does not want an unpleasant Budget to spoil its victory chances. The tax proposals that have attracted the maximum flack for the 2002-03 Budget are (a) pruning of the 20 per cent tax saving rebate available under Section 88 of the Income Tax Act to 10 per cent (b) a surcharge of 5 per cent on income tax in the name of sharing the national security burden (c) dividend tax on investors and (d) a cut in subsidy on urea. The heavy tax dose was uncalled for in the first place. All these tax blows are unlikely to be softened or withdrawn. Additional/alternative sources of revenue can be looked into and tapped. A simple economic law says if people have more cash in hand, they would spend or save. Spending will push demand for goods and help industry and saving will put more funds at the government disposal for productive use. More expenditure cuts can be effected. The administrative flab can be targeted. Increased dynamism in the excise and Customs duty collections is another. Peace with hostile neighbours, particularly Pakistan, should be a priority as bleeding the exchequer, both ours and theirs, by deploying the armed forces on the border is no solution to terrorism. But politics almost always prevails over economics in this country, no matter which party is in power.
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Gujarat's diplomatic fallout Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has expressed many views on the relentless wave of hate crimes in Gujarat after the burning alive of over 50 Ram sevaks inside a rail coach at Godhra on February 27. Even 50 days after the eruption of violence the acts of bestiality show no sign of abating in and around Ahmedabad. The nation had lost face in the eyes of the global community the days the kar sevaks were killed at Godhra. Thereafter, each day has been a source of fresh embarrassment for the country. Mr Vajpayee said so in a statement shortly after the outbreak of post-Godhra violence. The global reaction to tales of horror from the land of the Buddha and Gandhi is entirely on expected lines. It will not do to say that no country has a right to interfere in "our domestic affairs". Humanity could not have shut its eyes to the insanity that visited Bosnia. Nor could it have remained silent when reports of brutality for effecting ethnic cleansing started pouring out of Rwanda. The men behind the acts of barbarity in Rwanda and Bosnia are now being tried for crimes against humanity. Of course, comparisons are odious, but whatever the scale of violence in Gujarat, the diplomatic missions have a duty to their parent countries of keeping them informed. The British diplomatic mission that visited Gujarat was performing the same routine. It reported what it perceived to be the truth. The Ministry of External Affairs has reportedly discussed the contents of the report with representatives of the British High Commission. But their discussion cannot in any way minimise the damage that has been caused to the secular image of the country in the eyes of the global community. There is a saying in Hindustani that you can stop your own people from speaking about an unhappy development within the family, but there is no way that the neighbours can be told not to "interfere". In fact, in most western societies not reporting the misconduct of one's neighbour is treated as an act of abetment. The same rules of civil conduct are now being applied by the members of the global village to the happenings in Gujarat. The fire of hate coming out of Gujarat has been noticed all over. The White House has taken notice of the development and issued a public statement conveying President George W. Bush's expression of disquiet and displeasure over the developments. An unhappy development in Kuwait may also be linked to Gujarat. The decision, and particularly the timing, to order the closure of the only gurdwara in that country is likely to be linked to the wave of hate crimes here. Under Kuwaiti law only Muslims, Jews and Christians are allowed to set up places of worship. However, for long the liberal Kuwaiti leadership was looking the other way. But Gujarat provided an opening to the fundamentalist elements to renew their demand for the closure of the gurdwara. The diplomatic humiliation that was caused by the illegal entry into India of a Kuwaiti girl, and the undue political attention the event received, too may have played a part in the closure of the gurdwara.
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After the BJP’s Goa conclave No, there was no threat at all to the BJP-led government at the Centre. There would have been none even if the Telugu Desam, the second largest constituent of the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA), had withdrawn support to the dispensation presided over by Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee. For the wide world knows that the redoubtable Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, Ms Jayalalitha, is raring to jump on the NDA bandwagon. Moreover, Ms Mayawati, the equally tough leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), has all but clinched a deal with the saffron party and under it she would be Chief Minister of UP in return for her party’s support to the Vajpayee government in New Delhi. The BJP has badly singed itself more than once by entering into exactly the same opportunistic transaction with her in the past. Though twice bitten, it is not shy the third time round. That, however, is a different story. What matters at present is that the TDP and its supremo, Mr Chandrababu Naidu, have decided to stay inside the NDA tent but to “keep up pressure” for the removal of the Gujarat Chief Minister, Mr Narendra Modi. This is a classic case of illusion triumphing over reality. It wouldn’t take in anyone except the incorrigibly gullible. The rude fact of life is that the BJP at its strident conclave at Goa has firmly and totally rejected the demand for the sacking of Mr Modi, deservedly condemned widely for his acts of omission and commission during the horrific camage across Gujarat, following the unspeakable outrage at Godhra. Even after the TDP’s latest resolution senior BJP leaders have made it crystal clear that the decision on Modi’s continuance as Chief Minister is “irreversible”. What then is Mr Naidu banking on to get at least a semblance of face saving? Probably, he hopes that he might persuade Mr Vajpayee and other BJP leaders to at least defer the fresh elections to the Gujarat assembly that Mr Modi has been authorised to hold as early as he likes. To hold this poll in the near future, Mr Naidu has said, would be to “play communal politics” with a gigantic human tragedy. Others have bluntly opined that it would amount to “counting votes over corpses”. He has surprisingly, succeeded for the present. But that is only for the time being perhaps. For, the Hindutva hardliners, enthused by their victory at Goa, are also digging their toes in to support their hero’s right to hold early elections in the riot-ravaged state. With Mr Naidu staying on in the NDA, the feisty “Didi” from West Bengal, Ms Mamata Banerji, who has also been vocal about the BJP’s “deviation” from the NDA’s “secular agenda”, is unlikely to behave differently. After all, hadn’t she said that her party, the Trinamool Congress, would follow the TDP’s lead? All other “secular allies” of the BJP used Sunday’s meeting of the NDA Coordination Committee to voice their full support to the Big Brother’s decision on retaining Mr Modi. So, in the corridors of power in the Capital, there can be business as usual. But can the same be said about the country at large? In all honesty and with great sorrow, the answer has to be no. On the contrary, after Goa, the communal divide has become wider, not narrower, than it was after the outrage at Godhra and the subsequent death dance in large parts of Gujarat that was more a series of organised pogroms than a spontaneous backlash to the burning alive of 59 Ramsevaks. A spontaneous reaction, by definition, is a short phenomenon, however, great its intensity. Even in Ahmedabad, let alone other parts of Modi-ruled Gujarat, communal fires are still burning and consuming innocent lives. More than 100,000 Muslims, with no home left to go back to, continue to rot in mismanaged relief camps. Sadly, one of the reasons for the rise of communal hatred after Goa is the Prime Minister’s impassioned and rather surprising speech at a public rally in Panaji. Mr Vajpayee is perfectly right in complaining belatedly that his speech was either reported selectively or given a “motivated interpretation”. He never denounced Islam or all Muslims. He made a clear distinction between the Islam that preaches peace and humanity on the one hand, and the jehadi Islam on the other that promotes militancy and has made it difficult for peaceable Islam to function. But that is not the entire story. There are three reasons why the Prime Minister’s speech has spread a wave of dismay, even scare, and anger among not only Muslims but also those Hindus and others who are apprehensive about the future of the core Indian values of secularism and pluralism. The first was his tone and tenor that was in sharp contrast to his style of referring to Godhra and the rest of Gujarat until then. Secondly, since it is impossible to condemn Godhra too strongly, the Prime Minister cannot be faulted for saying what he did about the perpetrators of this foulest of foul deeds. But while he used his legendary oratorical skills for this purpose elaborately, sadly he had only one word — “nindaniay” which can be translated as deplorable — about all that has happened in Gujarat since Godhra and still persists. For once, his fine sense of balance seems to have deserted Mr Vajpayee. Thirdly, while he took care to distinguish between the two different “streams” in Islam, he made out that the entire Hindu community was tolerant, as if a large number of Hindu Taliban have not been strutting around under the banners of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal. No wonder, the impression has spread, rightly or wrongly, that Mr Vajpayee was pandering to the hardliners presumably because of their strength that they demonstrated at the BJP National Executive’s meeting. Also it is no secret that many in the BJP believe that the balance of power at the top has “shifted somewhat from Atalji to Advaniji”. Some of the smarter and younger members of Mr Vajpayee’s Council of Ministers were conspicuously active both before and during the confabulations in Goa’s salubrious surroundings. Most of them reportedly draw their inspiration more from the Home Minister than from the Prime Minister. If the communal divide has widened after Goa, the political polarisation in the country, inflamed enough already, has also escalated dangerously. Relations between the BJP, the core of the ruling coalition, and the Congress, the principal opposition party, were seldom cordial. They have now become alarmingly antagonistic and confrontational. The situation has been worsened further by the unhappy personal chemistry between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, as became evident during Mr Vajpayee’s notably blistering reply to the sharp attack on him Mrs Sonia Gandhi had made several hours earlier during the POTO debate. Since then Mrs Gandhi has muddied the waters further by her regrettable remark about the Prime Minister having “lost his mental balance”. She could have gracefully regretted this slip of tongue born of her inadequate knowledge of Hindi but she chose only to say that she “did not mean it”. Differences between the two sides are fundamental. Both sides also have a right to pursue their political objectives as vigorously as possible but within the rules of the game of democracy. One of these is that some challenges to the nation call for a national consensus. Unfortunately, the political climate is becoming more and more inimical to consensus building. One issue that not just needs but cries out for a national consensus and immediate action is that of ending the stranglehold of politics on the police and the administration. The country ought to be grateful to the distinguished super-cop, Mr Julio Ribeiro, who exposed this ghastly problem during a TV programme over the weekend. To be sure, Mr Modi is not the inventor of politicisation of the police and the civil services. This reprehensible process has gone on for decades during which every political party has held power. But, as Mr Ribeiro pointed out, in Gujarat partisan, political interference with the law and order machinery has reached the lowest depths. The instances he gave were chilling. For instance, the Minister of State for Home in Ahmedabad personally orders 95 per cent of the transfers of policemen in the state, sometimes against the wishes of senior officers. If this state of affairs cannot be ended, said Mr Ribeiro, the IPS and IAS cadres should be abolished forthwith. Let neither the Prime Minister nor the Leader of Opposition pretend that they haven’t been warned. |
Oriya haunts Orissa Chief Minister Politics is the art of the possible. And Orissa Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik seems to have proved this adage for quite some time. The 56-year-old leader’s greatest handicap is that he can neither speak nor write Oriya, the official language of the state. This is all the more surprising because he is the son of the illustrious leader and architect of modern Orissa, the late Biju Patnaik. The fact that despite his language problem, Mr Patnaik, soft-spoken and suave, has been able to carry on the show all along speaks volumes about his ability to manage and get things done. However, things are becoming too hot for him nowadays. Ever since rebel BJD leader Dilip Ray’s election to the Rajya Sabha, there has been simmering discontent among people, officials and elected representatives against Mr Patnaik’s capacity to handle crisis situations because of the communication gap. Mr Ray seems to be exploiting Mr Patnaik’s language handicap: he declared that as Mr Patnaik is out of touch with the people, he would dislodge him from power. Almost every leader of the ruling coalition— the BJD and the BJP — admits that Mr Patnaik is the greatest liability for them. True, Mr Patnaik is able to read out his Oriya speeches written in Roman script. However, there is a clear absence of personal touch and rapport between him and the people whenever he speaks Oriya in English accent at any meeting. It is said that he does not understand what people say to him in Oriya. Nor is he able to respond himself. Usually, Mr Rudra Mohanty, his father’s close confidant, briefs him in Hindi about what is being said in Oriya. His political associates brief him in Hindi or English. Not surprisingly, Union Welfare Minister Juel Oram recently called Mr Patnaik’s ignorance of Oriya “a shame as also an embarrassment”. After taking over as Chief Minister, Mr Patnaik did engage a tutor, Mr Sarath Kumar Nath. But this didn’t help. Though born in Cuttack, Orissa’s oldest city, he has spent little time in the state. A product of Doon School, Dehra Dun, he graduated in humanities from Delhi University in 1967. Top IAS officers say that most of the urgent and very important notes required to be sent to Mr Patnaik are written out in English so that he doesn’t get “confused”. He himself realises that matters would be easy if he had control over the language, but he is hardly able to overcome the problem. His critics say that if rules prevent anybody who couldn’t read or write Oriya from contesting panchayat elections, how can the Chief Minister continue in his post if he himself doesn’t know Oriya? Suffice it to mention that it is mandatory for a non-Oriya IAS or IPS officer to pass an Oriya test for being eligible for a posting in the district headquarters as DM or SP. A journey down memory lane It was a proud moment for the Indian Railways. And there is every reason for its officers and other employees to be happy. History walked 150 years back in time when a train, with an old steam engine, left the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) in Mumbai for Thane on Tuesday. With about 400 passengers, the train recreated its maiden run from the erstwhile “Bori Bunder” (now CST) to “Tannah” (now Thane) on April 16, 1853. The train mesmerised the people and passengers alike, including a host of VVIPs. The authorities took every care to re-enact the old world charm of 150 years back. Such was the attention to detail that the seven ivory-and-cinnamon coaches, smelt of the same wet polish as they did over a century and half ago. It is said that over 100 workers of Mumbai’s Central Railway Carriage and Wagon Workshop toiled day and night to spruce up an old locomotive and remodel some coaches and wagons to capture the magic and ambience of yore and create the look of the first train. Since that eventful day, 150 years down memory lane, the Indian Railways has tracked thousands of miles. Today, it is the world’s largest railway network, covering over 63,000 km with about 12,000 trains on its regular schedules. And no other mode of transport can boast of this magnificent achievement. To
commemorate this, the railway authorities have chalked out elaborate programmes. Prime Minister Vajpayee released the mascot guard, Bholu, on Monday. A postage stamp has also been released. What is more, this year has been declared the “Passenger Amenities Year”.
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Weather plays a role in stroke A 14-year study of thousands of first-time stroke victims found people are more likely to suffer a stroke in the spring or fall when weather conditions change, French researchers have reported. Dr Dominique Minier at the Service de Neurologie in Dijon, France, led a team of researchers who set out to find whether meteorological conditions were a factor in the occurrence of strokes. They studied 3,289 first-time stroke patients in Western Europe and determined that weather factors such as temperature, humidity and wind may contribute to a higher number of strokes and that more people had strokes in the spring and fall when weather conditions change. “It would be easy to imagine most would happen in the winter because of colder temperatures, but more factors combine in the fall and the spring,’’ Minier said in a telephone interview. A stroke causes damage to part of the brain as a result of an interruption of the blood supply. Speaking at a meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Denver on Tuesday, Minier said his team used 150 weather combinations, including air temperature, atmospheric pressure, precipitation, wind and humidity factors to determine which were most strongly correlated with a stroke. Strokes caused by blood clots and strokes linked to clogged large arteries were found to occur in high pressure conditions combined with medium humidity. Strokes caused by diseases of small arteries happened mainly in weather conditions combining low pressure, high humidity and cold temperatures, as well as unstable weather conditions with rain, Minier said. He cautioned that the findings were based on weather conditions in Western Europe, and do not apply to other parts of the world. “In practice the results from the study cannot be used to forecast the occurrence of strokes, but it’s interesting to better understand under what weather conditions they occur,’’ Minier said in a telephone interview. Reuters Heavy drinkers suffer brain damage Excessive alcohol consumption over long term takes toll on the body and mind but a new study suggests that heavy drinkers might suffer brain damage even after a few days’ binge. The study, conducted on animals, found that rats given large doses of alcohol every eight hours for four consecutive days experienced damage in their brains. The area of brain responsible for smell was damaged after only two days of heavy drinking and other areas within four days, it says. The amount of alcohol given to rats was roughly the equivalent of 10 drinks in a single occasion for humans, twice the amount commonly defined as binge drinking for men. For women, it is four or more drinks. The study finds that damage to brain cells occurs during alcohol consumption and not when brains withdraws from long-term alcohol abuse as commonly believed. A report quoting 1999 data from the National Center of Health statistics said the binge drinking is relatively common with 15 per cent of adults reporting engaging in it at least once within the previous month.
PTI
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What is religion about? Friends and students often ask me to suggest a course of reading that would answer the questions: what is religion? What is the function and relevance of religion today? Is it man’s most awakened activity or a superstition he should outgrow? My own knowledge of that course is very far from being exhaustive; but I have experienced and read enough to be able to give what I think may be useful answers to these questions. First, what is religion? We all think we know what it is, but this may be a mistake, possibly even a grave mistake. Because part of the problem in discussing religion is due to the fact that most people (even highly “educated” ones who claim themselves to be intellectually enlightened) think of religion according to their own particular religion, which may sometimes make you think that you are “good” and the other is “evil,” and which may also be quite inadequate as a comprehensive thinking of religion that will cover all religions. In the West, for example, religion is bound up with the concept of God and the awful menace of purgatory. Even Shakespeare — who was a genius-of-all-trades and could write about anything in the world — took for granted the existence of purgatory. In Hamlet, for instance, the Ghost says to Hamlet: “I am thy father’s spirit/Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,/And for the day confin’d to fast in fires,/Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature/Are burnt and purg’d away.” Since ages religion has been thought of in many different ways within a local culture, turning it into new forms of itself, no doubt, but still into forms of itself. Religion, therefore, is only a human construction, a holy lie: and that is why for several years now most people (particularly in the West) have been experimenting, in this age of knowledge explosion, with different methods of improving the quality of human understanding about religion and choosing to speak not so much of orthodox religion (which often creates all kinds of sophistical error by striving to accommodate blind faith to reason) as of a religion that promotes the standards of rational comprehension and allows one to experience an urge to have at least a pretty accurate picture of its fundamental character. But it is still, most conveniently and to the bad luck of common people, associated with ritualism, with the vast politico-theologico-financial organisations known as churches, temples, mosques and similar other institutions. And if it continues to be the force of the past of a wish-fulfilment dream brought to life in the assertion of heaven, hell, communal God or Allah or Ram, it will yield the profoundly horrifying results it has always yielded in the past, even when it is well intentioned (which it very often is not, particularly when self-centred religious institutions and unscrupulous politicians handle it). Religion needs to be understood as a means to encourage people to be ambitious for the highest art of living which calls for a way of living in time with dignity, commitment and respect for others. Its business is to wake us up and direct our attention not towards temples or mosques or churches or even towards justifying the ways of unknown God (who, though brought into existence by human imagination, is simply beyond its comprehension, baffling and enigmatic) to man in terms of a set beliefs or a treasure house of fossil observations, but towards the improvement of the social and economic environment and the various techniques of character training by which alone the frustrations of modern life and the vast sum of human suffering may be overcome. Thus, if religion has to be relevant today, (that is, for today’s generation in particular) it should, in every way, focus itself on the welfare of mankind, on a way of life founded upon the apprehension of the sacredness of love for others. In fact, religion loses its essence when we turn to it with an essentially profane attitude, as a means of meeting our needs, satisfying our wants (political or social) and ensuring our happiness. But when we cease to think of religion in terms of mosques, temples or churches or market places, and turn our inward attention to Infinite Being by letting it be present with us (even though we have no mental picture of it) it becomes a pure awakened activity which arises from the direct and immediate apprehension of the sacred by the individual. Everything that lives is sacred. And this apprehension of the sacred is accompanied by a blend of wisdom, praise and love, and is always characterised by self-forgetfulness and truthful living. the pursuit of religion in this sense is the most perfect, sublime, profitable, and delightful of pursuits.
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The Gita opens the whole world to us If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved while others were destroyed I would unhesitatingly include among them the
Bhagawadgita. This choice I will make not on grounds of its profound religious content and philosophical foundations alone but for its practical wisdom which we derive to wrestle with the manifold complex problems of life in this topsy-turvy world. There is a striking novelty about the Gita every time we read it as it unfolds something startlingly new, and adds a new dimension to our understanding. Generally we read too fast, and our reading habits are rather odd, and that too casual and we fail to grasp the true spirit of the books we read. Thoughtless reading leads nowhere. Reading requires a highly trained discipline of utmost concentration. Books read in solitude are rewarding, and their discussion with others is an exhilarating experience, and their close interaction with other minds hits off flying sparks in the realm of ideas. Advanced knowledge is always in a tactically exposed position. The other day I happened to discuss the meaning of the Gita with B.N. Dubey, a highly respected civil servant, and formerly Personal Secretary to the Defence Minister. His illuminating comments on the Gita made me realise that the Gita is a play enacted by four extraordinary characters who are engaged in their discussion of the fundamental problems of life and its meaning. The blind Kuru King Dhritarashtra asks what was happening on the Kurukshetra battlefield, and Sanjay, the reporter, describes the scenes enacted accurately.
Arjuna, the struggling soul, seeks answers to the questions that agitate his mind. Arjuna’s friend, guide and philosopher Krishna answers the questions point by point with poise, and using his logic and persuasive powers eventually succeeds in clearing the doubts assailing Arjuna’s mind. Arjuna’s delusion is destroyed, and he awakens to see the reality of life and vision. Krishna has the fullest satisfaction of having performed his duty as a friend and teacher. Sanjay’s role is also significant. He hears the whole discourse but nothing moves him, and he remains completely impervious to assimilating any new ideas, and he is mentally blind. Even today many of us like Dhritarashtra are unresponsive to the current of new ideas, particularly when they go against our strongly entrenched beliefs. Dhritarashtra, a man of few words, is inert and passive. His role seems like that of a curtain-raiser in a play. All through he observed silence, and towards the end when the play is over we forget him just pitying his plight as utterly an unrepentant ignorant man who refuses to learn anything. Sanjay evokes our sympathy and admiration. He appears a man of virtuous character, and of infinite patience who reports accurately without frills and embellishments. Towards the end Sanjay is enthralled by the spiritual bliss he derived from the dialogue exchanged between Krishna and
Arjuna, and it is remarkable indeed that in the verse last but one in the
Gita, Sanjay sums up brilliantly the whole philosophy of the Gita: “Wherever is Krishna, Yogas’ Lord, wherever is
Partha, the archer, assured are there property, victory and happiness”. There is no female character in the Gita. It was then a male-dominated society; and there was surely no place for women on the battlefield. Obviously, the battle originated due to a wrangling over the issues of property, deprivation of human rights, and the onrageous treatment meted out to Draupadi who was shamelessly disrobed in public demonstrating the collapse of all social and moral values that bind society. The Gita focuses on the moral and spiritual issues that govern human life when it is discussed in a dialogue form akin to the Socratic method of question-and-answer, which are co-extensive. Arjuna is a Prince-warrior, fearless, peerless in battle, and fully equipped with extraordinary tactical skills to vanquish his enemies on the battlefield. A man of iron and flint, honourable, sophisticated and suave in manners, humane and perpetually curious about the how and why of things. His close friendship with Krishna shows that his intellectual stature was pretty high, and that he could converse with his friend Krishna freely, and as friends do, talk on anything between the stars and the earth, and even take liberties which, of course, Arjuna later regretted have done, feeling that such an action on his part was audacious, and unseemly. The starting point of the Gita is the question of right and evil, which is a live issue today facing us almost at every turn and exercising deeply our mind. In other words the question is how to face the grim and sordid realities of life. How to master the art of living, and make our way nobly through the murky hurly-burly of life. These are the questions that weigh on Arjuna’s mind. At the sight of his dear and near ones who are going to be slaughtered, Arjuna falters and recoils, and refuses to fight while throwing away his weapons. Krishna does not command, exhort or pontificate. He investigates, weighs pros and cons, and elevates though to the highest, the finest, and the noblest practical and spiritual level. Action performed by a completely disinterested and detached spirit, and uninfluenced by charms of any material gain or depressed by worldly neglect is the goal and destiny of humankind. Such an approach intrinsically demonstrates a scientific temper of mind that has resolved some of the greatest problems of life. The Gita opens the whole world to us and we as pilgrims have to seek what we can despite our failings to imbibe its message. |
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Your love has made me dance to a fast beat! Your love has taken abode within my heart! This cup of poison I drank all by myself. Come, come, O physician, or else I breathe my last! Your love has made me dance to a fast beat!... In this forest of love the peacock gives a call. My lovely friend is both my qibla and kaba Having inflicted the grievous wound, You never enquired after me. Your love has made me dance to a fast beat! O Bullah, the Lord has brought me to the door of Inayat (the Master of Bulleh Shah) Who has given me garments green and red, to wear. When I danced a step I found him the same as ever. *** — Nazir Ahmad, Kalam-i-Bulleh Shah *** Their eyes are very benevolent to me. They look at the beloved as I raise them. The eyes are to be cast to the crows, That look on one besides Him. My eyes enjoy and are satisfied on seeing Him. They dance with joy at His sight. — Shah Latif (A Sufi saint) *** There is a principle, which is pure, placed in the human mind which in different places and ages hath had different names; it is, however, pure and proceeds from God. It is deep and inward confined to no forms of religion, nor excluded from any, where the heart stands in perfect sincerity. In whomsoever this takes root, and grows, of what nation soever, they become brethren. — John Wooman, Dairy |
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