Arjuna, Akbar, Amartya

The title of this column may suggest that I am reviewing some kind of sequel to the 1970s Bollywood blockbuster, Amar Akbar Anthony. But have no fear. This is not a movie review. The title flows from a tangential reading of Amartya Sen’s latest book, The Idea of Justice. I had no idea justice was such a complicated thing.

The book does not say anything Amartya Sen has not already said before. He has criticised our excessive preoccupation with building “just” institutions instead of a “just” society. The latter would include good institutions, but one would monitor outcomes of actual societal behaviour and keep making course corrections. Debates over what constitutes a just order are also less important than adopting a common-sense approach to reducing gross injustices through public reasoning.

The best part of Sen’s jargon-filled book is where he explains his ideas through examples. This is where Ashoka, Akbar and Arjuna figure in large doses. Through Sen’s lens, all three emerge as one-dimensional heroes, reasoning automatons, not real people.

Ashoka figures in almost all of Sen’s recent books as a kind of champion of public reasoning and moderation. There are, however, problems with the blind lionisation of Ashoka. No thinking person should presume that the historical Ashoka was the same as the Ashoka of the rock edicts.

All emperors have hagiographers and Ashoka surely had his. All histories gloss over the early part of his life, when his armies were murdering people. His Kalinga war was the worst massacre in Indian history at that point of time. If you want to turn Ashoka into a folk hero, you start by looking at him after his “conversion” and change of heart — which is what Buddhist historians like to do. Surely, this is a deficient way of judging someone with history’s hindsight. It’s like assessing Jinnah by looking only at the first half of his political life.

Ashoka’s ideas were products of the intellectual and social environment of his time, and not Ashoka’s alone. Public reasoning and debate did not begin or end with him. They have been part of our cultural ethos from ancient times and we have to thank scores of ancient Indians for it, not just Ashoka.

This brings me to Akbar, whom Sen casts as an early secularist and votary of reason (“rahi akl”). That Akbar was a moderate and tolerant ruler is fact. What is not is the tacit presumption that secularism or tolerance was not a part of the Indian ethos before him. Secular rule is the only way to keep diverse populations together, and many rulers before Akbar knew that.

Like Ashoka, Akbar too started with a sectarian approach, but when his empire grew, he had to change tack. He tried to bring holy men of various religions together to discuss and debate their views. This was as much driven by Akbar’s need to control people’s religious beliefs as by the need to evolve a new synthetic unity. Long before Akbar, Constantine the Great knew the damage religious divisiveness could do to his empire. Which is why he forced Christian bishops to unify their versions of the Bible at the Council of Nicea.

No emperor, from Ashoka to Constantine to Akbar, would want religious disputations to go beyond a point, for radicalism always threatens rulers more than the ruled. Both Ashoka and Akbar were wise rulers, but they did not invent tolerance or secularism or public reasoning. For that you must credit the people and philosophers of ancient India. Their rulers may just have seen these values as essential for maintaining empire.

Now comes Arjuna. Amartya Sen, the peacenik, obviously prefers Arjuna’s reasons for avoiding war at Kurukshetra to Krishna’s call to duty. Sen casts Arjuna in the role of unwilling warrior when he had no qualms fighting other wars before Kurukshetra. By implication, Krishna is the agent provocateur. Dead wrong. First of all, Krishna’s message in the Gita was not to go to war, but to do one’s duty when needed. The Kurukshetra war was not a whimsical call to arms. It became inevitable when Duryodhana and his advisors thwarted all efforts to achieve an honourable peace.

Now picture the World War II allies suing for peace with Hitler on the basis of Arjuna’s specious reasoning, complete with worries about how many people will get killed. It would have been “peace in Arjuna’s time”, but of the kind Neville Chamberlain achieved in Munich with Hitler. It made the Second World War more horrific. In our history, we have seen how Nehru pulled defeat from the jaws of foolish diplomacy in the 1962 war.

He played Arjuna, the pacifist, till he could no longer maintain the charade in the face of Chinese perfidy. Peace with honour is achievable only if you are prepared to go to war.
Amartya’s Ashoka, Arjuna and Akbar are great historical characters who contributed to India’s cultural nationhood, but he has reduced them to cardboard characters of dubious authenticity. He hasn’t done them or Indians much justice.