THROUGHOUT THE CENTURY of the modern Indian Renaissance, it was an article of truth that one could not offer cogent and honest interpretations of the Sanatana civilization unless one imbibed its spiritual core. Writing in 1927, this is what N.N. Law said:
In the case of the ancient Hindus, the value of the spiritual side of their civilization is very difficult to be realized by a man of the twentieth century because of the frame of mind that is generally developed in him under the influence of the current thoughts and environment. But it was this spiritual culture which was indissolubly bound up with every phase of the ancient Hindu civilization, and influenced and determined…their manners, customs, and institutions, through which their thoughts and feelings found expressions.
Nowhere is this truer than in the political systems, institutions, traditions and practices that Hindus founded and nurtured throughout the ages. More than merely bookish codification, this political system operated via customs, which in turn acquired great authority because they were actually values lived by real people and were generationally transmitted. We cited one such glorious example in our essay on the ancient, Yogic village of Sorade.
Thus, when we remove this spiritual element from our politics and statecraft, we get the crude type of competitive politics that we observe in Western democracies. It is unfortunate that we blindly adopted the same system without first conducting a philosophical debate as to its feasibility for a spiritual civilization like India, which had just emerged from a millennium of oppression. The Western model of democracy is essentially competition and competition divides, and there is no telling when competition culminates in bloodletting. However, the Sanatana theory and practice of statecraft whose roots are moored in Vedanta, recognizes what is known as tara-tama bhava, or the hierarchy inherent in nature. In its political expression, this was transformed as a continuous attempt at harmonizing the various elements of this hierarchy after giving due recognition to the value of each element. This is how social and other conflicts were minimized and a mechanism for self-rectification was built into our civilisation and culture. The inseparable companion of self-correction is self-renewal: the lake renews itself when the silt at its bottom is cleared out. This is the Sanatana method.
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