The Training, Qualifications, Character and Powers of Ministers in Ancient India: A Study in Harmony - Sandeep Balakrishna

A KEY LINK TO UNDERSTAND both the theoretical and practical functioning of politics and statecraft in ancient India up to the destruction of the Classical Era is not to view it from the prism of what is known as democracy. While we can find contemporary terminological equivalents to adequately describe and analyze various aspects of Hindu polity, we must have a vivid picture of its practice. The chief sources that enable us to get this picture include epigraphs, language, literature, writers on Rajyasastra and Dharmasastra, numismatics and what are derisively dismissed as “oral legends.”

It is also incorrect to somehow “prove” that democracy existed in ancient India—i.e., the sort of democracy that has been in vogue for roughly the last three hundred years. At best, it can be said that some practices and elements familiar to us today did exist back then. But in this case, the parts do not make the whole. It is akin to saying that all creatures that have wings are eagles.

A reasonable definition of ancient Indian polity and statecraft is that it was a Circumscribed Monarchy where the power of the king was constrained by a Council of Ministers. Every writer on Indian polity from Manu onwards held that a good administration was one where the King and the Council of Ministers were mutually afraid of each other, and in turn, all of them were afraid of public opinion. For more details on public opinion in ancient India, see the essay series linked below.

Unlike contemporary democracies, the ruler had to compulsorily be a warrior first and an administrator next. Among other things, good administration was defined as a powerful method of preventing war and winning it if it occurred despite solid administration. Almost every royal fiat had to be whetted by the Council of Ministers before execution. In turn, these top echelons kept a hawk-like vigil on the daily life of the people, generously rewarding their good conduct, service, fidelity to tradition, and punishing faults and crimes in a timely fashion. Although this system eventually thawed and was vandalized to the point of extinction, its foundational features remained intact in the DNA of our people even after India attained a questionable independence. To quote the memorable words of the stalwart of epigraphy R. Narasimhacharya, these features contained in our historical records “bear testimony to the prowess, piety, generosity, patriotism and toleration of our princes and the people.”

P.K. Telang also describes this system beautifully:

The word Rajan (or King) means one who can keep the people contented. Power and authority were implicitly admitted to rest on the sanction and the good-will and consent of the people. The ultimate right of the people to be the sole arbiters as to the kind of government they would have and the persons they would have to govern them, was recognized. This recognition was given concrete form in two restraints on the power of the King…He could not transcend Dharma. What is Dharma? The custom of the people, admitted and sanctified as binding law and imprimatur of those who were the knowers and guardians of the people’s culture. He could not break the word of the Brahmanas. Who were the Brahmanas? Those who having acquired culture and knowledge, gave everything to the service of the country and the service of the people without expecting anything in return. Their watch-words were self-renunciation and self-sacrifice in the service of the nation. You will note how both these checks would lead to the substantiation of the ultimate power of the people.

But this does not mean that the system was perfect in all respects. There are numerous instances that show conflicts between the King and the Council of Ministers.

An early instance of this conflict occurs during the rule of the daring and indomitable Śaka ruler, Rudradamana I of the Western Kshatrapa dynasty. He placed an ambitious proposal to repair the dam of the Sudarshana Lake at Junagadh. After much deliberation, his Council of Ministers shot it down because it was cost-intensive. But Rudradamana had given his word to the people. And so, he rebuilt the dam using his personal money or privy purse.

Ministers were able to wield such extraordinary clout owing to their selection process, detailed for example, in Kautilya’s Arthasastra. Before being appointed, they were subject to rigorous tests which were above and beyond their scholarship, talent, skill or experience. These tests had everything to do with their personal character, foremost of which was absolute integrity and absolute loyalty to their land. This is the fabled fourfold Kautilyan test:

1. Religious allurement

2. Financial enticement

3. Sexual temptation

4. Inducing physical threat

Depending on which tests the aspirant passed or failed in, portfolios would be allocated. For example, if a candidate failed in all tests but passed the test of sexual temptation, he would be placed in charge of “pleasure grounds” or brothels. The candidate who passed all the tests would be appointed as the Prime Minister.

It is precisely this element that is missing in our IAS, IPS, IFS and other high-level recruitment processes. Thus, it is unsurprising that a barely-disguised, one-man breaking-India force like Harsh Mander still roams around scot-free.

These tests apart, appointments to ministerial offices entailed these qualifications:

• A solid training in the arts including music, drama, poetry, etc.

• A thorough mastery over grammar

• Impeccable and exquisite handwriting

• A cultivation of vision and foresight

• Strong memory

• Eloquence

• Health, vigour and enthusiasm

• Basic or advanced military training

• A demeanor that exuded dignity, poise, composure, charm, and wit

• Round-the-clock availability to everyone including the lowest classes of people

• A genuine attitude of affection and warmth towards all classes of the society

• Ruthlessness sans personal hatred when dealing with criminals

• Purity of life by not missing the key elements of Achara and Vyavahara such as performing the prescribed Dharmic rituals, festivals, Vratas and doing regular Daana.

• The Mahabharata has a beautiful set of verses that gives perhaps the profoundest list of qualifications and qualities a minister must be endowed with.

  Oh Rajan! Take care that your ministers should be men well-versed in the Sastra of politics and the application of the six gunas: noble birth, devout, bereft of faults, good politicians, clever lawyers, and learned in history. They must be skilled to read the unwritten signs and intentions (Ingitajnana) like an open book. They must fully know what should be done and when. They must be heroic and strong. They must well-born and well-bred, keen witted, and must succeed in all works that they undertake. They must be experts in the art of warfare and in the strengthening of forts in order to make them impregnable. They must be deeply learned in the Dharmasastras, they must be broadminded and show mercy in situations that elicit it. They must be wise, endowed with foresight and must command the wisdom to circumvent all future dangers and must have the inner strength to face and subdue the present threats. They must keenly anticipate the motives of their foes and friends alike. More vitally, they must learn how to deal with indifferent and lazy kings who act purposelessly and must guard their secrets, standing firm like rocks.

• O King! These ministers must be strictly Dharmic, generous and immune to all temptations. In a word, such ministers are strong and fit, like patient cows, to bear the burden of the state upon their backs.

  The history and culture of the Indian people and their civilization is an inspiring, sublime, and exalted kaleidoscope pieced with lovely patterns of the lives and legacies of such ministers. From the immortal Kautilya to the true, contemporary Ratna of Bharatavarsha, Sir M. Visvesvarayya. If one Kautilya, one Darbhapani, one Vidyaranya Swami, one Thimmarasu and one Visvesvarayya could sculpt the fortunes of and bring light, prosperity, and joy to an entire Rajya, imagine what an entire cabinet of such light-givers can do.

• Small wonder that Kautilya and other Hindu writers and lawgivers recommended that the King should follow the Prime Minister as “a student follows his preceptor, and a son his father.” In a superb feat of creativity, the Kannada blockbuster movie, Sri Krishnadevaraya brings this feature vividly alive in the scene where Prime Minister Thimmarasu slaps the newly-coronated emperor Sri Krishnadevaraya several times in a row. The Raya’s response: “I understand that there is an intrinsic message of virtue and warning in your slaps. It only shows the depth of your affection towards me.”

  We believe further commentary on this point is superfluous.

• Courtesy: https://www.dharmadispatch.in/history/the-training-qualifications-character-and-powers-of-ministers-in-ancient-india-a-study-in-harmony

THE LOSS OF RASHTRA-RNA: THE TIGHTER WE EMBRACE WESTERN DEMOCRACY THE MORE CHRISTIANIZED OUR OUTLOOK BECOMES by SANDEEP BALAKRISHNA (Dharma Dispatch)

A cultural commentary on key civilisational lacunae in the Indian constitution and how they have played out in practice for seven decades

The profound and irreplaceable loss of spirituality is the cost that the experiment of democracy over the last five hundred years has unarguably extracted from us. It is not mere loss, but destruction, and emotional desolation is the logical consequence of this destruction whose logical consequence in turn is that democracy as it stands, has become deeply dehumanising. In the name of being elected from among the people, the elected representative maintains a big distance after electoral victory or sulks or simmers or plots after defeat. The warmth after electoral victory becomes a façade and people are left guessing about the real meaning of the whim and mood of the representative they elected. This is called political analysis. The dehumanisation is complete both on the part of both the representative and the voter. Let’s aside the realm of politics. At a very fundamental level, this state of being is no way to live.

Neither are these my words. They were uttered and written with unmatched sagacity and spiritual depth by Rishi D.V. Gundappa about a century ago in the repeated warnings he gave, cautioning an India then in a haste to adopt democracy.

It can be argued that another major reason democracy evolved in Europe was to facilitate global plunder under relatively stable conditions at home. European monarchies were essentially oppressive despotisms and the fledgling but ambitious global trading enterprises couldn’t forever remain beholden to the whim of the currently reigning monarch to sanction expensive overseas expeditions. Bloody palace intrigues and succession wars only added to this commercial risk. 

Democracy meant that it was better to have a first among equals than a despot who has no equal. The other major factor was the industrial revolution which pretty much sealed the fate of monarchies. These points become clearer when we note that by the time India formally became a British colony, democracy had been well-established in the UK. And it was the selfsame democracy that sanctioned not only this colonization but passed “laws” for more effectively plundering India. The same democracy also produced several generations of racist academics who in turn fed policy raw material to their political masters.

This cannot be seen in isolation because of a logical question: what was the fundamental character of Hindu monarchies? Short answer: they were largely in tune with millennia-old, established customs, traditions and practices of Raja Dharma which is anything but despotic. Western democracy killed Dharma and “independent” India largely imitated the same democracy. Rajarshis like the Mysore Wodeyars, the Maharaja of Baroda and other truly enlightened rulers had, overnight, become subservient to a faceless democracy which in practice meant that they had to bow down to Congress vermin whose only distinction was Gandhian opportunism.

Civilisational suicide was never embraced with greater fervour.

That said, western democracy has its own intrinsic strength, value, and virtue, and it has endured in the west for so long while it has wilted in most of its former colonies. This is because it evolved over several centuries and was entirely home grown, in tune with the national soil, temperament, and had unique and specific precedents. The European model of democracy requires the constant practice, correction and reform of centuries. This is how DVG puts it:

The strength to govern effectively is a great strength in itself. It requires experience and practice to percolate in the administrative staff. The opportunity for both will be available only when a nation becomes truly independent. A people who are merely clerks cannot develop grand, noble, and lofty ideas and a sturdy work ethic.

This is perhaps the greatest indictment of the IAS. 

India had none of these western precedents and the manner in which we adopted democracy is the reason for the chaotic state we are today in: which writer of the Indian constitution could envisage that in less than seventy years, members of their own party would wage war not just against the constitution but the country itself? The basic trait of Bharatavarsha is Sattva to protect which Rajas is required, the absolute opposite of the west whose basic trait is an unhinged Rajas as a constant whose end goal is the uninhibited enjoyment of Tamas. You cannot outwardly adopt the temperament and tactics of a wolf and pretend that a cow is a wolf.

The other important reason for the chaos-seeded democracy we adopted was the background of the authors of our constitution. In DVG’s words, they were extraordinary scholars endowed with piercing intellect, erudition, logic, and were highly educated. But they were also great theory masters. The overall consequence was the untested imposition of theories like freedom, democracy, liberty, and federalism fashioned in the west on an entire people who lived their lives for more than three millennia based on a thoroughly divergent political, cultural and social inheritance. To put it bluntly, an all-encompassing and far-reaching change for the worse was thrust upon the entire population of the seventh largest country in the world without their consent. From being a duty-bound, participatory “Praja,” the Indian citizen became a mere voter. 

This is civilisational wrecking beyond comparison.

It was the constitution of an ill-informed elite whose outlook was barely Indian, a point which was repeatedly hammered with phenomenal foresight during the Constituent Assembly debates by Damodar Swaroop Seth:

this Constitution as a whole, instead of being evolved from our life and reared from the bottom upwards is being imported from outside and built from above downwards. A Constitution…in which there is not even a mention of thousands and lakhs of villages of India and in framing which they have had no hand, well you can give such a Constitution to the Country but I very much doubt whether you would be able to keep it long.

And Sri Damodar Swaroop ji was right. After a lapse of seventy-three years, we have a mutilated, defaced constitution, worse than just merely keeping it. What Damodar Swaroop meant was the following in practice. Of asking a few simple, rudimentary, every day questions before force feeding the constitution down our throats back then:

1. What are the food habits and diet of these proverbial villagers?

2. What are the unique local/village customs related to worship, traditions, rituals, marriage, death, etc, which they have inherited from time immemorial? 

3. What is their typical daily life?

4. How are disputes resolved at the local level so that satisfactory justice is delivered in the shortest possible time?

5. How do they spend their spare time? What are their typical modes of recreation, sports, etc?

These are the most accurate yardsticks that provide an almost unerring raw material for what is known as policymaking today. Doing this requires the old-fashioned Indian way: of spending time with these real people, eating with them, going to their temples, playing their games, interacting with their kids…But what do our policymakers who go to these criminally expensive schools learn? Numbers. Statistics. Graphs that only a student who pays ₹ 70 lakhs can decipher. But more dangerously, psyche-altering theories that have impoverished entire societies. The more insane the theory, the greater the chances of getting a Nobel. Ask Amartya Sen.

Needless, such warnings by enlightened minds like P.V. Kane, DVG and other such eminences went unheeded.

One fails to understand the meaning of the words, ‘fundamental rights’ in a constitution which took over two years of deliberations, if they could be changed within a year and a half.

P.V. Kane

But the damage had already occurred at the root level. Take the case of the cliché that several folks find it fashionable to utter today: that our constitution has no provision for Dharma, and merely stop at that, not bothering to actually study the details, which is where the real story lies. This is because investigating these details will reveal uncomfortable truths some of which are politically incorrect.

For example, all Dharmasastra texts unambiguously say that the king had no authority to meddle with Sastric rules governing local customs, which were invariably rooted in our conception of Varna. Does any public person today have the guts to call for a thorough rethinking of this fundamental point? The answer is no because the word “honesty” is inseparable from “guts.” What is the bedrock of these local customs, indeed the bedrock of Sanatana civilisation itself? Dharma. Which in daily life also means “duty,” which is what kept our civilisation alive, thriving and resilient for millennia. 

Now, where is the chapter on fundamental duties in our constitution, which has been made out to be some kind of sacrosanct document higher than Dharma itself? The simplest definition of duty is this: it is an attitude of inner life that makes most laws unnecessary because it is distilled spirituality applied in practical life. Because the simplest definition of law is that it is a barbed-wire fence that restrains base human passions. When Dharma is intrinsic to our inner life, we need no outer barbed wires. And an innate sense of duty keeps people from creating mischief in society. 

The Sanatana civilisation until the framing of this constitution was the most glorious, unbroken, glimmering, living jewel of this fact. Instead, by an unthinking emphasis on rights, we gave birth to a political system, which can most appropriately be called Rule by Factions.

At any rate, the injurious consequences were evident almost immediately owing to a rather common sense reason. After India attained “independence” – rather, after the British left in haste – we lacked sufficient numbers of elected representatives who had any degree of competence, capability, wisdom, erudition, and even plain guts to deserve such high offices. Instead of questioning this crater-like deficit, we embraced democracy as a universal good and magic pill. One outcome was that these representatives, deeply aware of their own incompetence began succumbing to mob blackmail. Panicked moves and appeasement replaced decision, the primary function of the elected representative and government. The most representative human specimen who made the most number of panicked moves was Jawaharlal Nehru whose knees turned to jelly at the mob-demand for linguistic statehood. It was all downhill after that.

Indeed, it is noteworthy that there are reams of provisions and directions in our constitution regarding the economic and social aspects of the country but not a word about the key foundations of the Sanatana civilisation: Rna, Rta, Dharma, Yajna, Svadhyaya, Lokasangraha, etc. Almost ninety per cent of urban Hindus wouldn’t have even heard of these terms. As the luminaries of our modern renaissance observed, a secular state cannot and should not mean a godless state.

One can list hundreds of such examples but the summary is this: our constitution is the very antithesis of the civilisation it was supposedly meant to protect. And with the benefit of hindsight, we can make a valid case that the farther we travel down the path of western notions of democracy, the more Christianized will our outlook become...has become.

One inescapable conclusion is that the Indian state, set up after 1947 is fundamentally designed to be an inside ally of a civilisational war against Sanatana Dharma than began a thousand years ago.

Think about something you see every day, something that has become a way of life of Indian politics and politicians. Take a person who is culturally a deep-rooted Hindu. He contests elections, gets into Parliament and almost overnight becomes an alien to his own former self. What remains of his deep roots become mere outward finery now meant to be worn during the five-year circus show called elections because the very constitution upon which he took oath constrains him from discharging a Rashtra-Rna for which the constitution has no provision.

When this happens over more than seven decades, the fault is fundamental: it could be that our political system at its core is still that craven Nehruvian conveyor belt that sucks in the best of people, sucks out the last atom of Dharma in their atma and spits them out after hacking their roots.

|| ॐ तत् सत् ||

Courtesy: https://www.dharmadispatch.in/culture/the-loss-of-rashtra-rna-the-tighter-we-embrace-western-democracy-the-more-christianized-our-outlook-becomes