THE GENIUS OF SANATANA POLITY AND STATECRAFT: DECOLONISING INDIAN GOVERNANCE by SANDEEP BALAKRISHNA (Dharma Dispatch)

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s vision of and eulogy to the Indian Civil Services in his inspirational speech on April 21, 1947 to the first batch of the Indian Administrative Services needs repetition if only to underscore how farsighted he was: 

Your predecessors were brought up in the traditions in which they … kept themselves aloof from the common run of the people. It will be your bounden duty to treat the common men in India as your own. [Emphasis added] 

It was a truly rousing and heartfelt speech. It was also a challenge to the best men to see whether they could scale the Mount Everest or just Nandi Hills. Fortunately, a sizeable chunk took up the Sardar’s challenge and showed what the Sardar’s “steel frame” was really capable of contributing towards nation-building. Until at least the mid 1970s, there were any number of IAS officers who were also scholars and culturally learned. Fast forward, a decade later, the downward transformation was as swift as it was brutal and criminal. Recent history is witness to the undeniable living reality that the steel frame has transformed into a moth-eaten hollowness. Indeed, it is inconceivable that brazen “politicians” like Lalu Yadav, D.K. Shivakumar et al couldn’t have gotten away with their venal marauding of both the exchequer and public conscience without being ably assisted by the bureaucracy. 

Nirad C Chaudhuri echoed[i] Sardar Patel as recently as in 1997 when he remarked that

…what disappeared from India with the going away of the British had created remained, intact in all its features and above all in its spirit… The immense noisy crowds that greeted the end of British rule in India with deafening shouts of joy on August 15, 1947, did not recall the old saying: they thought nothing of British rule would survive in their country after the departure of the White men… They never perceived that British rule in India had created an impersonal structure…. a system of government for which there was no substitute. In this system, the actual work of government was carried on by a bureaucracy consisting of the highest British officials together with a hierarchy of officials whose lowest but the most numerous personnel was formed by the clerks. Actual initiation of government action was in the hands of the men in the lowest position, viz, the clerks… the basic character of the Indian bureaucracy as it is now: ‘Theirs is a solid, egocentric, and rootless order, which by its very nature, is not only uncreative, but even unproductive. Its only purpose is to perpetuate itself by inbreeding, and ensure its prosperity. Government by such a bureaucracy can by itself be regarded as a decisive sign of decadence of a people in their political life.

The common feature of both the Sardar and Nirad Chaudhuri’s observation is just one word: rootlessness; in other words, psychological and cultural colonization. In practical terms, if there’s any institution that needs to be urgently decolonized today, it is the Indian Administrative Services (I use this term in an all-encompassing sense to include all the Civil Services like IFS, IPS, etc). Many learned Civil Services officers have themselves written and spoken at length about the need for reform in the Civil Services. But the word they’re looking for is not “reform” but “decolonize.” I would also dare add the following to this: the state at which the Civil Services is currently in, reform is simply impossible.

We can also regard this issue with a bit of historical data pertaining to said colonization.

Rule by Theory

One significant consequence—indeed, a defining feature—since India became a democracy in name is something that I call Rule-by-Theory. Under Nawab Nehru’s extended dispensation of darkness, softcore Communism was the theory that ruled India. Till she lifted the Emergency, Indira Gandhi opted for a slightly hardcore version of the same Communism. And Rajiv Gandhi didn’t have a clue about anything. After his demise, the country was pretty much in free fall except for some breaths of fresh air under P.V. Narasimha Rao and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. 

But what has remained common for the last sixty-odd years is the selfsame Rule-by-Theory. Or to be more specific, Rule by Western Political Theories, which are completely at odds with the millennia-old genius of Sanatana polity, statecraft and governance. What has worsened the situation is the untested implementation of said Rule-by-Western-Theories. And nowhere is this defect more glaring than in the near-obliteration of the time-tested system of the Gram Panchayat, which had largely remained untouched even by the most oppressive Islamic tyranny. Although the Gram Panchayat system exists only in name, its original sturdiness has perhaps been irretrievably lost. In other words, the form of democracy that India adopted after 1947 centralized political power in New Delhi to such an appalling extent that even state governments were reduced to the status of supplicants. As an example, let’s look at an illuminating if not tragic account[ii] of the deliberations over the Panchayat Raj system in the Constituent Assembly.  

·       I want to ask whether there is any mention of villages and any place for them in the structure of this great Constitution. No, nowhere. The Constitution of a free country should be based on ‘local self-government’. We see nothing of local self-government anywhere in this Constitution. 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 which is not based on units and in the making of which they have no voice, 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 for long. 

·       We cannot have a strong Centre without strong limbs. If we can build the whole structure on the village panchayats, on the willing cooperation of the people, then I feel the Centre would automatically become strong. 

·       Dr Ambedkar boldly admitted, and the members of the Drafting Committee do concede that in this Constitution there is no provision for establishing Panchayat Raj…When there is no such provision, it can never be the Constitution of India… If the village is to be discarded, someone can also boldly demand that this Constitution be discarded.

Unprecedented Concentration of Political Power

Some conclusions are inescapable from this. At no other time in the millennia-old civilizational history of India—even under the vast and sweeping monarchies of the Mauryas, the Guptas and the Vijayangara Empire—was political power concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority in a single city: New Delhi. Such concentration of political power is not only alien to the Sanatana spirit, it is a crime against this spirit. Indeed, this centralization and concentration of power is the chief reason for the growth of regional and caste-based parties in just about thirty years after we attained freedom. For example, from the “Dravidian” parties up to say the Telugu Desam Party until recently, it was common to hear their leaders drop such grand public utterances about “taking our fight to Delhi.” Think about what that means. Think about what this kind of “democracy” has done to Bharatavarsha and her Sanatana civilisational continuity. 

Rajyashastra is Subservient to Dharmashastra

In the Sanatana tradition, what is known as politics was always subservient to Dharmashastra. In a way, Rajyashastra (polity, statecraft, governance, administration) was a mere subset of Dharmashastra and couldn’t be divorced or separated from it. Politics, economics, etc were worldly subjects to be regarded as mere tools and implements that facilitate a human being’s continuous quest to attain spiritual liberation. Which is why politics was constrained by the tenets of Dharma, and it is Dharma which guarantees spiritual freedom to the individual. All other freedoms are meaningless without spiritual freedom. In the Sanatana conception, this spiritual freedom of the individual received primacy because the collective actions and remembered traditions guided by this spiritual freedom is what gave us civilizational continuity. 

Consider these words[iii] by the iconic D.V.G.

no matter how far India progresses in the achievement of….material wealth, there will always be numerous other countries as competition… our desire…to be equal to England, Germany, America, and Russia in material acquisitions…is itself an adventure. It’s our duty to attempt such things so let’s do it.

But the one field which doesn’t present any such competition is culture: specifically, the spiritual culture of India. This spiritual culture is the best and the finest of India’s wealth. If we don’t account for or neglect this spiritual culture, there’s no other area which India can take pride in. Forget pride, there is indeed no area where India can become useful to the world.

But think about what these Western political theories, democracy etc have become today, in the lands of their origin: they have become instruments to manipulate the public mind. Indeed, even the notion of the term, “public conscience” has all but been eliminated in public discourse in the West.  

From the Vedic period up to the 18^th century, there was an intimate and a kind of deeply personal relationship between the ruler and the ruled. Indian polity represented perhaps the greatest lived example of what is today known as “last mile delivery of governance” and such other fashionable verbiage. The level of decentralization in governance was truly unparalleled. Every village, the last unit of administration was self-contained. Villagers really didn’t have a reason to step out of their confines for any matter concerning their daily needs. 

Genius of Decentralisation 

Indeed, history shows us that the genius of Indian polity can best be observed in our village setups. In a manner of speaking, the village was the physical manifestation of the proverb that “you can create your own world wherever you are.” 

Speaking at a very high level, what do institutions like Gram Panchayat, Sabha, Samiti, Mahanadu, Oor, Parishad etc really mean? For a fairly detailed treatment of this topic, refer to my essay on the Mackenzie Manuscripts. In any case, these institutions were later refinements of the original administrative and governance systems that existed in the Vedic period: Arajaka, Bhaujya, Vairajya, Samrajya, Maharajya, Swaarajya, etc. Roughly speaking, these refinements were brought in practice during the Mauryan rule and continued in a largely unbroken fashion until the Mughals. Thus, in Northern India, we had administrative units such as Rashtra, Ahara, Janapada, Desha, Vishaya, and Bhukti. Their equivalents in Southern India were Rajya, Pithika, Ventte, Vishaya, Seeme, Naadu, Hobli, Valanad, Mandalam, Naad, Aimbadin, Melagaram, Agaram, Chaturvedi, Mangalam, Kuttam, and Palayapattu. 

See another facet of the indivisibility and unity of India?   

But in the realm of practical life, these were intimate institutions that kept our extraordinary civilization alive and unbroken in the daily life, customs, festivals, and consciousness of Indians for hundreds of generations. Only in the rarest of rare cases was punishment actually enforced at the level of the village because there was an unspoken and interiorized understanding among people that even a minor disruption in these systems would bring down the whole edifice. The fabled inscription at Uttaramerur (near Kanchipuram) is one of the extant records that testify to this kind of near-perfect administrative decentralization. 

Maharaja, Samrat and Chakravartin

The Sanatana conception of a Maharaja, Samrat or Chakravartin also offers tremendous illumination. The Taittiriya Samhita, for example, lists what is known as the Dasharatni (Ten Gems). These were ten top administrative officials (Purohita, Rajanya, Senani, Suta, Gramani, Kshatriya, Sangruhitr, Bhagadhugh, Akshaavapa, and Parivrukti), whose permission was mandatory in order to ratify the King’s coronation. Only after the King took the following vow (Vrata): “I will protect Dharma,” was he pronounced as being officially coronated. But there was an even more practical and profound side to this. Let’s hear it in the words[iv] of the gem of a scholar, Dr. Srikanta Sastri: 

Because there is the Law of the Jungle [Matsya Nyaya] in this world, the [institution] of King was created in order to uphold and maintain peace. The King who enforces the power of punishment using Dharma as his guide is compared to Mahavishnu who preserves order in the world. However, it is completely in violation of the spirit of the Dharmashastra to regard the King as having the Divine Right to rule.

At once, the King was the combined embodiment of the following: he was the leader of the society, the commander-in-chief during wartime, the Chief Justice who would dispense justice after free, frank, and open consultation with wise men, and not folks who had risen to high rank owing to mere technical or subject competence. In the Sanatana conception, dispensing justice was to be done with an attitude of Soumanasya (Pleasantness of mind) as a verse of the Atharvaveda (30: 5-6) says beautifully. When we regard this from another perspective, the genius of Bharatavarsha becomes evident: this is an attitude, outlook, and temperament towards life juxtaposed on the complex tapestry of statecraft and polity. Which is why for the major part in its long history, Bharatavarsha had very few instances of dictators and tyrants. However, every Muslim Sultan or Nawab was a despot and tyrant almost without exception. 

One can cite examples of numerous such Samrats but I’ve considered Harshavardhana here. Harshavardhana divided the income derived from his personal landowning into four parts. He gave one part each to:

1.     Take care of Government expenses

2.     Fund the salaries of high-ranking Government officials

3.     Patronise scholars, Vidwans, Pandits, poets, artists etc.

4.     Charity

More than a thousand years later, the warrior-queen and Raja-Rishika, Ahalyabai Holkar followed the same tradition of Harshavardhana. Indeed, they followed the warning in the renowned aphorism, Rajaa Kaalasya Kaaranam, which simply means this: that political system is despicable which loots people without first solving their economic problems.

I leave the gentle reader to draw their own conclusions.  

Postscript

More fundamentally, recall how we address a long and distinguished line of luminaries – Manu, Brihaspati, Ushanas, Parashara, Bharadwaja, Vishalaksha, Vatavyadhi, Baahudantiiputra, Katyayana, and Chanakya – who first laid down the philosophy of Sanatana statecraft: as Rishis. 

Notes

[i] Nirad C Chaudhuri: Three Horsemen Of The New Apocalypse. Emphasis added.

[ii] Dharampal: Panchayat Raj And India’s Polity

[iii] D V Gundappa: Jnapaka Chitrashale: Vaidikadharma Sampradaayastharu: DVG Kruti Shreni: Volume 8: Nenapina Chitragalu – 2:  (Govt of Karnataka, 2013). Upasamhara. Emphasis added.

[iv] Dr. S. Srikanta Sastri: Bharatiya Samskruti. P. 203. Emphasis added. 

Courtesy: https://www.dharmadispatch.in/culture/the-genius-of-sanatana-polity-and-statecraft-decolonising-indian-governance

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