A shloka (verse) from the Mahabharata poses a question to the ongoing jubilation in Ayodhya.
Na sa sabha yatra na santi
Vriddha na te ye na vadanti dharmam
Na sau dharmo yatra na satyamasti
Na tatsatyam yacchalenanuviddham
“That is no assembly where there are no elders, and they are not elders who do not declare what dharma is. That is not dharma which is separated from truth, and that is not truth which is fraught with deceit.”
It appears in Udyoga Parva (The Book of Effort) as Vidura delivers crucial lessons on ethics. Interestingly, in the Sampoorna Mahabharata published by Gita Press, the shloka is also mentioned at the moment when Draupadi, forcibly brought to the assembly of the Kauravas, asks troubling questions to the elders present in the court. As she is being insulted and disrobed, Draupadi demolishes the legitimacy of the court and its veterans. Adding fire to her fury, the Gita Press editors have placed the decisive shloka in parenthesis amid the questions she raises.
The verses mirror the Ayodhya of our times. We are told that an investment of several thousand crores will transform the town. But as Ayodhya becomes a grand assembly on January 22, would its high seats be occupied by the Republic’s honourable elders? Do the organisers and presiding officers of the assembly carry the great values of Indian civilisation? Have they offered their lives for truth and dharma?
Also read: ‘Independence’ on January 22? The Noise Generated Is More Likely to Force a Divide
One of them is Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister, a man known for criminal violence and obscene language, whose voluminous crime dossier has been buried in the state police files. The other person is the country’s prime minister, so obsessed with reflections of himself everywhere that even Narcissus would be embarrassed. Have these elders lived a life of dharma?
The Ayodhya assembly is founded on untruth and adharma. What its courtiers term as the triumph of truth has emerged from deceit and brute force. Citing the court ruling, they overlook that the same bench had termed the ‘Ayodhya Kand’ of December 6 as an offence. The above interpretation of Ayodhya becomes imperative because Indian rulers disregard the constitution and spread falsehood in the guise of scriptures.
When a civilisation forgets its values
But where are our elders? Last week, I visited a distinguished scholar and one of India’s finest thinkers. Approaching 90, he was recently admitted in the hospital and had arrived home after a difficult phase.
I went to him to discuss the biography of his late friend, Ramchandra Gandhi (grandson of Mahatma Gandhi), that I am currently working on. He had lost much of his alertness. He was unable to recall several of his old friends, forgot their names and faces. His sentences trailed off in multiple directions. And yet, through the nearly two hours I spent with him, he had a constant refrain: “Sanatan dharma is in crisis.”
I tried to take him to multiple directions but the old man brought me to the singular point. Amid fading memory, with a melancholically blank face and red eyes, he was cognisant enough to discern the greatest threat to the Indian civilisation. “It’s time to take a clear stand. Ramu wouldn’t have faltered, and so wouldn’t I,” he said.
Also read: Four Decades of Milking a Deity in Ayodhya
Returning home, I recalled Sita’s Kitchen, the book Ramchandra had written after the demolition of the Babri mosque. When the injured Hindu pride was “morally bullied and cajoled to perceive a 16th century mosque in Ayodhya as the very embodiment of otherness; sheer, indissoluble, otherness”, he wrote, it marked “Advaita’s Waterloo”. The philosophy of Advaita, that there is no other, which the Upnishads describe as Tat Twam Asi or Thou Art That, stood defeated in the inglorious chapter of the Ayodhya Kand.
The world knows the famous Gita sermon in the Mahabharata, but the great epic has another episode named Anugita. The Pandavas have won the Hastinapur throne and are now the ruling kings. One day Arjuna suddenly realises that he has forgotten the Gita due to the “fickleness of his mind”. Admitting to his ignorance, Arjuna requests Krishna to deliver him the sermon all over again. Krishna rebukes him and says that he wouldn’t be able to “recollect all what he said on that occasion”, and “it is impossible for him to repeat, in detail, all that he said”.
It is, perhaps, possible for a disciple to forget their guru’s teachings. But the guru? The great lord? The episode underlines a crisis that arrives before a civilisation when it forgets its values. The forgetfulness is deliberate in the case of Indian society and media. They have erased their recent past and are out to write a new history of December 6. Wallowing in the ocean of a sinister oblivion and having renounced its dharma, the Indian civilisation is being disrobed in the city of Ram. He couldn’t have foreseen it.
Ashutosh Bhardwaj is an independent journalist and author of the award-winning book The Death Script.
