Penitence in Public Life

Emperor Asoka is one of the biggest achievers in ancient India. He carried Buddhism from a local faith to that of being a global religion. But his other big achievement was in abjuring violence in a dramatic manner and accepting peace. He got this story told to the posterity in powerful language in his edicts that say a lot about the mayhem he had himself caused in Kalinga, and his thoughts thereafter. The longest among the edicts reads: “150,000 persons were thence carried away captive, 100,000 were there slain, and many times that number died”. His penitence followed. “Directly after the annexation of the Kalingas began His Sacred Majesty’s remorse for having conquered the Kalingas, because the conquest of a country previously unconquered involves the slaughter, death, and carrying away captive of the people.

After annexing Kalingas in the 3rd century BC, King Ashoka understood the virtue of penitence in public life. Why leaders do not understand it today

That is a matter of profound sorrow and regret to His Sacred Majesty”. It is doubtful if history would have remembered Asoka for his conquests alone. But since the discovery of his edicts and coins by 19th century British civilians in India, he captured the imagination of Indians as a king who not only felt remorse for his past wildness but could turn his repentance into an ideology which traveled far and wide.

His story acquires relevance in today’ context, against the background of the travails of Narendra Modi, a leader whose governance talents and iron will undoubtedly makes him a deserving candidate for the post of prime minister. Yet he is in a limbo because he has not thought it necessary to show any remorse whatsoever for the horrendous 2002 riots in Gujarat under his charge. True nothing has been proved so far to implicate him personally in the communal holocaust killing 1,200 people, mostly Muslims. Nevertheless, one of his ministers, a woman,  has been sentenced with prison term; another is facing trial; and the allegation that the police took too long to appear on the scene is an accepted fact. Maybe much of the violence had happened without Modi’s knowledge, as mob fury has its own dynamics, but he still remains morally accountable as the state was under his charge and it was his remit to maintain public order.

With Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, whose JD(U) is a coalition partner of Modi’s BJP, absolutely unwilling to accept Modi as the alliance NDA’s candidate as prime minister for the 2014 Lok Sabha poll, what has come into focus is the importance of penitence in public life. The value of atonement is not merely derived from the Bible, or the life of Asoka. If Modi had in all these eleven years made a single public gesture to express grief for his administration’s failure to prevent the riots, the atmosphere would have been different altogether for him. Instead he issued a half-hearted apologia before the assembly elections last year, with no mention of what was it about. A heartfelt “sorry” for the 2002 massacre would have erased many bitter memories from public mind of his own vitriolic utterances, including his citing, at the height of the violence, Newton’s law of motion about each action drawing an “equal and opposite reaction”.

One understands why it is so difficult for Nitish to accept Modi as NDA’s candidate for the post of prime minister and yet remain in the coalition. Far from its being a refusal born out of jealousy, it is an expression of helplessness. Bihar’s capital, Patna, is the place from where Emperor Asoka ruled over a vast empire in the 3rd century BC. In today’s Bihar, Muslims are 17 per cent of the population and are a community known to vote en bloc. Despite protestations to the contrary by Modi’s influential advocates in the media and elsewhere, the fact remains that Muslims have not pardoned him after 2002, not to speak of voting for him or his party. It is no wonder that he does not field a single Muslim candidate in the state’s assembly elections. It doesn’t matter as Gujarat has just 7 per cent Muslim population; they are scattered, and are too timid to matter electorally. But Nitish presides over a broad alliance of Muslims, a section of OBCs and dalits. In 2005, he managed to show the door to Laloo Yadav and his RJD precisely because Muslims as a community had switched sides. There could be other reasons too that had led to the ouster of Laloo Yadav, but getting Muslims over to his side was Nitish’s trump card. And now the BJP is cajoling him to give up his hard won constituency by riding the Modi bandwagon.

The 2002 Gujarat riots may be an old story but it has an unending recall value, somewhat like Stalin’s gulags, Hitler’s pogrom, or, looking closer to our times, the three-day-long massacre of Sikhs in Delhi and some other places in early November 1984, following the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her own Sikh bodyguards. Its long shelf life in public memory is evident from the allegation against former Congress minister Jagdish Tytler that he played a key role in the riots near a Gurdwara in the capital leading to the death of three persons. Like Modi, Tytler never publicly regretted his role. He is of course not a gifted leader like Modi but he has the same arrogance of power, which people would neither forgive nor forget. The day last week when a Sessions Court ordered reopening of the investigation against him, 29 years after the incident, there were sizeable crowds of ’84 riot victims and their relatives who had assembled outside the court to demand his fair trial. Modi’s plight is on a larger scale. He is unlikely to get powerful allies in states with 15+ per cent Muslim population, like Assam, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Kerala. These states account for 36 per cent of total seats in the lower house.

Asoka had ruled two millennia before modern democratic states came into being, but he understood the virtue of penitence in public life, and that of moderating one’s pride of power with a credible concern for the welfare of every section of the populace. It is a pity that Modi has not cared to understand the message of Asoka’s edicts. Maybe India will be the loser, for it genuinely needs the leadership of an “iron man”, or perhaps an “iron gentleman”.

(The author is the National Editor of Lokmat group)