Triveni Journal

1927 | 11,233,916 words

Triveni is a journal dedicated to ancient Indian culture, history, philosophy, art, spirituality, music and all sorts of literature. Triveni was founded at Madras in 1927 and since that time various authors have donated their creativity in the form of articles, covering many aspects of public life....

Spiritual Reorientation of India’s Political

Anil Baran Ray

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Anil Baran Ray

What is the end of politics?  A rethinking over this age-old question has become necessary in view of the kind of bad connotation that politics has assumed in recent times, particularly in India.

To Aristotle, the great master of ancient Greek political thought and one of the greatest geniuses the world has ever produced, politics meant acting in the interest of the whole people and it is only its perversion, which entailed its use of narrow or selfish interests.  Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, conceived an even higher end of politics.  To the extent he said that only those people were fit for governing the state who, not having any family or property of their own, pursued selflessly the larger interests of the people as a whole, he made politics synonymous with selflessness or spirituality in the sense of calling out the best in the individual.

When a modern man, prone to treating politics as a mundane thing, argues that politics has nothing to do with spirituality, he simply misperceives the meaning and role of spirituality in life.  So long as man thinks that he is a mere body-mind complex, he is given to seeking physical comforts as well as wealth and power for self-aggrandizement.

It is his craving for more and more of these things that inevitably brings in its wake corruptibility.  However, it is only the limitation of his knowledge that makes a person think that he is a mere physical being. Being a spirit, man has the spark of the Divine in him and as such it is the bounden duty of man to rise above the temporal and ephemeral goals of existence and to strive for the realization of the Eternal in him.  It is the law of man’s being to move from the lower to the higher, from the lower Self to the higher Self. This higher purpose of life could be realized only by a harmonization of individual desires and social obligations, only by a continous upward movement, so to say, from selfishness to the spirituality of selflessness.  Self-realisation, that is to say, and not self-affrandizement, is the grand purpose of life.  Politics, is an enterprise of life and as such its purpose or, so to say, the purpose of political life cannot be separate or divorced from the purpose of life itself.  Thus conceived, politics too has to be viewed, as Michael Oakeshott, the successor of Harold J. Laski to the chair of Political Science in the London School of Economics and Political Science, put it, as ‘a calling which beckons man to uphold his eternal and infinite self on the temporal and finite plane of thought and action’.

‘Now, if that is so, then it is the obligation of all human-beings – politicians and others-to always keep in view the two principles of the supreme law of life: righteousness and renunciation.  The first ordains that all goals of life, political or otherwise, are to be pursued with righteousness. Why? Because, as the sages of ancient India answered thousands of years ago, ‘by righteousness a person prospers in the short run, gains what seems desirable, and defeats enemies, but perishes at the root in the long run.  ‘The modern tendency – to regard the fastidiousness over the purity of means as useless and to hold that what matters is success and achievement by any means and at any rate – is self-defeating in the ultimate analysis. It amounts to taking a fragmented view of life in contradistinction to that holistic view which holds that not success at any rate but perfection is the goal of life.  It is in perfection that the being becomes one with the Supreme Being.  A short cut of any means, fair or foul might bring one immediate success in life but it might also pave the way for one’s ultimate disintegration.  When one’s doing takes one far away from one’s being, the incongruity that results from it is bound to lead one to one’s eventual disgrace.

As for the second principle, that is, renunciation, it needs no saying that nothing great can be accomplished in life without renunciation of some sort or the other.  So far as politics is concerned, renunciation means not self-serving, not self-aggrandizement, not the clannish pursuit of group or factional interests, not power for one’s own sake, but the power, to make sacrifices for the service of the people.  Politics pursued with righteousness and renunciation makes it indistinguishable from spirituality.  After all, spirituality means in the last instance such righteousness and renunciation as lead one to the realization of one’s true self.

Spirituality in such a sense provides the foundation as much to life in politics as to life in other spheres.  Working at this foundation and strengthening it, involving a spiritual reorientation of India’s political life, is the need of the time. We must understand that India has now fallen on evil times because her professional politicians, being ignorant of the relationship of politics and spirituality, have taken to politics of personal aggrandizement, making the country ‘poorer’ in the process.  And out of such understanding we must reformulate our concept of politics, making its purpose indistinguishable from the larger purpose of life.  That is the greatest reform on the political front that calls for our attention today. Whatever consequential reforms are necessary in order to ‘purify’ our politics must be equally paid attention to. If necessary, we must amend the Constitution, prescribing minimum educational qualifications and training for those who intend to adopt politics as a profession.  More than two thousand years ago, Plato, in order to elevate the crisis-ridden Greek society and polity of his time, recommended a stringent scheme of training for politicians with a view to ensuring their selfless and whole-hearted application to the job entrusted to them.  In the conditions of today we cannot be as ambitious as Plato. But we can certainly think of emulating his suggestion on a lesser scale that is more viable in the conditions of today1.

Note:  1 In this connexion, it will be appropriate to point out that the Supreme Court’s May 2, 2002 directive to the Election Commission to the effect that the Commission should make it mandatory for candidates for Parliament and Assembly elections to make disclosures in respect of – a criminal conviction, involvement in a criminal case, personal and family assets, financial liabilities and educational qualifications – is a step in the right direction.  Let us hope that steps such as this will set in motion the process of transformation of the Indian polity.

Courtesy: Bulletin of the Ramakrishna Mission – Institute of culture (August, 2002)

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