Public Dharma: Sauce for the goose may not be sauce for gander

Chennai: The recent tropical cyclone, ‘Ockhi’ that devastated Kanyakumari, adjoining parts of Kerala and Lakshadweep is a standing affirmation that ‘Nature’ is its own master. The adverse effects of climate change may be attributed by experts to “our collective sins” of humanity’s tryst with a development model, yet ‘Nature’ remains unassailable.

But the sphere of ‘Culture’ is far more different, relatively less autonomous than we feel, and social fabrics are far more precarious than how brute forces of ‘Nature’ manifest themselves as a master-spirit of its own calling. Given this thin but definitive line separating ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’, every social narrative, from the so-called tribal societies to the most advanced, involves, as sociologists tell us, some rudimentary elements of ‘sacrifice’, ‘honour’ and ‘reciprocity’ that define people’s engagement with ‘Nature’.

The organisation of progressively complex social structures over time, economic institutions and power relations within a society thus revolve around very asymmetric and often hierarchic realities.

Dilemmas could get worse when it comes to leadership types and attendant ideologies in a modern, technological society, jostling for space and legitimacy of the people in a democratic polity.

If, as the great German thinker Immanuel Kant thought, the possibility of ‘universalizing a rule’ is the bedrock of the ‘Moral’, its offshoot notions like liberalism, fair play, equality, respect for the individual qua person, social justice and so on, are getting out of fashion in today’s political lexicon.

Where insularity is the price to pay for religion or caste-based identity politics, even a cursory look at how ‘Dharma’ - the notion of what is right or just in its broadest sense - in the Indian intellectual traditions is playing itself out in the public sphere, is not a one-formula proposition. If anything, the gulf between what is asserted as ‘Dharma’ — whether in value judgments that people make all the time, judicial pronouncements or in political speeches — and how people at various levels perceive ‘Dharma’ seems only widening.

In a sense, this is a legacy that goes back to the days of the grand old epic ‘Mahabharata’ itself, which is full of ‘Dharma Sankat’- conflict of values. Did not Lord Krishna himself advise Yudhishtra “to tell a white lie, ‘Asvathama Hatah’, to make Drona believe that his son Ashvathama is dead?” asks the eminent Sanskrit scholar, late K. Kunjunni Raja, in a perceptive collection of essays, edited by an outstanding modern Indian philosopher, Bimal Krishna Matilal, in ‘Moral Dilemmas in the Mahabharata’.

Even the concept of the four goals of life - ‘Dharma’, ‘Artha’, ‘Kaama’ and ‘Moksha’, known as ‘Purusharthas’ - is a many-layered one. Again the concept of ‘Aram’ - nearest approximation to ‘Dharma’ in the great Tamil saint-poet Thiruvalluvar’s ‘Thirukkural’ - is a mosaic of life-affirming qualities.

Thus, the phenomenon is not new, as old as the hills perhaps, which in another metaphysical/theological framework, like say in the Judea-Christian tradition, man’s folly, pride and the glorious uncertainties of life would be traced to the concept of ‘original sin’ that began with Adam and Eve.

However, what is worrying in today’s Indian context is that, leave alone any room for nuance, even an acknowledgement of the many-sidedness of ‘Truth’ or ‘Dharma’ would be frowned upon as ‘un-Hindu’. This, ironically, means disowning our own multiple cultural traditions, for a new socio-political identity, as a reaction to a political discourse in the Gandhi-Nehru idiom in post-Independent India that is seen as ‘minorities appeasement’.   

Such widening of the ‘Dharmic chasm’ was evident in Chennai recently when hundreds of women, at the ‘samadhi’ of former Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, on her first death anniversary on December 5, poured out, “why have you forsaken us ‘Amma’?”  Alongside were posters on city walls, remembering her as “Dharma Thaai (Mother of Dharma), ‘Ulagam Pottrum Uthama Thaaye (blemishless mother the world praises)’ and so on.

These could be straight dismissed as routine, sentimental political slogans, appropriate for the occasion, but the deification of Jayalalithaa continues, albeit in mellowed tone. This is notwithstanding the fact that the Supreme Court upheld the trial court verdict in the disproportionate assets case against Ms Jayalalithaa and her confidante V K Sasikala, even if charges against the former abated after her demise last year.  

The larger issue is that ‘Dharma’ in the public sphere is itself perceived differently at various levels of social reality. For all its drawbacks, the welfare-oriented face of successive governments led by Ms Jayalalithaa, or anybody else in her place for that matter, has been delivering something to the economically weak, marginal and poorer sections that makes people across the board to still hail her as a ‘benevolent mother’.  

In the Tamil Nadu political context, the adulation of several charismatic leaders, right from Kamaraj, Annadurai, Karunanidhi to MGR, has been on a similar phenomenological footing of their politico-economic systems delivering something. In fact, a Sanskrit scholar recently told this writer that it is to Ms Jayalalithaa’s credit that the scheme of ‘Anna Dhanam’ (free feeding) in all temples, implemented well by the State HR & CE department, was subtly universalised by her.

Traditionally, the custom of cooking food in ‘Madapallis’ and distributing it to all castes/classes of people was largely confined only to Vishnu temples, thanks to Sri Ramanuja, he said, to drive home, how today even select mosques and churches have adopted it, thanks to her temple ‘Anna Dhana’ scheme. All this, Ms Jayalalithaa did without having to be culturally insular, he said.

Hence, from a logical viewpoint, the many-sidedness of ‘Truth’ and ‘Dharma’ - the Jains call it ‘Anekantavaada’ - should promote plurality in all its richness and infinite variety, as enshrined in the Indian Constitution.

Even the information and communication technologies (ICT), which anchor our daily bread and butter in urban India, have gone beyond binary logic to multi-valued logic systems. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander is at best part of this multiple logic of our very complex times.