India is the only country in the world that was ruled by Muslims for nearly 1,000 years and yet never become a Muslim nation. This was because of the high spiritual quotient of all Indians, writes DR ANIL K RAJVANSHI. He suggests that the Indian leadership and intelligentsia should learn from this and instead of dividing people, unite to fight the battle against poverty and unemployment
There is a beautiful story in the Panchatantra. In a huge well, lived two groups of frogs who were always fighting for territory and resources. The clever king of one group befriended a cobra and got him into the well so that it could finish off the other group. The cobra came into the well, and one by one started eating the frogs of the other group.
The king was very happy with this development and felt that his aim of controlling the well and its resources was achieved. However, soon the cobra ate all the frogs of the other group and turned his attention to the king’s group.
The cobra told the frog king that he needed food to survive. Despite the king’s pleas, the cobra first ate the king’s subjects and family members and ultimately ate the king himself!
There is a general tendency in people, especially those in power, to appeal to the baser instincts of people and take the help of negative and evil forces to achieve their goals, little realising that these forces are nobody’s friends and have their own agenda. They destroy everything in their wake including their creator and cannot be controlled, once unleashed. It is therefore best to keep away from them.
Natural selection
Nature also destroys negative tendencies but in a very evolutionary and positive manner. The evolution of the species takes place by branching. Whichever branch gets into a dynamic equilibrium with the surroundings survives, grows and prospers. The other branch, simply dies off and with it, that branch of the species. Thus, nature evolves by making the other branch irrelevant.
This is a great lesson for all of us. If we want to put somebody down, the best way is to rise higher and make that person irrelevant. In this process, the whole system gets lifted and is far superior to the one in which the person is brought down by negative forces whereby the whole system loses.
This has been taught in all the great religions of the world and is the basis of the victory of non-violence and higher thought. However, to rise up requires great courage, conviction, faith in oneself and internal security.
Gandhi’s method
This is what Gandhiji did all his life. He fought against the unjust system nonviolently and always gave a solution. This helped in resolving issues amicably. Too often, people simply fight without solutions, thereby creating conflicts, chaos and general violence.
Also, one of the weapons Gandhiji employed in fighting the unjust system was that he took everybody with him. He realised that to fight a long battle against the mighty British Empire, the whole country had to be united so that each person became an important soldier irrespective of caste, creed or religion.
This is an important lesson for the present leadership in the present times. We should not fight against each other but need to fight the battle against poverty and unemployment so that the economy improves, and we become a strong nation. That can only happen when we take everybody with us and not divide the nation based on caste or religion. As they say united, we succeed and divided we fail.
We should also realise that all of us are the products of this great country. We have been born in this country and most of us will live, work and die here. It is in our interest to unite to work together to make this country great.
Possible solutions
For this to happen, we need to create conditions where everyone is offered the same opportunities of education and employment so people, especially the youth, can progress based on their capabilities rather on their caste, creed or religion.
The world over, enough examples exist to show that poverty and ignorance create conditions which can be exploited for violence and terrorist activity. An empty mind is a devil’s workshop. Thus, most often, leaders thrive on ignorant people because uneducated and unemployed youth can be easily controlled by the venom of violent and terrorist ideas.
Thus, it is necessary that we provide work and employment to the youth so that they can get on with the task of nation-building. India has enough resources to do so. What is needed is the will of the leaders to get away from divisive politics. This will help improve the general environment and bring in confidence in youth to work for the greater good.
How can one make negative or evil forces irrelevant? Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras recommends that one should show indifference to these forces. By ignoring and being indifferent to them and by acting positively, we can make the system evolve so that these forces become irrelevant and die a natural death.
History also shows that India followed this recipe in the past. For instance, India is the only country in the world that was ruled by Muslims for nearly 1,000 years and yet never become a Muslim country. A probable answer lies in the higher quality of Indian spiritual thought. Though physically beaten by external rulers, they could not conquer the hearts and minds of Indians.
Another reason could be that religion was a very personal matter for Indians. They had a personal god based upon India’s ancient tradition and were not interested in surrendering it to the messenger of God. They, therefore, simply ignored these rulers!
Spiritual outlook
Yet we have not learnt anything from our history and have forgotten our great philosophical thought and are degenerating into practising a jingoistic, ritual-based, militant religion. We almost seem to be becoming like the Taliban.
In order to reverse this trend, we need to educate our children in schools about our great Indian ideas and the history of tolerance, higher philosophical thought and the lives of our great thought leaders like Buddha, Ashoka, Adi Shankaracharya, Kabir and Gandhi. It is the solemn duty of all of us, who care for this country and are attached to the story of India, to educate and teach youngsters about these issues.
Humans have a propensity to humiliate others. We seem to get pleasure in bringing others down and in seeing them in misery. This tendency could be traced to the evolutionary process whereby to gain control over resources, it was necessary to remove the competition; humiliation and pulling down others was a part of this process.
However, by becoming spiritual, we can reduce our greed and become sustainable and in the process, become better human beings. This will reduce our need to control others and create conditions to fight for resources. India and the world can, therefore become a much better place to live in if we become positive and rise above others to pull the whole system up.
(The writer, an IIT and US-educated engineer, and a 2022 Padma Shri award winner, is Director, Nimbkar Agricultural Research Institute, Phaltan, Maharashtra. He can be reached at anilrajvanshi@gmail.com)
This article first appeared in the South Asia Monitor
Featured photo: courtesy mkgandhi.org
It is an obvious fact that people at the helm of public affairs use the people to abuse themselves.
People at the helm of power, as fact speaks for itself, lit the fire and then fan it so that it becomes a raging fire and spread everywhere.
No doubt, as Anil ji says, building perfect spiritual outlook is the way of building of a non-violent inner engineering which can spin a convivial periphery around the sphere of individual influence and coupled with it, at the level of governance, we need an equitable and all-inclusive Social-engineering where equal opportunity is guaranteed for everyone, mitigating the divisions of caste, creed, religion and social-status which are as such the main cause of dichotomy around, in every sense of the words.
And till these two projects of inner & outer engineering are not synchronised in tandem, we will keep estranging ourselves from the focus of genuine progression both as civilised and cultured individuals and as a Nation. It’s high time we put ourselves in this matrix of self-analysis and critically evaluated our shortcomings and also our worth!
Nice post Oswald ji, a pointer indeed to look at our weaknesses and empower our self-worth.