With cruel irony, vivid televised images from two far-flung battlelines, one in Ukraine, the other in Gaza, are flashed across the world, highlighting savage death and destruction in a display that belies the fact that for all our technological advances in global communication, in order to resolve differences humankind still has to resort to the mass murder called war.
India’s official stand on both conflicts has been dictated by the demands of what is called realpolitik, a pragmatic tightrope walk that best serves one’s self-interest.
While the US-dominated West would have India side with Ukraine and name Russia as the aggressor, New Delhi has had to factor in its relations with Moscow, along-time ally and supplier of oil and armaments, and take a neutral position by calling for restraint and peace.
Similarly, while condemning the Hamas assault on Israel that triggered the current conflagration, New Delhi has refrained from unequivocally siding with Israel despite pressure from the Western world to do so and has once again appealed for peace.
This sitting on the neutral fence of peace could well irk critics and prompt the question as to how come, for all our holier-than-thou airs, about Gandhian ahimsa, our most venerated text, the Bhagwad Gita, has Krishn in his cosmic manifestation enjoining the faltering Arjun in the name of dharma, religious duty, to let slip the dogs of war against his kinsmen, the Kauravs, at Kurukshetra.
Such an accusation would be based on a profound misunderstanding and misrepresentation of an allegory that uses the metaphor of war to represent the daily inner battle we all must wage against the wily adversary of our own ego which, through the ploys of fear, hate, revenge, envy, and greed, prevents us from breaking the illusory bonds of attachment and attaining liberation.
The Gita, generally deemed to be a later addition to the epic, is an anti-war testament in that it seeks to free us from the passions of the mind, which lead to violent confrontations between individuals, ethnic and religious groups, and nations.
It is a clash of egos that results in the raging inferno of war, the hell that humankind unleashes on earth, putting to shame all our achievements of science, art, and philosophy. At the heart of the great tale that valorises martial feats of skill and subterfuge, the Gita is like a vertiginous zoom-out cinematic shot that awakens and raises consciousness far above the sound and fury of mortal combat to a realm of pacific calm, beyond the earthly boundaries of violence and bloodshed.
Another ageless epic set against the backdrop of the clamour and clash of weaponry is Homer’s Iliad, about the siege of Troy, which currently is in the literary limelight thanks to Emily Wilson’s widely acclaimed English translation that, in unrhymed verse, captures the horrors and tragic futility of warfare.
Zhuge Liang, a statesman and strategist in China’s Han Dynasty, succinctly summed it up: “The wise win before the fight, while the ignorant fight to win.”
COMMENTS