India vs Bharat Essay

Ancient Indians were not known to move over a enormous sense of history. Historians have had to affirm a lot on accounts by foreign travellers and foreign sources to reforge our history. And both much(prenominal) sources, including Megasethenes, Fa-hsien and many medieval Arab travellers, have uniformly launch that Indians were remarkably rectitude abiding and that crime was very r ar.Most historians including A.L. Basham and juvenile writers like Abraham Eraly have treated such rosy accounts with suspicion unless because prescriptions in legal literature, largely comprising of the Smritis, reflected a more insecure and harsher society. This could either show that these foreign travellers were all fanciful in their writings on ancient India or that these sacred texts played a very nominal role in governing the Hindi way of life. Apart from the giddiness of the suggestion that a traveller would lie in praise of a foreign land, the later scenario appears more probable bec ause of another very fire facet of ancient Hindu society- minimal State interference in the daily life of a citizen.Therefore there was no overarching governance administering a code of laws or enforcing punishments to maintain law and order and keep hind end crimes. The codes of Manu, Katyayana or Narada were largely irrelevant to the common Hindu. There appears to have been a latent fruition that the State and its laws are inherently incapable of creating a crime-free society and the onus for this has to rest more locally perhaps even out on the individual. And it is this realisation that has to dawn in todays India. The realisation that 12000 plus police stations in some 7 hundred thousand towns and villages cannot regulate over 110 crore people.Prof. Werner Menski, in his seminal recreate on Hindu Law (Hindu Law Beyond Tradition and Modernity, Oxford University Press, 2003), explains the Hindu view of dealing with crimes most accurately. He writes that despite the recognit ion of gloam in human values from the golden period of early ages, law and punishment in the late classical period were never utilise to displace self-control as the elementary social norm. He writes-The abstract expectation of self-controlled order in classical Hindu law would have empowered, in principle if not in practice, all Hindus to determine forthemselves, as individuals subject to the highest order, what they should be doing. A rulers claim to induce what Hart called primarily rules could never have developed in such a conceptual climate, since in the classical Hindu systems such basic rules were to be cultivated in the social sphere and should then be implemented locally and individually in self-controlled fashion.It would be quite disparage to assume that the traditional, classical reliance on individual and situational self-control was in all abandonedthreats of punishment of are not purely secularas most legal commentators have assumedtransgressions of Dharma are overly seen as sins, which require penance and/ or attract posthumous consequences. (Emphasis supplied)Therefore, the recognition that the primary onus of adhering to Dharma is on the individual indispensablely meant that external/ societal interventions in the form of laws and punishments were superfluous in creating a crime-free society. The emphasis instead was on encouraging a Dharmic conscience among citizens.Prof. Menski explains the current relevance of this idea- In this think it is instructive to refer to the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961 which is widely seen as an example of the futile attempts by the state law to abolish socio-legal practices in Indian societydisgusted with the horrible stalemate over thousands of luck deaths every year, some women activists began to call for a moral reappraisal. Yet, does this mean that the roulette wheel of history should in fact be turned be back to Asokas idealism?Postmodernist analysis recognises (albeit with some reluctance) that the old Hindu concepts of examining ones conscience (atmanastuti) and model behaviour (Sadacara) retain their relevance today. While some modernist commentators have tremendous difficulty with this kind of approach, it cannot be just dismissed out of hand.What is needed in India today is a moral reappraisal on Dharmik lines. We Indians have come to imbibe amorality. In the western conception ofIndividual freedom and liberty, morality is a shackle. A variety of western thinkers including Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, Marx joined cause in attacking loyalty to morality as something that thwarts individual flourishing or sustains certain short socio-economic relations. We have subconsciously adapted this attitude of amorality as a natural concomitant of individual freedom or free market without realising that foreign western morality which was fostered and sustained by the Church and the State Bharatiyamorality is individual-centric and freedom-enabling. It is also important to em phasise, especially in the current context, that our morality is entirely gender-neutral. A Dharmik society or Bharat will render most kinds of activism that we have seen after the Delhi gang rape, especially the feminist variety, redundant.India unfortunately has forgotten to teach its children Dharmic morality. The except moralities we have come to follow are freedom and success. Today we birth in awe of a man from Gujarat who built a great business empire apparently through unethical and morally-suspect means all in the name of his success. Seven centuries ago Marco Polo stood in awe of a different kind of Gujarati business men- the ordinary merchants of Lata who according to the Venetial traveller are among the best and most trustworthy merchants in the world for nothing on earth would they tell a lie and all that they say is true. Isnt this an example of the difference between India and Bharat?