’I was opposed to the two-nation theory... I’ve changed’

Gurcharan Das on Partition, the Mahabharata, and the concept of good and bad

Gurcharan Das on Partition, the Mahabharata, and the concept of good and bad

IT TOOK Gurcharan Das a couple of years to read, unfathom and interrogate the Mahabharata. In his new book, The Difficulty of Being Good the former CEO of Procter and Gamble and author of books The Elephant Paradigm and India Unbound studies characters from the epic, their moral dilemmas, and draws parallels with our lives. Excerpts from a conversation with the author:u00a0u00a0

Why Mahabharata and not Ramayan
The characters of the Ramayan are too perfect. The hero, the heroine, the brother, even the villain is just perfect. It's not too interesting; in fact it's quite boring! The Mahabharata on the other hand, resonates with our lives. We're all flawed, we're all searching for dharma. Good people do wrong deeds, bad people do good deeds, the good suffer, the bad flourish, that's how the real world works. The Mahabharata lets you draw lessons from it. If you were to ask a Christian or a Muslim who is good, they'd point to God, at the Holy Bible and Quran. But the Mahabharata asks us to reason it out. Till the end, Yudhishthira is looking for dharma, which he says is inside a cave.u00a0

Good or bad can't be objective
It's not mathematics in which 2X2 will always equal 4 no matter what. It's a very grey area. There are several definitions of what is good. Vidura from Mahabharata, adjudged a particular deed as good depending on the number of people who benefited from it. Yudhishthira was of the idea that doing one's duty is its own reward.u00a0

Some years ago, a child wandered too deep in the sea in Goa and a young man jumped in and saved him. Years later, the young man admitted that he had done so only to impress his friends especially a girl he wanted to woo. Now, Vidura would sidestep the motive and still call it a good deed because the child was saved.

Yudhishthira, who would have jumped into the water even if no one was around, would have called it a selfish act. Good and bad can't possibly be objective, nor can we have one rigid sense of either. All of us adopt different views of good and bad depending on the situation.

It doesn't change according to what field or section of society you belong to. Because fundamentally, human beings have much more in common than what divides them. So the same rules apply regardless of whether you're a politician or an artist, an actor or a doctor.

Good or bad can be objective... in these instances
Slavery has been entirely abolished, there has been notable progress in the condition of the Dalits in India, the blacks in America and women all over... these are definitely good things. Slavery was a 'bad' concept. As a question Draupadi raises in the subtext, how can one human being gamble another being or own another?

Good or bad? Socialism/Communism
I admire Marx but human beings can't shrink their egos. It's not in our nature. Just as socialism as an ideal is good. One needs to strive for equality among all sections of society but the government can't adopt it as a policy. It was tried in Russia but didn't work. It's like Oscar Wilde's saying which is to the effect that, 'We're all in the gutter but some of us strive to look at the stars.'

Good or bad? Capital punishment
I'm not a believer in capital punishment but that's because I believe the accused would suffer a great deal more if he had to spend a lifetime in prison. A judge holds responsibility for doling out two kinds of justices:
distributive (fair dividing of the rewards of society) and retributive (crime and punishment). The latter is required in order to deter criminals.

Good or bad? Jaswant Singh's book Jinnah, Partition and Independence and the uproar
I haven't formed an opinion on this matter because I haven't read the book yet. But more than viewing it under the lens of the Mahabharata, I'd like to revisit Partition and the reason why it happened. I come from Lyallpur, present day Pakistan, and in my growing up years, I felt the two-nation theory was wrong.

But I've changed. I feel like Sardar Patel now. The idea of a united India would have meant a weak centre and strong states. India would have broken up, I feel. India has remained united whenever she has had a very strong central authority, be it the Mauryas or the Guptas or the Mughals.

Today, we have a Muslim population of 12 per cent. If we had remained united with Pakistan, it would have been a third of Indians. That would have been difficult. We would have been, we still are, caught in issues of minority and identity instead of looking at infrastructure and development. India would have turned unwieldy. It's probably better this way. Jaswant Singh is hardly a historian and while I might read his book someday, right now I want to study the Cabinet Mission's proposal of that time.

Good or bad? India and Pakistan continually at loggerheads
We want to live peacefully with each other. We'd like our border with Pakistan to be like the border the US shares with Canada, or why go that far, the kind of border that Gujarat shares with Rajasthan. If you look at it from the point of view of the Mahabharata, Yudhishthira was an idealist who grew into a pragmatic ruler. Here's how when the Pandavas are exiled to the forest after the rigged game of dice, Draupadi asks Yudhishthira to take back their kingdom, considering the Kauravas snatched it away through wrong means. He refuses, simply because he has given his word that he will fulfill the vanvaas. Later, Yudhishthira agrees to wage war against the Kauravas, to get back their kingdom. He changes. You need a tit for tat sometimes. Even if you take Mahatma Gandhi, he succeeded with ahimsa because he dealt with the British. I doubt he would have, had the other party been Adolf Hitler or Duryodhana. India needs her ideals, but she also needs a strong army and perhaps even an ISI to hit back. Tit for tat isn't such a bad thing. We need to present a moral face in front of the world and be good. But if the other person sends a terrorist and blows up our hotels, you have to hit back!