A Hurried Swearing In
Last week, a widowed wife and a mother was sworn in as Deputy Chief Minister within three days of her husband’s tragic and sudden death. There was no constitutional requirement to do so, since Deputy Chief Minister is not a constitutional post. In other words, there was no immediate necessity to swear her in. Yet neither her late husband’s party nor the ruling coalition thought it fit to wait for 13 days.
I expressed my anguish over this development to a few friends. The general feedback that I got was that it is because this is Kali Yuga, or that it is “Apad Dharma”, a few memes, or a simple justification that this is political expediency. Some accused me that I was too principled.
Largely no one shared the anguish I felt, or even if they did, chose not to respond, either due to not wanting to criticise the ruling dispensation or they have become so cynical that this is how things are.
Collective Fatalism
I feel that somewhere along the way, the prophecy of the decline of Dharma in Kali Yuga has become an excuse for us, as a society, to accept every act of Adharma with a lazy sense of resignation, instead of making us think or push back and seek to rectify such acts. We have stopped to make even the perfunctory noise. In other words, we have become collectively fatalistic. And because we have stopped pushing back, further acts of adharma are committed, declining dharma even further, which we then see as proof that Kali Yuga has arrived. We are fulfilling the prophecy through our own inaction.
We seem to be in a self fulfilling cycle.
Dharma in Kali Yuga
I then had a long conversation with a scholar who specialises in the Mahābhārata. I was trying to understand the current situation through the lens of our scriptures. The sense I got was that during Kali Yuga, of the four legs of Dharma : Truth, Integrity, Discipline, and Compassion, while three decline, Dharma is still held up by Truth.
The king is also said to be the cause of both Dharma and Adharma. In other words, if a leader conducts himself according to Dharma, then dharma can still prevail. There is, therefore an agency that our leaders continue to possess.
More importantly, Apad Dharma is only meant for rarest of the rare exceptions and cannot act as a justification for every violation of dharma.
Conclusion
I believe that not just our leaders, but all of us, have agency and a responsibility. There are moral choices that we can make. As long as even one leg of Dharma stands, it remains our responsibility to protect it. Should we not therefore push back and express ourselves? Protest when acts such as those we saw recently are committed ? Not merely shrug our shoulders, blame the prophecy, or invoke scriptural exceptions so repeatedly that they then become the norm? Should we not pick up the courage to criticise our political leaders for failing in their duty?
Kali Yuga does not justify Adharma. Our silence does.
Hari’s Curries
A Buffet of Reflections