【Review】It is difficult to overlook the coincidence of the current political debate over governance and the publication of the eighth volume of the English translation of the Mahabharata a few weeks ago.
The Bharatiya Janata Party's political campaign to promote its prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, for the general elections has brought under sharp focus the Gujarat chief minister's responsibilities when his state saw its worst communal killings of Muslims or what then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee described as the chief minister's failure to observe the raj dharma.
And the eighth volume of the Mahabharata dwells at length on what a king's raj dharma ought to be in a section that accounts for a little more than half of the book's 700-odd pages.
This is the section that describes how Yudhisthir, the eldest of the Pandavas, reaches out to their grandfather Bhishma when the old warrior is lying on a bed of arrows after being vanquished by Arjuna in a battle in which purists believe the latter had used unfair means. Yudhisthir urges Bhishma to explain how a king should govern and how he should deliver justice or treat his enemies. What follows is one of the most erudite lessons on the king's duties and the royal code of conduct or what is also known as the raj dharma.
【News source】
The concept of raj dharma
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