About a fortnight ago, the Supreme Court, judging the case regarding the Muzaffarnagar school incident where the teacher had abused the Muslim student and had him slapped by the whole class, expressed anger that the Uttar Pradesh government and police did not do their duty; that they failed to comply with the Right to Education Act and protect students from discrimination and harassment. 

It was reported that the court said the “State must take responsibility for this incident [...] If this incident has happened, then it should shake the conscience of the state.”

This is the state in which the CM Yogi Adityanath joined the Bharatiya Janata Party’s recent blitzkrieg defending Sanatana Dharma against the attack by Udayanidhi Stalin.

Now the Supreme Court asked what seems like a simple question: Where has your conscience gone? Why have you not protected the rule of law?

This question points to a deep impasse in Hinduism.

Simple definitions: Morality is seeking to find a common ground without any kind of bias or prejudice – i.e., finding a stance that is universally acceptable. Conscience is an inner voice that tells you about what is right and what is wrong, forcing you to think, act and criticise.

The teacher’s enactment of this humiliating drama was immoral. It is like (though less intense than) the cow-protectionists lynching a Muslim because he was carrying cattle in his truck. It is also similar in structure to a family or community murdering a boy from a lower caste because he dared to even propose to a girl of their caste. These have occurred with increasing frequency in recent years. Thus, the problem is not individual: the diverse perpetrators of these acts seem not to have an inner voice, a conscience, that tells them that what they are doing is a crime, a violence, a sin against society.

The concerned police have shown no respect for the law, and no morality by acting in a manner that was grossly unfair to the boy who already has been subject to humiliation and discrimination. They refused to register the name of the religious communities in the FIR, hiding the communal nature of the attack. There was no voice of conscience in their ear, telling them to do the right thing.

The government concerned too, has remained impassive in the face of this atrocity (as have so many other governments in the context of so many such atrocities) – it has seen no moral stake in standing up for the right, and in acting conscientiously. Its silence is unconscionable.

Far from being an individual failing, the absence of morality seems fundamental to a dominant way of life.

The question is: Is it right to say that the teacher, the police, and the government are all evil?

The concepts of morality and conscience are recent in Western history. Morality achieves its sharpest formulation in Immanuel Kant who, towards the end of the eighteenth century, proposed that the individual’s act should be so impartial that it could be a universal law. Conscience too is of the same vintage. It is a rejection of society’s external demands and an insistence on an inner voice that tells you the right way to act (thus, the “conscientious objector” to war).  Before these somewhat secular concepts, the main ethical leash holding back selfish acts in Western culture was the notion of sin.  A sin could be against your fellow Christian, who is your equal in the eyes of God. 

In Hindu, especially brahmanical dharma, this idea of equality in the eyes of God is absent. A glance at Manu’s Dharmasastra (2nd century CE) shows the hierarchical ethics that constitutes it. The punishment for or freedom of your actions depend on your station in the caste hierarchy – indeed a Brahmin can almost never be punished.  According to the Apastamba Dharmasutra (4th century BCE), a minor offence like abusing an arya, if committed by a sudra, may have the latter’s tongue being cut out as punishment. We are not even speaking of the “untouchables” here.

The concepts of an inner voice and of judging rationally, fundamental to conscience and morality, have traditionally been weak in Hindu ethics, which directs you to follow explicit rules, laws, and customs to guide right action, without questioning them in any way. You cannot subject dharma to rational inquiry because its effects are unknowable. You obey the brahmanical smriti and shruti.

The idea of remorse and forgiveness, however, are present in Hindu ethics. When, exemplarily, in the Mahabharata, the hunter Jara mistakes Krishna’s foot for a deer’s head and shoots a lethal arrow at it, he expresses remorse and begs forgiveness. As he dies, Krishna forgives him, saying that he, in his previous avatar as Rama, killed Jara who was Vali in his previous birth. Thus, the recognition of one’s evil act reflected in the other leads to a concept of forgiveness.

The absence of the ideas of morality and conscience explains the way in which current Hindutva politicians, bureaucrats, and indeed public figures evade responsibility for criminal atrocity with retorts like: “It does not concern me”; “Why should a minister comment on every lynching?”; “What about Christianity and slavery?”; etc. And yet, in one voice, they all fiercely attack a mere statement that criticises Sanatana Dharma!

So, when the Supreme Court says, “it must shake the conscience”, it is asking for a faculty which does not exist in Hindutva today.

Why should such atrocities be criticised by Hindutva? Well, any religious community is a complex system with a shared world view, even though the community may or may not specifically endorse each act by everyone. But the absence of criticism by leaders of Hindutva means a tacit acceptance and encouragement of that conduct by others.  One cannot escape religious responsibility by hiding behind the state’s hierarchy of response.

However, this leads to the second impasse: in a complex politico-religious system such as Hinduism in India, you will always find more extreme, more fundamentalist elements that seek to unseat the present leaders – hence leaders who once rose to power pandering to evil and violence in the name of religion cannot afford to be seen as moderate even if they would like to. It is difficult to get off the tiger of fundamentalist rage once on it. This is the most charitable view of the silence of the rulers.

The absence of conscience strikes at the root of Hindutva, crippling its bid for greatness in the modern world.

This leads to my final question – is it possible for Sanatana Dharma to develop a conscience?

As I have pointed out in a companion essay, development has been a historically unchanging feature of dharma, all its protestations to an unchanging essence notwithstanding. The idea of ahimsa, the idea of remorse and that of forgiveness provide the foundation for the development of conscience and morality. 

The voice of moderation and reason, the spirit of love, non-violence, indeed fraternity, must enter the language of modern Hinduism. It must learn conscience and morality to foster a multi-religious society with confidence and stature.

The author is a political theorist and may be contacted at r.srivats@gmail.com.