The Nectar of Gita…for you, me and all! - Essay 2: Does Gita by any chance, espouse the cause of violence?

Om Namo Bhagavathe Vaasudevaayaa!

Essay 2:

Does Gita by any chance, espouse the cause of violence?

A straight and clear answer would be a big fat NO!  Often, we get to hear or encounter this kind of a question from people who have either not read, or partly or casually read, or improperly understood Gita. A serious and spiritually oriented reading of Gita, would not give rise to such doubts.

A casual story seeker may see that once Arjuna dropped bow and arrows and refused to fight, Krishna with his Gitopadesh, encouraged him to fight, vanquish and kill the entire opposition. Surely, it looks like espousing the cause of violence. Here what is one missing? Obviously, the context, the person who was in charge of the action, the essence and the actual message of Gita.

The context was the great battlefield. The person in charge of the action was Arjuna, the great warrior. In a battlefield the options are very limited; especially when one is fighting for one’s rights. Here, Arjuna representing the Pandavas, was fighting for the land and kingdom which was rightfully theirs but which was deviously taken away from them. The options before him were to fight to the finish, win or be vanquished. A true and righteous warrior would naturally fight for victory. Things would not turn out to be good for him, if he loses his self-worth and backtracks at the nick of the moment when battle bugles are blown.

Let us transpose this scenario to the current times. We have our soldiers guarding our frontiers from enemy invasions. They are always fit and battle ready to repel any incursions. Hypothetically in one such testing situation of the enemy violating our border, the general expectation would be a valiant fight by our soldiers in pushing back the enemy. But imagine if such soldiers were to suffer from diffidence and were in a mood to drop their weaponry, what would be the fall out? All will be lost for us. We therefore see our top leaders, Generals and prominent speakers visiting the battlefront and addressing them with motivational speeches. In one way, those speeches are nothing but Gitopadesh! Can we then charge such motivational speakers as espousing the cause of violence? No one with sane mind would say so. Right?

Now coming back to Kurukshetra, what Vasudeva Krishna did was to make Arjuna see things in the proper perspective. That helped Arjuna to come out of his quandary and made him discharge his duty of fighting the war. Vasudeva Krishna was only instrumental in making Arjuna, a Kshatriya and warrior prince, to realise his enjoined duty of fighting the enemy in a battle field.

The message of Gita was for people to do their enjoined duty or ‘swadharma’ dispassionately and with diligence, without worrying about the outcome. A soldier has to fight the enemy, a farmer has to till the land, a student has to study, a govt servant has to administer so on and so forth. This is in brief what Gita propounds. As Gita took birth in the battle field and the person concerned was Arjuna, the message for him was not to backtrack from his ‘swadharma’ which was fighting ‘Dharma Yuddha’ – righteous battle. Hence espousing the cause of violence was never the objective of Bhagavad Gita. It was just the response of a misconstrued understanding of Gita.