Prema Jayakumar

It is irresistible, given the confluence of the two dates, the installation of the deity in the not yet fully built Rama temple in Ayodhya with all its fanfare, celebration and controversy and the seventy-sixth death anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi which comes a week after it, no longer particularly remembered or acknowledged, to talk about Ramarajya. But, however much you ignore the old man in his single dhoti and round spectacles and long stick, he has a habit of making himself relevant to whatever is going on. After all, Gandhiji was one of first the votaries of Ramarajya, a reign similar to the supposed ideal one that held in Ayodhya during the rule of Rama. He dreamt of an India which would be a Ramarajya.

And what was the Ramarajya he envisioned? Such visions have not been his alone. Let us remember here that other philosophers too have envisioned states which were ideal in that they put the concerns of the people of the state before anything else. From Plato to Thomas More through other names through history, philosophers have thought of, debated, the virtues of the ideal king or ruler to begin with, the ideal government when democracy was involved. For Plato, the ideal state would be ruled by a philosopher king. For Thomas More, it was a state that was governed by reason alone. For John Rawls, a well-ordered society was a society in which all accept the same principles of justice and society’s basic institutions are regulated by these principles. Any ideal society had to be a well-ordered society, there had to be social unity, shared enterprise, public security. For Mahatma Gandhi, Ramarajya was a rule where the government cared for the weakest of the people. He said, ‘If the king is mindful of the difficulties of the weakest section of his subjects, he rule would be Ramarajya, it would be people’s rule.’

For Gandhiji, Ramarajya was a form of government which involved the empowerment of people at the grassroots, equality of opportunity, the administration as a whole would be decentralised with power given to local groups, there would be co-operative participation of people, and there would be democratic self-governance. Religion did not play a part in this society except as an individual’s own concern. For Gandhiji Rama and Rahim were the one and the same deity and as stated by himself, he acknowledged no other God but the one God of truth and righteousness. Gandhiji’s Ramarajya was a earthy one. To him the kingdom of God was to be found on earth. He could not be bothered by what it would be like in heaven. That was too far a place.

A government which was based on equality, justice, non-violence, self-rule, resting on moral and spiritual values, decentralized power, a concept of trusteeship where governments were conscious of the fact that the funds they held and used were held only as trustees of the people, and economic equality. But, Gandhiji’s Ramarajya was not a monolith, since, for him, there was no absolute truth. Truth had to be tested, experimented on, renewed. It was far from sanatana, it was not something you inherited whole, you inherited some, you found the rest out for yourself, you discovered it and lived by it till you found some contradiction and tested it again. No wonder he called his autobiography ‘My Experiments with Truth’. Mind you, they were only the experiments of one man with this value called truth. He did not claim that all experiments would be similar or should be similar. In common with jesting Pilate, Gandhiji kept asking ‘What is truth?’ but he did try to find the answer as well and did not go away on the question like Pilate!

So can we, wish/pray, whatever works for each individual, for a Ramarajya where the denizens would accept nothing as absolute including the rule of Rama but would seek the truth for themselves and live by it? Where equality, at least of opportunity, could be taken for granted, where the fulfillment of minimum of human needs can be taken for granted? Once again pray, with the rishis, ‘Asato ma satgamaya, tamaso ma jyotirgamaya, mrityorma amritam gamaya’ (Lead me from falsehood to truth, from darkness to light, from death to eternal life) and end with the invocation for peace. ‘Om Santhi, santhi, santhi’.