Living Bhagavad Gita 016: Heroic Leadership

A series of short articles on the Bhagavad Gita for people living and working in our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times filled with stress and fear. This scripture born in a battlefield teaches us how to face our challenges, live our life fully, achieve excellence in whatever we do and find happiness, peace and contentment.

[Continued from the previous post.]

What pleasures can be ours, Krishna, by killing these sons of Dhritarashtra? Only sin will be ours by killing these atatayis. BG 1.36

There is a big difference between the way Arjuna looks at the Kurukshetra war and the way Krishna sees it. For Krishna, it is essentially a dharma yuddha, a war for establishing dharma, righteous ways of living and leading, and for destroying evil, which is the purpose of his incarnation, for which he has been waging wars throughout his life.  He does not expect any preeti, pleasures, from the war. As a great yogi, a yogeshwara, his pleasures do not depend upon the success in the war, or on any external factor for that matter. As Adi Shankaracharya says in Bhaja Govindam:

yogarato vaa bhogarato vaa sangarato vaa sanga-viheenah

yasya brahmani ramate chittam nandati nandati nandaty-eva

Whether he is engaged in yoga or in bhoga [sensual pleasures], whether he is in the company of others or without company, he whose mind revels in Brahman rejoices and rejoices and just rejoices.

That is how Krishna is.

But for Arjuna, the war is still a preeti yuddha: a war for acquiring the pleasures of power and wealth and also for the cold pleasure of vengeance for what was done to Draupadi. That is what he means when he rhetorically asks ‘what pleasure [preeti] can be ours by killing these sons of Dhritarashtra?’ Standing there between the two armies, the highly sensitive Arjuna suddenly realizes those pleasures are not going to taste very sweet because all said and done, Duryodhana and his brothers are his own people, his cousins, however evil they are.

The epic tells us that this is what actually happens too – after the war is over, Yudhishthira feels so guilty about it all that he refuses to accept the crown. And Vyasa, Narada and so many other wise men have to explain to him again and again what happened was inevitable under the circumstances and he has to accept that reality and fulfill his responsibilities towards the Bharata dynasty and its subjects by accepting the crown.  Arjuna is now getting a foretaste of what Yudhishthira later feels. He feels he will get no pleasure from killing Duryodhana and his brothers and will only accrue sin from it, even though they are atatayis.     

Atatayi is a Sanskrit word that means someone who commits the most heinous of criminal acts. As far as a kshatriya is concerned, said ancient India, not only does he accrue no sin from killing atatayis, but it is his duty to do so since he is a warrior bound to protect virtuous ways of living and leading.

To give an example for an atatayi from the epic itself, let’s take a look at what Ashwatthama does in the Sauptika Parva of the epic.

On the evening of the eighteenth day of the war, Ashwatthama, Kripa and Kritavarma learning of the fall of Duryodhana in the mace fight with Bhima approach him as he lies in writhing agony. There Ashwatthama vows vengeance on the Pandavas for what they have done to Duryodhana and had earlier done to his father. As desired by Duryodhana, Kripa crowns Ashwatthama the commander of Duryodhana’s army that now consists of just these three people. As they proceed toward their camp, they hear the sound of the victorious Pandavas celebrating and running away in fear, hide under a banyan tree in a thick jungle.

That night as Ashwatthama lies awake unable to sleep, he watches an owl attacking and killing the crows asleep on the tree. That gives him the idea of attacking the camp of the sleeping Pandavas and taking Kripa and Kritavarma with him he goes there. Inside the Pandava camp, Ashwatthama brutally strangles to death a half-asleep Dhrishtadyumna, ignoring his pleas to be killed like a warrior and not like an animal.  He then kills Shikhandi and Draupadi’s five children, all unarmed, and all the remaining Pandava warriors while they were hardly out of their exhausted sleep. Screaming, confused and terrified warriors run helter-skelter thinking some deathly monster is attacking them and Ashwatthama brutally pursues and butchers them all. Kripa and Kritavarma hack down to death the warriors who manage to escape the wrath of Ashwatthama and reach the gates of the camp.

Ashwatthama, Kripa and Kritavarma in that night the epic calls a kalaratri are examples for atatayis. 

Let’s take one or two contemporary examples for atatayis. In November 2008, ten members of an extremist terrorist organization carried out ruthless shooting and bombing attacks that lasted for four days across Mumbai, brutally killing 166 innocent people and wounding three hundred others, several of them guests and tourists in India from such countries as the United States, Israel and so on.

The terrorists reached India using a hijacked fishing trawler. In Mumbai they seized cars and split into different groups to carry out their relentless attacks at some of the most popular and prestigious places in the city, including the Taj Hotel. Using automatic weapons and grenades they wrecked havoc at the sites. The first site to be attacked was the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus [CST] where they opened indiscriminate fire into the teeming crowds there at the peak hour. Fifty-eight people fell victims to these shootings and over one hundred were injured.

Elsewhere they blew up a petrol pump. Attacking the Nariman House complex, they killed a Jewish rabbi and his wife and five other Israelis during a three-day siege. The terrorists had no mercy for women, old people or children. The two-year-old child of the rabbi survived only because of the presence of mind showed by his nanny who smuggled him away to safety.

Entering the popular Leopold Café, they shot and killed ten people dining there.

Entering the prestigious Taj Hotel, India’s national pride, by a side door that they broke down, they began spraying bullets at random and set off bombs under the hotel’s world famous central dome causing a massive fire that raged through the top floors of the hotel.

The terrorists continued to viciously spread death and devastation in other chosen locales in the city, putting into effect the plans they had made before they reached India. 

The men who did these barbaric acts fit into what the Mahabharata called atatayis.

The Hindi movie Rowdy Rathore is centered on the asuri activities of a man called Baapji who rules a vast network of villages with an iron hand ruthlessly torturing men, looting their wealth and raping women. With the help of a few pitiless henchman, Baapji has enslaved all the villagers who have no option but to submit themselves to his and his son’s lust, greed and sadism. They enjoy torturing the hapless villagers, their pain thrills them, and they laugh fiendishly watching them writhing in agony. It is a picture painted in a single colour: black. Pitch black with no shades of grey to it.

Even the police have no power over them because of Baapji’s political influence. They are constantly humiliated and made to dance to their tune. In a very disturbing scene we see a police inspector standing humbly before Baapji begging for his wife to be given back to him – she has been carried away by Baapji’s son who is keeping her with him until his lust for her is satiated. Hearing her husband’s voice, the wife comes running out of the room where she is kept and Baapji’s son follows her, walking fearlessly with a lecherous smirk on his face.  The son bluntly raises two fingers to say he would give her back to the inspector after two days and the inspector has no choice but to quietly go back. Such is the terror unleashed by Baapji even among the police.

Baapji and his son are atatayis.

“My name is Elena and I used to be a human being. Now I am a sex slave. If you are reading this diary then I am either dead or I have managed to escape…” thus begins Trafficked: The Diary of a Sex Slave by Sibel Hodge, a gritty, gripping novella inspired by accounts of real victims of sex slavery and research into the dark underworld of sex trafficking, an international business with networks spread across the world trafficking hundreds of thousands of victims including children and turning their lives into pure hell. Few escape this hell that usually lasts so long as the victims can be used for the purposes of the business. It has been estimated that around 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders every year – eighty percent of whom are women and girls according to the US State Department. The trafficked women and girls are crowded into rundown apartments and cramped filthy trailers and are forced to have sex with up to thirty customers a day. They are closely guarded at all times and many are beaten and repeated raped by brothel guards and the trafficking bosses.

The tens of thousands of men and women involved in running this ruthless business are all atatayis.

Unspeakable atrocities were committed against young Nirbhaya in Delhi in 2012 by a group of rapists, arousing the righteous anger of the entire nation. The men who made hapless Nirbhaya undergo hell on earth are atatayis in ancient Indian terms.

While these are extreme cases of atatayis from the fast paced modern world where the nature of crime itself has changed and new forms of crimes are invented every day, another perfect example for an atatayi from the Mahabharata world itself is Duryodhana. While he was still a child, even before he began his education under Kripa and later under Drona, he had already committed several monstrous crimes against the Pandavas and he continues to do these throughout his life. And, apart from what was done to them during the dice game, when he sends them to the forest for twelve years, horrible things to happen to them there too.    

Duryodhana fits the term atatayi perfectly. And it is him and those who are in the battlefield fighting for him that Arjuna says he does not want to kill even though they are atatayis – because they are his swajana, his own people. The Gita is taught to Arjuna to show him how he is bound to do that unpleasant act in spite of his compunctions, since he is a soldier for dharma, a dharma yoddha, sworn to protect righteousness and destroy unrighteousness.  

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When the world is corrupt and men in power follow wickedness, we have two options: We can either join hands with the corruption or fight to destroy it. Joining the corruption is the way of the ordinary man. He finds it not only easier but the right thing to do in his personal interest and in the interest of his family. This is what the Upanishads call the path of preyas – the road widely travelled, the tempting, easy path that takes us nowhere. Fighting to end corruption and to destroy the corrupt is the way of the hero, which very few opt to do. The Upanishads call it the path of shreyas, the road less travelled, the path of the heroes, of the dhiras, the path that leads to success for the individual and the good of the world. Speaking about these two paths, the Katha Upanishad, from which several verses appear in the Gita verbatim, says:

anyachchreyo’nyadutaiva preyah
te ubhe naanaarthe purusham sineetah
tayoh shreya aadadanasya saadhu bhavati
heeyate’rthaad ya u preyo vrneete

Shreyas and preyas are different from each other. Man comes across a choice between these two and good happens to those who choose shreyas. Those who choose preyas miss their goal and fall.

Shreyas is the path of lasting good, the path less travelled, the path that leads to fulfillment and glory, the path that makes life worth living. And preyas is the path widely travelled, the path of short-lived success, of illusory victories and joys, and ultimately of disappointments and depression. The man who travels by that path finds in the end that he has wasted his life.    

When Arjuna says ‘only sin will be ours by killing these atatayis,’ he is choosing the path of preyas, the path of momentary joys and illusory successes that will eventually lead him nowhere.    What he wants to do is to abandon his responsibilities as a kshatriya and as a prince and to run away from the scene of the war because it is his own people he will have to fight against. He forgets that not doing anything against the wicked and letting them continue with their wickedness amounts to practicing wickedness himself.

Destroying atatayis is one of the first duties of a kshatriya, something he is taught to live for right from his infancy as a warrior for manusham, everything human, all that makes life worth living. He is taught from his earliest days that felons who commit felony have to be punished for their crimes not only to prevent them from committing more such crimes but also as a lesson for others who might have a tendency to do commit such crimes.

Running away from the battlefield and handing over the land into the hands of wicked people who see power as an end in itself and not for service to the world is not a choice that Arjuna has.

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India has always been interested in leadership as a subject. Both of our grand epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, could be seen as studies in effective leadership in their entirety. Besides, while the Ramayana has chapters devoted exclusively to leadership, much of the largest parva of the Mahabharata, the Shanti Parva, is devoted to the exploration of leadership. Apart from this, several of our Puranas and all our dharma shastras contain sections of raja dharma, the dharma of leaders.

The Mahabharata clearly states that kingship was invented to end the matsyanyaya, to protect the weak from exploitation by the strong. And according to Krishna, the teachings of the Gita are the same as what was taught to rajarshis – seer kings or philosopher kings – in India from the beginning of time: how to live for others, how to make service to the people their religion, their way of worshipping the Divine.

And in its discussions of leadership, India insisted that a leader has to be heroic and fearless in destroying evil and protecting the good. When adharma raises its head in the society, it is the duty of the leader – the king in the old days and modern leaders today – to destroy it from the roots. It is this role of the leader that Krishna is reminding Arjuna by asking him to stay in the warfield and fight and destroy ways of evil by destroying those who practice them. As Krishna sees it, turning away from this noble responsibility would make Arjuna a coward, which is what Krishna would call him when he lashes out at his friend for contemplating running away from the battlefield.

Several students of the Bhagavad Gita see the battle of Kurukshetra as a battle between the powers of darkness and the powers of light, among them Mahatma Gandhi. Just as in political life today and in the past, in our organizational life too darkness is widespread. Not all organizations are committed to the good of the society, the basic commitment in most of them being to the single motive – profit. And some of these organizations do not mind going to any extremes for maximizing profits. While we cannot do without organizations, it is important that the practices of the organizations are founded on ethics and they are committed to what ancient India called lokasangraha, the common good. And when they fail to do so, it becomes the duty of leaders within and outside the organization to fight and end organizational corruption.       

The numerous whistle blower movies and books we have speak of ethically committed leaders raising their voices against corruption from within the organization, a brilliant example for which is whistleblower Mathew Lee whom a Wall Street Journal article called ‘perhaps the lone hero of the ugly collapse of Lehman Brothers.’ Mathew Lee, an employee of the corrupt firm, showed the tremendous will power to stand up against his powerful employers and raised red flags about the company’s accounting, risking his life itself.  Movies like Erin Brockovich based on the life of a real life activist too speak of leaders – anyone who has leadership qualities is a leader, whether he or she is in the position of an organizational leader or not – risking their lives to fight against the evil that these organizations do.    

Active opposition to evil does not necessarily mean violent opposition to evil. For Krishna the war was always the very last choice. As the Mahabharata shows us again and again, Krishna would do all that is within his powers to avoid the war – sometimes risking his life, sometimes accepting humiliation on himself. But all that failed and he was left with no other option but to approve of the war with the Kauravas. And even then the war he approves of is a declared war between two armies with specific rules for both parties to follow.

Heroic leadership is not a path you follow so that you are seen as a hero by the people. It is not an egoistic path at all. On the contrary, it is a path on which you sacrifice your ego for the good of the world.

Heroic leadership is not a path you follow so that you are seen as a hero by the people and they applaud for you. It is not an egoistic path at all. On the contrary, it is a path on which you sacrifice your ego for the good of the world and expect nothing in return.  

And that is the path of leadership Krishna wants all of us to walk. And he teaches us through Arjuna how to walk that path fearlessly, with unwavering attention on the goal, keeping our mind balanced, in samatva, for the good of the world, the common good, lokasangraha. 

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