Public Administration in Ancient India c12.39

c12.39

The Ministers were, of course, directly responsible for the due performance of their duties to the King. But they had also a sort of indirect responsibility to the people. This is illustrated by the story told by Hiuen Tsiang about Vikramāditya, King of Srāvastī. This King was very charitably inclined, and he largely supplied the wants of the poor, the orphans, and the bereaved. One day he ordered his Ministers to distribute daily five lakhs of gold coins. On this, the treasurer, fearing that the resources of the State would soon be exhausted, said to the King: "Your treasury will thus be emptied, and then fresh imposts will have to be laid, until the resources of the land be also exhausted, then the voice of complaint will be heard and hostility be provoked. Your Majesty, indeed, will get credit for charity, but your Minister will lose the respect of all.”¹ The story current at Hiuen Tsiang’s time about Asoka’s Minister² refusing to comply with the King’s wish to give away all his possessions in charity, also shows that the Ministers recognised some responsibility to the people. And they were held responsible not only for their own actions but also for those of the King. This theory of Ministerial responsibility is clearly expressed in the following passage in the Sanskrit drama, Mudrā-Rākshasa: “When anything wrong is done by the King, the fault is of the Minister; (for) it is through the negligence of the driver that an elephant goes mad.”³ So, when Rājyavardhana was treacherously assassinated, the Ministers told Harshavardhana that they were to blame for the misfortune, for they ought not to have allowed Rājyavardhana to go to a foreign King’s camp unguarded.⁴