Theory of Government in Ancient India (Post-Vedic) c6.29

c6.29

Herein consists the supreme importance of government. It is only through fear of the king that people do not eat one another. The king alone brings peace on earth.¹ If the king did not perform his function, the strong would rob or kill the weak. The righteous people would be terribly oppressed and unrighteousness would be adopted by all. None could say of any article of diet or any other property that it was his. The very sense of property, of ‘mineness,’ would disappear. Nor would one be able to claim his wife or son as his own. For all regulations of marriage and morality would cease to operate. In short, “Society itself would cease to exist.”² There is really no one who can be happy in a state of anarchy. If sinful men deprive others of their possessions, they are themselves assailed by more powerful persons who, in their turn, are exposed to similar risks from yet stronger combinations. Women are abducted. Like cattle without a herdsman, like fishes and birds attacking one another, men sink into darkness and rush headlong to destruction.³ In a word, anarchy is “the worst possible of states.” None should live in it.⁴ “One should first select a king.........Then should he select a wife, and then earn wealth. If there be no king, what would become of his wife and acquisitions.”¹ In modern phraseology, the state is prior in importance to the family or private property, both of which, in fact, it alone makes possible. If the working of Government is disturbed, all creatures are overtaken by evil. The Mahābhārata emphasises the idea by putting it into a mythological form; it was kingly duties which first flowed from the original god and then other duties came from his body. Kingly duties comprise all kinds of renunciation, initiation, learning and worldly behaviour.²