The Bizarre Telling of the History of Bharat: The Case of Ashoka

By Ravi Nayyar

I am passionate about a few areas of inquiry — cyber policy, international relations, law and governance, and cricket, of course.

But I am also incredibly interested in Indian history, especially how its narration has been twisted for ideological and political purposes over Bharat’s existence as a civilisational state. That is, following its invasion by a series of Turkic peoples, the Portuguese and the British, but also its independence in 1947.

An example of the way Indian history has been thus twisted is the overly positive treatment of Ashoka, one of the last leaders of the Mauryan Empire. Founded in the fourth century BCE, it was one of the greatest empires the world has seen and the first to run across over two-thirds of the Indian subcontinent.

Now, I believe that it makes perfect sense for Nehruvian Marxists and socialists since the 1920s to have idolised a tyrant like Ashoka, and not an actual brain like Chanakya, when looking for an intellectual forefather who wasn’t European. And to ensure that Ashoka was referred to as ‘Ashoka the Great’. After all, Chanakya was a celebrated ancient Indian polymath and royal advisor to Chandragupta, the founder of the Mauryan Empire. He wrote the Arthashastra, the ancient treatise on how to run a state and its (political) economy. While Chanakya believed in a robust but minimally-sized state (not in the libertarian sense, but a risk-based sense championing necessarily proportionate state intervention), Ashoka was a socialist. His inscriptions literally speak of a ‘nanny’ state when he defines the role of his Mahamatras, whom we would call ‘religious police’. Sounds like the ‘Licence Raj’ under India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru and then his daughter, Indira Gandhi, as Prime Minister.

Also, while Chanakya was critical to the building of the Mauryan Empire, the latter started to collapse under Ashoka. Don’t take it from me: take it from the Hathigumpha inscription of King Kharavela. Speaking of collapses, I am reminded of how Nehru de-industrialised West Bengal, a core contributor to the sorry state of the state today. Or how India more generally became an economic basket case — until the IMF-mandated structural adjustment policies were implemented in the ’90s — under governments led by successive iterations of the Congress party that enamoured of state control of pretty much everything, regardless of the logic thereof, because socialism was the way to go.

I also used the word, ‘tyrant’, to describe Ashoka advisedly. Perhaps the earliest recorded genocide on the Indian subcontinent happened under Ashoka’s reign. And the wretched Kalinga War saw merely one of the genocides he performed. For instance, he also ordered the slaughter of 18,000 Ajivikas in Bengal. Regarding the Kalinga massacre, there is no contrite inscription of his in the present Indian states of Odisha or Andhra Pradesh where the war was fought in the third century BC. There is, oddly enough, one in modern-day Pakistan, but ‘Ashoka the Great’ doesn’t quite express unqualified remorse for the massacre. Like how no iteration of the Congress party has condemned the ethnic cleansing of Marathi Brahmins under their watch after Gandhi’s assassination.

On Ashoka’s religion, the narrative by the Nehruvians was, essentially, the following for decades:

The bloke went into Kalinga an angry Hindu, but was so sad about what he did that he became a pacifist Buddhist.

Except Ashoka was a Buddhist for a few years before the Kalinga War.

And it gets better: given the evidence we have for Ashoka’s malevolence (eg genocides), it is likely he became a Buddhist to gain the support of Buddhist rivals of his family members in the royal court, thus safeguarding his position on the throne of the Mauryan Empire, which he usurped. He was apparently linked with the Buddhists for a decade before converting. Again, before the Kalinga War which is alleged by the Nehruvians to have made him ‘see the light’.

Similarly, various iterations of the Congress party cornered the market for decades, as the present iteration continues to, when it comes to playing votebank politics. An example is the effective reversal of the Shah Bano judgement of the Indian Supreme Court of 1985 by PM Rajiv Gandhi (one of Nehru’s grandsons) via the enactment of the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986. Today, you can look at the numbers game being played to ensure that Nehru’s great-grandson, Rahul Gandhi, retains his Lok Sabha seat of Wayanad.

Finally, how Ashoka usurped the throne itself. I say ‘usurped’ because he wasn’t crown prince when his father, Bindusara, died. His half-brother, Sushima, was. Before Sushima returned to Pataliputra, the capital of the Mauryan Empire, from countering an invasion on the northwestern frontiers, Ashoka wrested control of the city with the help of Greek mercenaries. And it appears Ashoka had Sushima killed at the eastern gates of his own capital. I said ‘one of’ because, per Buddhist texts, during a years-long civil war, it seems Ashoka knocked off all male rivals in his family (99 half-brothers), bar his full brother, Tissa. ’Ashoka the Great’, amirite?

Now, while Nehru didn’t have Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel knocked off, Nehru was not the then-Congress party’s first choice for its President and thus Prime Minister of India. Yes, Gandhi had already told the party on 20/4/46 that he wanted Nehru in the chair but, when the deadline (29/4/46) for the fifteen Pradesh Congress Committees to file their nominations for President of the Party and thus PM passed, the results were:

Twelve for Patel

Three abstentions

(= Jawaharlal who?)

Because Nehru couldn’t hack it, Gandhi asked Patel to withdraw from the race. History repeated itself — Patel was denied the Congress Presidency in favour of Nehru, just as in 1929 and 1937.

Let’s wrap this all up.

Given the above correlations between Ashoka’s conduct and that of the Nehruvians, it makes perfect sense why they — be they politicians, officials, academics and other ‘intellectuals’, as well as civvies — just can’t get enough of ‘Ashoka the Great’. (Note that: I am not saying that the Nehruvians deliberately mimicked Ashoka; and there are elements of Nehru and the Congress party’s history that I have omitted to avoid this piece getting too long.)

Never mind that Ashoka was known as ‘Chandashoka’, at least in the early years of his reign of tyranny. That is, he was condemned as ‘Ashoka the Cruel’.

I wonder what moniker was used by Bengali Hindu refugees — fleeing erstwhile East Pakistan following the Partition of India in 1947 (over forty years after the Partition of Bengal) and who were housed in ‘permanent liability camps’ in what is now the Indian state of West Bengal — to address Nehru by.

Some of My Key Source Material

Dr Sanjeev Sanyal, Ashoka, the Not So Great

Dr Sanjeev Sanyal, How Much of Indian History Is Really True?

Encyclopaedia Britannica, Mauryan Empire

Makkhan Lal, In Patel vs Nehru Saga, Remember that India’s First PM Wasn’t Elected Unanimously

Kolkata Partition Museum, Chronicling Resettlement