Ashoka’s Unfinished Lesson for the Indian Republic

India often asks its past to provide reassurance. Ancient achievements become evidence of national capacity; inherited traditions become answers to contemporary anxieties. Yet history is more useful when it unsettles. The most valuable question is not whether earlier Indians possessed every virtue the republic now claims. It is whether their successes and contradictions help identify what public power still struggles to do.

Ashoka offers such a test. His lion capital supplies the republic’s state emblem, and the Ashoka Chakra sits at the centre of its flag. These are familiar symbols. Less familiar is the demanding distinction his record invites: between a ruler who counsels respect for difference and a political order that makes such respect enforceable. The former is an ethical achievement. The latter remains a constitutional obligation.

An emperor’s argument against conceit

In the third century BCE, Ashoka used inscriptions on rocks and pillars to communicate across a vast, unevenly governed empire. Their concerns extended beyond conquest and revenue to conduct: the treatment of others, the responsibilities of officials and relations among religious communities. They were assertions of authority, but also attempts to explain what authority should be for.

Major Rock Edict XII is especially relevant. In its discussion of religious sects, it urges restraint in speech: people should not exalt their own community or disparage another without proper cause. Honour shown to other traditions could benefit one’s own; indiscriminate praise of oneself and condemnation of others could do the opposite. Listening was not presented simply as a concession to outsiders. It was a means of improving understanding.

This was not a modern declaration of free expression or equal citizenship. Translations differ, and the vocabulary of ancient sects does not map neatly onto contemporary religious identities. Nevertheless, the argument is recognisable. A community can damage what it cherishes by making self-celebration its chief public activity. Confidence need not require contempt.

For contemporary India, that is a sharper lesson than a generic appeal to harmony. Disagreement is unavoidable in a society containing many faiths, languages, castes and accounts of history. The relevant standard cannot be the disappearance of offence. It must be whether disagreement leaves others able to participate as equals.

The limits of benevolent power

There is a temptation to turn Ashoka into a constitutional democrat before his time. His own inscriptions resist that reading. Major Rock Edict XIII records remorse over the suffering caused by the conquest of Kalinga. It also retains a warning that the ruler possesses the power to punish forest peoples. Moral concern and coercive authority occupy the same political landscape.

That tension matters. An emperor’s willingness to restrain himself does not give subjects an independent means of restraining him. Nor do public statements of benevolence establish how consistently distant officials behaved. Inscriptions are evidence of what the ruler wished to announce, not comprehensive audits of imperial government. They should be read critically, neither dismissed as empty publicity nor accepted as proof of administrative virtue.

The modern republic begins from a different premise. Citizens do not depend for their rights on the disposition of whoever governs them. Public office is constituted and limited by law. Courts, legislatures, elections and procedures are intended to make accountability more durable than personal virtue.

The distinction is practical. An administrator may patiently hear a complaint; a functioning system must also provide a recorded decision, intelligible reasons and a route of appeal. A minister may welcome criticism; constitutional protection must extend to criticism that the minister dislikes. Good intentions can improve government. They cannot bear the entire weight of liberty.

From inherited difference to equal citizenship

India’s civilisational history contains rich traditions of argument, exchange and intellectual rivalry. It also contains entrenched hierarchies and exclusion. Selecting only the first produces nostalgia; selecting only the second obscures resources for change. A useful historical imagination holds both together. It asks which inheritances deserve extension and which require a break.

The Constitution makes that break explicit in important respects. Equality before the law, prohibitions on specified forms of discrimination and the abolition of untouchability do not merely preserve an inherited social accommodation. They challenge practices that accommodation could leave intact. Freedom of conscience likewise belongs to persons, not only to communities speaking through recognised leaders.

This is where the language of tolerance becomes insufficient. To tolerate can imply that someone with superior standing permits another to exist. Equal citizenship rejects that hierarchy. A person seeking public employment, police protection or access to a public facility should not have to establish the antiquity, popularity or cultural usefulness of their identity.

Nor should respect for communities shield power within them from scrutiny. Women, disadvantaged castes, dissenters and those who change or reject religious belief may need protection against authorities claiming to represent tradition. Pluralism cannot mean negotiating peace among powerful spokespeople while leaving less powerful individuals unheard. Its constitutional purpose is to widen freedom, not freeze communities into officially approved forms.

Restraint must become administrative practice

The contemporary information environment rewards precisely the habits Ashoka’s counsel questioned. A provocative fragment travels faster than a careful explanation. Praise of one’s own group and suspicion of another can generate attention with little expenditure on evidence. India’s linguistic diversity adds another difficulty: a statement can move between languages and contexts stripped of the qualifications that made it intelligible.

Yet the answer cannot be a broad official mandate to enforce agreeable speech. Governments are interested participants in public argument. Vague restrictions can turn an appeal for civility into a means of suppressing inconvenient reporting, scholarship or protest. Constitutional protections for expression, alongside legally bounded restrictions, are more reliable than discretionary judgments about whether criticism sounds sufficiently respectful.

A better response begins with the state’s own conduct. When authorities restrict communications, prohibit an assembly or take action against allegedly unlawful speech, they should identify the legal basis and provide reasons with enough specificity to permit meaningful challenge. Any restrictions should be necessary, proportionate and subject to timely review. Secrecy should require justification rather than operate as an administrative reflex.

These principles also apply beyond headline controversies. A district office that publishes eligibility rules reduces the scope for favouritism. A police station that records complaints consistently makes protection less dependent on social standing. A municipal authority that explains permissions and refusals makes unequal treatment easier to detect. Translation into locally used languages is part of accountability: reasons that citizens cannot understand offer little practical protection.

Legislatures have a complementary responsibility. Committee scrutiny, reasoned debate and accessible records can expose weaknesses before a measure becomes an administrative fact. Consultation should include people likely to bear its costs, not merely organisations best equipped to secure an appointment. The object is not endless deliberation. It is better information and a visible chain of responsibility.

A republic worthy of its symbols

Ashoka’s inscriptions were an effort to make an ethical vocabulary public. Their continued presence reminds India that governing has long involved more than the possession of force. Authority has also sought legitimacy through explanations of its purposes and limits. But the republic must demand something more exacting than the emperor could offer: institutions through which citizens can contest those explanations.

That requires a less ornamental relationship with history. Schools and public institutions can present the edicts alongside the uncertainties surrounding their implementation and the coercion remaining within imperial rule. They can place traditions of debate beside histories of exclusion. Such teaching would neither diminish India nor require citizens to agree on a single account of its civilisation. It would treat them as capable of judgment.

The same standard should govern public life. Respect is not measured by the frequency with which officials invoke harmony, but by the security enjoyed by people who dissent. Accountability is not established by declaring concern for the vulnerable, but by making remedies accessible when concern fails. National confidence is not weakened when an institution admits error; correction is evidence that it can learn.

The lesson of Ashoka is therefore neither a programme of ancient revival nor a sermon against disagreement. It is a warning about conceit, joined to a warning about benevolence. Power should listen, but citizens should not have to rely on its willingness to do so. India honours the moral ambition of its inherited symbols when it subjects authority to the impersonal discipline of constitutional government.