Gita and Non Violence - 4, War as a moral duty

Lord Krishna now enters into a conventional form of argument with Arjuna, based on principles of virtue and vice. He explains that for a Kshatriya or warrior like Arjuna, there is no nobler profession than participating in a righteous war, on the side of the good. One whose dharma or duty is to fight should be delighted at the prospect of fighting for good against evil. If one does not do that, he falls from a high pedestal and people, including his enemies, look down upon him. Such a person would fall from grace and for a very long period of time people would remember him as coward, not as compassion incarnate as he is trying to portray himself.

If we look into the historical context we’ll see that there are enough instances to justify what the Lord said here. If for instance Britain or United States, out of sudden compassion and spirit of non violence would have refused to fight Hitler and Nazis, many more Jews and other innocents would have been killed. To fight a scourge ordinary folks cannot simply resort to non violence. Only God or His incarnations can. One would then say how did Mahatma Gandhi fight the British? It is questionable and doubtful whether Mahatma would have succeeded in the end to dislodge the British from India merely through non violent non cooperation unless the Second World War severely depleted the resources of the West and unless Netaji Subhas Bose's INA divided the army and navy. Mahatma’s non violence, with due respect to it, certainly could not prevent the partition of India and the associated massacre of millions. Nor could it prevent the massive man made famine in Bengal and death of another million poor souls on weapons of avarice and indifference. 

A scourge can be fought only on equal terms, no amount of peace overtures can desist a Hitler or a Stalin from killing. Neither did it prevent Duryadhana from waging the war as we have already seen in the context we are talking about.

Therefore under such a circumstance it’s a moral duty to stand up and fight for right and justice, to save the weak from the tyranny and oppression of the strong. As Sri Ramakrishna pointed out (The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna) that a ruthless landlord is needed to disarm the rebellious and bad tenants, the evil propensities need to be subdued using the rule of law and justice and a righteous war, however oxymoron it sounds, is based on that principle of justice.

So a righteous war like the one in Mahabharata is justified to arrest the march of evil, to protect the innocents. But I bet that our intellectual friends are still not convinced. They can argue that if Sri Krishna is the supreme Lord He can stop this war, what is the need for all these drama? There is a need, and with our limited intellect it is very hard for us to decipher the grand design which pervades this Universe and shapes its history. In Sri Ramakrishna's language, a one litre jug cannot hold four litres of milk.