Union Home Minister Amit Shah is often referred to as Chanakya, the ultimate master of statecraft. For starters, Chanakya, also known as Kautilya, is regarded as one of the greatest political thinkers and strategists in world history. Living in the fourth century BCE, he was the chief adviser to Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the Mauryan Empire.

Under Chanakya's guidance, Chandragupta established one of the largest and most powerful empires of its time. Chanakya's traditionally attributed enduring legacy is the Arthashastra, a monumental treatise on governance, economics, diplomacy, military strategy, and public administration. It remains a repository of timeless wisdom on statecraft.

This week, I was consulting the Arthashastra to find out whether Chanakya had ever advised abstention from the public sphere as a matter of state policy when a ruler is unable to explain his conduct.

All I found was that Chanakya never advised a ruler to remain missing. On the contrary, he urged the ruler to remain in regular touch with his subjects so that he would not be misled by his courtiers and sycophants. He also devised mechanisms through which the ruler could benefit from the wise counsel of professionals, although the term itself was not in existence then.

In other words, the Arthashastra does not justify Amit Shah's conduct ever since July 20, when the police under his command resorted to the cruellest methods to deal with the students' agitation.

Thousands of students gathered at Jantar Mantar in Delhi not because they wanted to, but because circumstances compelled them to do so. A series of scandals, including question paper leaks that forced the cancellation of the NEET examination, disappointed the students so deeply that some of them took the extreme step of ending their lives. While mentioning this, let me add that suicide is never a solution to any problem.

One of their demands was the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, who had demonstrated his incompetence as Education Minister. He should have resigned on his own, accepting moral responsibility for the lapses in the conduct of NEET and the opacity in the functioning of the CBSE. Prime Minister Narendra Modi made matters worse by using Pradhan's birthday to shower lavish praise on him.

As the number two in the Cabinet, Shah could have asserted his authority and advised Pradhan to resign. Much against Chanakya's advice, he preferred to remain silent.

Intelligence comes under the Home Minister. It would have warned the government that when the students announced a peaceful march to Parliament on July 20, the police would not be able to stop them at the barricades. It would also have informed Shah that closing 16 Metro stations would not suffice to prevent the students from reaching Jantar Mantar.

Alas, the government did not take the protest seriously. When the Cockroach Janata Party gained greater traction on social media than the ruling BJP, it was claimed that the support had come from Pakistan. Then came attempts to tarnish the agitation by portraying it as foreign-inspired and led by anti-social elements.

When the students broke through the barricades to continue their march to Parliament, the Delhi Police had every reason to use mild force to disperse them. After all, they could not allow anyone to take the law into their own hands.

What Delhi witnessed, however, was shocking. The policemen used lathis studded with nails. They also used canisters and other potentially lethal weapons. I saw one shocking video in which a policeman struck the backside of a young woman who had bent over to protect herself. I wondered whether he had a mother, a wife, or a sister, for only then could one comprehend how he could be so cruel and vulgar.

None of the men who attacked the students had nameplates on their uniforms. Who authorised them to remove them while they were on duty? This suggests that they had come prepared to deal brutally with the agitators and escape identification. Imagine, they were not confronting terrorists or infiltrators on the border but our own students, who had been wronged by the very state that is supposed to protect them.

The policemen had come armed with stones to hurl at the students. Their worst misconduct, however, was allowing masked men in plain clothes to accompany them and permitting them to assault the students. I recall that during the agitation against the amendment to the citizenship law, similar characters were found on the campuses of JNU and Jamia Millia Islamia, taking the law into their own hands.

Amit Shah has a reputation for meticulously planning everything he undertakes. How could the police have decided upon such a strategy without consulting him? If he allowed them to do what they did, he cannot absolve himself of responsibility. And if he claims that he was not in the loop, it only demonstrates a failure of leadership. Either way, he needs to answer for his conduct.

Parliament is the place where such issues ought to be discussed. There are innumerable video clips of Shah angrily responding to questions from the Opposition. He can single-handedly outshout the entire Opposition. He should have been in Parliament to answer every question the Opposition raised about the manner in which the police and a paramilitary force dealt with the students. He could even have turned the tables on the Opposition by apologising for the barbarity.

Shah preferred to evade Parliament. This certainly did not show him in a good light. If, in the process, he earned the reputation of being a coward, he has only himself to blame. Why is he afraid of Parliament? A majority of its members belong to his party and its allies. They are there to support him.

He has at his command all the facts and figures that no one else has. He can use them to demolish every argument advanced by the Opposition. So why is he afraid of facing the House? If he is not physically well, a statement to that effect would suffice to dispel the Opposition's charge that he is shying away from responsibility.

The Prime Minister, too, could have taken the lead in assuaging the feelings of the people. He could have made a statement in the House and answered the questions raised by the Opposition. Neither of them thought it fit to do so.

My teacher and former Deputy Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, Prof. PJ Kurien, reminded the Speaker in a letter that he had the authority to direct Amit Shah, or even the Prime Minister, to appear before Parliament and answer the questions raised by members. That is how parliamentary democracy is meant to function.

It appears that the government wants the stalemate to continue so that it can blame the Opposition for the washout of the Monsoon Session. Such a strategy speaks poorly of the ruling party. Chanakya never advised such a course of action. People are watching how two men who have ruled the country for the last 12 years have suddenly fallen silent and seem afraid of the very Parliament that conferred upon them the legitimacy to govern.

It was on August 5, 2019, that the Home Minister informed Parliament about the abrogation of Article 370 and the bifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir into two Union Territories. He promised that Jammu and Kashmir would regain its statehood at an appropriate time.

Seven years have passed, and despite the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly passing a resolution demanding the restoration of statehood, nothing has happened. Has the ground situation improved under Shah's watch? People in both J&K and Ladakh are disappointed. Incidentally, it was during this period that the Pahalgam terror attack took place, in which 26 tourists were shot dead in cold blood.

The modern-day Chanakya has failed to deliver on his promises. It would, of course, be unfair to blame him for the theft at the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, over which he had no direct control. Yet he appears not to realise that such incidents have antagonised a large section of the people who were once captivated by the Gujarati duo.

Courage lies not in boasting about the size of one's chest but in confronting challenges as they arise. Lal Bahadur Shastri coined the slogan "Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan" when the nation faced an external threat. He was a humble and simple man who had the courage to resign as Railway Minister after a major train accident in South India, accepting moral responsibility.

Shastri went on to become one of India's most admired Prime Ministers. As a boy, he displayed courage by crossing a flooded river to attend school. As Prime Minister, he showed courage in standing up to Pakistan. That, not silence or evasion, is the true measure of leadership.

Many of my young readers may not know much about Sharad Yadav. I had just started my career as a journalist when a by-election was necessitated in Jabalpur in 1974 by the death of the incumbent Congress MP. Sharad Yadav was fielded by the united Opposition with the blessings of Jayaprakash Narayan.

He won the seat by a massive margin. It signalled the beginning of the downfall of the Congress led by Indira Gandhi, who imposed the Emergency the following year when she realised that things were slipping out of her control. Yadav remains the only leader to have won Lok Sabha elections from three states—Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

Here, allow me a digression. I once travelled in an Ambassador car from Gaya to Patna. I was seated between Sharad Yadav and former Prime Minister VP Singh. I was there to interview Singh. My own car was following us. At one point, Singh told me, "It would be a national disaster if I became Prime Minister." I was not sure whether I could quote him.

When I asked him, he gave me the go-ahead. Sharad Yadav, however, advised me not to quote him. It became the lead story in the Hindustan Times the next day. The Delhi edition carried it as the second lead. That quotation haunted Singh throughout his tenure as Prime Minister. TIME magazine even published it as one of its quotable quotes.

I saw the emergence of another Sharad Yadav in Bankipur, Bihar. He is Jan Suraaj Party leader Prashant Kishor. I never gave much credence to Kishor's claim that he had guided, among others, Narendra Modi, Mamata Banerjee and Nitish Kumar to electoral victories. When his party contested the Bihar Assembly elections, many of its candidates lost their security deposits. He himself chickened out of contesting at the eleventh hour.

But in Bankipur, he won by a huge margin. Bankipur was once part of the Patna West constituency. It has a large population of Kayasthas. For those who may not know much about them, let me mention that they are a highly educated community.

During the Mughal period, they served as accountants, administrators, teachers and scribes. Even today, they have a significant presence in the civil services, education, journalism and healthcare. Shatrughan Sinha and Amitabh Bachchan are two prominent Kayasthas. So is a great Swami who travelled all across India.

The constituency had remained with the BJP for the last 30 years. Its last MLA was Nitin Nabin, who was chosen to succeed JP Nadda as the BJP's national chief. He resigned from the Assembly after becoming a Rajya Sabha member. All the BJP's calculations went wrong following the police action in Delhi.

The BJP lost the seat by a huge margin. Bihar is often associated with caste politics. Yet, in this Kayastha-dominated constituency, it was a Brahmin who emerged victorious. This was not a defeat born of local factors or organisational weakness. This was a referendum on the high-handedness that people have witnessed from the centre.

If Pradhan had a reason to resign, Shah has many more reasons to do so. After all, if a minister must take the fall for a breakdown of law and order, then the man who micromanages the entire security apparatus cannot escape accountability. Under these circumstances, resignation is the most honourable course of action for Amit Shah.