Darpan letter · No. 725 September 2026

The eye that does not shrink

On a man kept out of a park and a man freed too late, the Upaniṣad’s eye that does not recoil, the Gītā’s equal seeing, and the old promise that the weak may prevail through dharma

प्रिय साथी,

Two people from today’s papers, and neither of them is famous for the right reasons. The first is Kashmir Singh, seventy years old, who spent decades working on construction sites and driving in Delhi, and who lives with his wife Meena Rani in the block of 141 flats set aside for the Economically Weaker Section in a Gurugram housing society. The resident welfare association told them they could not use the central park. On 31 August he wrote to the administration by hand: “We have been locked inside our room for three days... Should we just die locked inside our room?” On 15 September the District Registrar ordered the restrictions lifted. The association says it will appeal, and that dispute will be settled by law.

The second is Surinder Koli. Arrested in 2006 in the Nithari cases, he was sentenced to death by trial courts in thirteen cases between 2009 and 2022, and in 2014 came within four hours of execution before the Supreme Court stayed it. One by one the cases collapsed. The Allahabad High Court called the investigation botched and an “easy course of implicating a poor servant of the house by demonising him”, and in 2025 the Supreme Court acquitted him in the last case, after close to twenty years in prison. He had taken a different name to find housing and work. On 18 September he was found dead; the autopsy is awaited, and early reports describe it as suicide. And we should not forget the other families in this story: the children and young women of Nithari who were killed, whose parents were also failed by an investigation that took the easy course.

What joins these two stories is a single habit of the eye. In both, a person was first seen as a category, “EWS occupants” in one and “a poor servant of the house” in the other, and the category did the thinking. Our tradition has a precise word for what the eye does next.

The Īśopaniṣad says: यस्तु सर्वाणि भूतान्यात्मन्येवानुपश्यति। सर्वभूतेषु चात्मानं ततो न विजुगुप्सते॥ — yas tu sarvāṇi bhūtāny ātmany evānupaśyati, sarvabhūteṣu cātmānaṃ tato na vijugupsate — he who sees all beings in the Self, and the Self in all beings, no longer shrinks from anyone (Īśopaniṣad 6). The verb is vijugupsate: to recoil, to draw back, to want something kept at a distance. A notice that bars a neighbour from a park is vijugupsā written down. So is a headline that calls a man “the butcher of Nithari” before any court has tested the evidence. The Upaniṣad is not asking for sentiment. It describes a way of seeing in which the other person is never wholly other, and it says that the recoil simply stops.

The Gītā makes the same point with a list chosen to shock: विद्याविनयसम्पन्ने ब्राह्मणे गवि हस्तिनि। शुनि चैव श्वपाके च पण्डिताः समदर्शिनः॥ — the wise see with an equal eye a brāhmaṇa endowed with learning and humility, a cow, an elephant, a dog and a śvapāka, one who cooks dogs (5.18). The verse puts the most honoured person of its society in the same line as the most shunned, and calls the one who sees them equally a paṇḍita. Notice, though, what it does not say. It does not say that the elephant and the dog must eat the same meal. Sama-darśana is equal seeing, not identical treatment. That distinction is exactly the one the District Registrar drew. The association has a real point about maintenance charges and unpaid dues, and a swimming pool can be charged for. A path to walk on and a bench in the open air are another matter, and the order held that a conveyance deed cannot take them away.

Then Kṛṣṇa gives the method: आत्मौपम्येन सर्वत्र समं पश्यति योऽर्जुन। सुखं वा यदि वा दुःखं स योगी परमो मतः॥ — he who, by comparison with himself, sees the same in everyone, whether it is pleasure or pain, O Arjuna, is held to be the highest yogī (6.32). Ātmaupamya: measuring another’s pain by your own. Try it honestly with Koli’s twenty years. Count back twenty years from today and see where you were then, and everything you have lived through since. Now imagine all of it spent in a cell, much of it waiting to be hanged, for crimes the courts finally said were not proved against you, and then walking out into a world that still knew only the name the newspapers gave you. The authors of today’s article in The Hindu, from the Square Circle Clinic at NALSAR, ask the question that ātmaupamya forces on us: “What does a justice system owe to a person it has wrongly taken so much from?”

For an officer the hardest form of this teaching comes earlier in the same chapter: सुहृन्मित्रार्युदासीनमध्यस्थद्वेष्यबन्धुषु। साधुष्वपि च पापेषु समबुद्धिर्विशिष्यते॥ — he excels who has an equal mind towards well-wishers, friends and foes, the indifferent and the neutral, the hateful and his own kin, and towards the righteous and the sinful alike (6.9). Read the last words again: sādhuṣv api ca pāpeṣu, towards the good and even towards those taken to be wicked. This is not a counsel to excuse wrongdoing. It is the investigating officer’s discipline. The person whom the whole crowd has already named a pāpī is precisely the one to whom the same careful process is owed, because that is where the easy course is most tempting and does the most harm. Samabuddhi is what the police officer, the magistrate and the district collector need most on the day the crowd has made up its mind.

And what of the powerless while they wait? The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, telling how the world was ordered, says that even the strongest order needed something above it, and so dharma was brought forth: तदेतत्क्षत्रस्य क्षत्रं यद्धर्मः। तस्माद्धर्मात्परं नास्ति। अथो अबलीयान्बलीयांसमाशंसते धर्मेण यथा राज्ञैवम्॥ — this is the power over power, namely dharma; therefore there is nothing higher than dharma; and so a weak man hopes to prevail over a strong one through dharma, just as through a king (1.4.14). A seventy-year-old man with a handwritten letter against an association of flat-owners is abalīyān facing balīyān, the weak facing the strong. His hope was in exactly what the Upaniṣad names: an office, today the Registrar’s, that would hear him according to rule. Koli’s case shows the other side of the same promise. Dharma did come, acquittal by acquittal, but it came after twenty years. The verse is a promise, and institutions have to keep it in time.

For your preparation, three things. When you write a GS4 case study, name the person before you name the category: “a seventy-year-old resident and his diabetic wife” reads differently from “EWS occupants”, and the examiner can tell which candidate sees people. In GS2 answers on criminal justice, remember the Law Commission’s 277th Report, Wrongful Prosecution (Miscarriage of Justice): Legal Remedies (2018), which recommended a legal framework for compensating people wrongly prosecuted, and connect it to what the article asks for beyond money: psychosocial care, halfway homes, reconnection with family and help with work. And tonight, take one card from today’s paper in which a group is described only by its label, and write two lines about one person inside that group. It is a small exercise in ātmaupamya, and it will make you a better officer long before it makes you a better candidate.

One more thing, and it is about you. Aspirants are also sorted into categories: dropper, repeater, “still preparing”. Do not let the label do the thinking about yourself either. If this season is weighing on you more than you can carry, speak to someone you trust, or call Tele-MANAS, the national mental health helpline, on 14416. Asking for help is not weakness. It is what the verse means by not shrinking, turned towards yourself.

Be proud of this inheritance, and honest about it. A civilisation that could put the dog-cook in the same verse as the learned brāhmaṇa had grasped something very large. It did not always live by it, and the voices that held it to its word, from the saints of the bhakti movement to the makers of our Constitution, belong to that inheritance too. The verse is not a description of what we were. It is a standard we can still be measured by, in a housing society in Gurugram, in a police station, and one day in your own office.

When you next see a notice, a file or a headline that asks you to recoil from someone, remember the one who sees himself in all beings: ततो न विजुगुप्सते। He does not shrink. Neither should the eye of the State.

— आपका साथी, दर्पण

Sources: Īśopaniṣad 6 · Bhagavad Gītā 5.18 · Bhagavad Gītā 6.32 · Bhagavad Gītā 6.9 · Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.14