Patna,(BiharTimes): It is a case of BJP proposes, Nitish Kumar disposes––but with a difference.

More than a month after winning the Assembly election with the help of RJD and Congress and two and a half years after snapping ties with the saffron brigade Bihar chief minister inadvertently ended up dancing to the tune of former friend. His cabinet on Tuesday gave a nod to the proposal to declareApril 14 as Emperor Ashoka Jyanti, and thus under Negotiable Instruments Act declared it a holiday.

Curiously, the BJP under the banner of Rashtrawadi Kushwaha Parishad celebrated 2320th birth anniversary of Emperor Ashoka on May 17 last and notApril 14 as on this day it commemorated the birth anniversary of the architect of Indian Constitution, Bhim Rao Ambedkar. While Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad attended the Ashoka Jyanti celebration party chief Amit Shah addressed a big public meeting at Gandhi Maidan to mark the start of 125th year of the birth of the Dalit icon.

As April 14 is already a national holiday, according to the principal secretary (cabinet secretariat) Brajesh Mehrotra there would be no additional holiday.

By doing so the Nitish government fell into BJP’s historic trap of ignorance, when there was no political compulsion to do so in the post-poll Bihar.

On the run-up to the Assembly election earlier this year the Bharatiya Janata Party was suddenly reminded about the importance of Emperor Ashoka. By using a Kushwaha outfit and claiming that Ashoka was a Kushwaha the party actually tried to woo Koeris to its side.

But most Indian and international historians, including Romila Thapar and late R S Sharma dispute the claim that Ashoka was a Koeri.

Though many of them are of the view that Ashoka was born around 304 BC there is no record of his exact date of birth.

The BJP’s strategy did not work and Kushwaha votes overwhelmingly went in favour of the grand alliance of the JD(U), RJD and Congress.

When the BJP was celebrating his birthday earlier this year an authority on Mauryan period, Romila Thapar, questioned the very choice of date of the Emperor’s birthday.

Thapar, a Professor Emeritus at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, wrote “Ashoka and Decline of Mauryas” in 1961–– a work based on Ashokan edicts. She had in May last said that not to speak of the birthday, even his exact year of birth is a matter of debate among historians.

On Tuesday (Dec 15) Thapar again expressed surprise over the Bihar government’s decision. “I don’t know how they have calculated and arrived upon this date,” she was quoted in The Telegraph as saying.

Now another scholar on Ancient Indian Studies, Nayanjot Lahiri has raised serious objection over the Bihar government’s move.

“The decision of the Bihar government to declare a state holiday on Ashoka’s birthday amounts to a modern concoction. Ashokaa’s epigraphs, the only written version of events in his lifetime, do not mention either his date of birth or his year of birth,” Lahiri, a Professor of History in Delhi University, was quoted in the Times of India. 

Inventing history by celebrating a fictitious birthday is not the way forward, she further added.

Lahiri, who has recently published a book on “Ashoka in Ancient India” further said: “We don’t know exactly when Ashoka was born that he was born sometime in the cusp of the fourth and third century BCE (c.304 BCE) is certain, but the particular day, month, and year is not known. Very few ancient writers share our modern obsession with recording such events with calendrical exactness, and certainly Ashoka’s scribes cannot be counted in this category.”

“If the Bihar government wishes to honour Ashoka, it is better if they put in more effort in securing and preserving the places associated with him and marked by monuments and epigraphs that he got made. Pataliputra, Ashokaa’s capital may be a good starting point––where salvage archaeology is seriously required for recovering its ancient core”, she said.

If this is the case how is it that first the BJP and now the state government had invented the exact date of Emperor Ashoka’s birthday.

“If this trend continues, in next few years we may see some more such birthdays of ancient heroes coming up––even on the day of national holidays.

But do not forget, both Ashoka and Ambedkar had one thing in common: they both converted to Buddhism.