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protecting his dharma he earned that disgrace that the society has still not been able
to forgive. Every act of dharma raj Yudhishthir is for the protection of dharma.
Dhritarashtra is the only person who could have stopped the game. But he simply
doesn't have the spine to make his own decisions, or stick to them when he does
make them. He puts all of that off onto his son. Rather than guiding his son by being
a moral example, he subtly encourages his son by lack of response to terrible
actions. Dhritarashtra is one of those characters who is so incabable of morality (good
or bad) that he'll put himself as far away from it as possible, by rationalizing or
avoding poor decisions,
The problem was that Vidura was powerless. He can merely advise, exhort, and plead
with the blind Dhritarashtra who, obsessed by his desire that the throne must be his
son Duryodhana’s, is deaf to all appeals. In the very beginning of the epic we are told
that the Kauravas are a giant tree of passion whose root is the weak-minded
Dhritarashtra. Its seed is infatuation; its branches are anger and pride rooted in
ignorance. Or even pretending he doesn't understand it at all.
Bhishma’s failure as a leader of the polity lies in his never having practiced the rajadharma
he speaks of at length to Yudhishthira on his bed-of-arrows which seems to
become his penance for inaction. In a Kshatriya the “witness” stance only brings
about the destruction of the policy. The Kshatriya must use power to protect the
rights of the weak, for that is his dharma, the truth of his nature. To abjure this
because of a self-imposed vow and turn into the “egotistical sublime” of the age
brings destruction and misery in its wake not only for oneself, but also for the entire
society of which such a person is the corner stone, the pillar of strength.
Karna might appear to be nobility and generosity personified, but actually he is eating
his heart out in envy and every act of his is triggered by a sense of deeply injured
merit, a hyper-sensitivity about his low caste, which goes so far as to drive him to bid
a princess to be stripped in public and to term her a prostitute.
The question would be asked "Why did Bhishma, Dronacharya, and Vidura not desert
the evil company of king Dhritarashtra and join the Pandavas?" The answer is given
by Bhishma himself. He had vowed to remain loyal to the throne of Hastinapur
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