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History Optional PYQ Master Pack · Model answer

Explain how Ashoka used religion as a tool of political aggrandizement?

  • UPSC 2019
  • Mauryan Empire

Dhamma, the Prakritised form of dharma, was the moral code Ashoka propagated through edicts inscribed on rocks and pillars. Framed in the language of ethics — compassion, non-violence, respect for elders — a substantial body of historical opinion reads it as something more calculated than piety alone.

You are reading the opening of the model answer. The full answer is part of the History Optional PYQ Master Pack.

What the full answer covers

  • Nilakantha Shastri's Ethical Baseline
  • Thapar's Political-Consolidation Reading
  • Bongard-Levin: Pacifying Labour, Consolidating the State
  • The Heterogeneous Empire and the Need for a Unifying Ideology
  • Dhamma-Vijaya: Conquest Reimagined as Diplomacy
  • Dhamma Yatra and Religious Toleration as Statecraft
  • …and 1 more sections, with a conclusion

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