भयाद्रणादुपरतं मंस्यन्ते त्वां महारथाः।येषां च त्वं बहुमतो भूत्वा यास्यसि लाघवम्॥
bhayād raṇād uparataṃ mansyante tvāṃ mahā-rathāḥyeṣāṃ ca tvaṃ bahu-mato bhūtvā yāsyasi lāghavam
Word by word
The verse says
The great warriors will think you left the field out of fear. They thought highly of you. You will become small in their eyes.
In plain words
Krishna names the specific humiliation.
The men whose opinion Arjuna actually cares about will not think he was merciful. They will think he was frightened.
And the last phrase is precise: you will become light - lāghavam. Not hated. Diminished.
Where you've felt this · at work
Your firm asks you to sign off on something you believe is wrong. You refuse, and you resign instead. Nobody reads it as principle - they assume you could not keep up. Explaining afterwards only makes it worse, because explaining is exactly what a man who could not keep up would do.
Going deeper
This is the cruellest verse in Krishna's argument, and it is aimed with precision.
Arjuna's refusal is genuinely about compassion. Krishna is pointing out that it will not be legible as compassion to anyone watching. From outside, a great archer who sits down before a battle looks like exactly one thing.
Notice who is named: mahā-rathāḥ, the great chariot-warriors. Not the general public. Bhishma. Drona. Karna. The men Arjuna has spent his life measuring himself against, and several of them the men he is refusing to kill.
So the shape of it is this. The people he will not fight out of love will conclude he was a coward. His mercy and his disgrace have the same address.
That is a genuine feature of the situation, not a rhetorical trick. There are acts of conscience that cannot be read correctly by anyone, and the person doing them has to accept being misread.
Krishna is asking whether Arjuna's compassion can survive not being recognised. It is a fair question, and the Gita will eventually answer it - but not by making the recognition arrive.