KAUTILYA AND INDIA’S
MODERN WARS
Kautilya, also known as Chanakya and Vishnugupta, was a master strategist who was well-versed in the Vedas (Hindu religious texts) and adept at creating
intrigues and devising political stratagems.
– L.N. RANGARAJAN
KAUTILYA AND INDIA’S MODERN WARS
As I crossed the finish line, I wondered how Kautilya, India’s master strategist of ancient times, would have assessed the manner in which India conducted itself during all its wars and conflicts after Independence. Despite India’s spectacular success in 1971, he would have been largely critical, I reckoned. Nevertheless, I thought it would be worthwhile to benchmark how a fledgling modern state prosecuted war and statecraft against some of the principles and templates of war postulated by him around two thousand years ago.
For the uninitiated, Kautilya was said to be a key advisor or minister in the court of Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the powerful Maurya Dynasty which ruled India between 322 and 185 BC. Kautilya’s claim to fame rests on a series of texts that are believed to have been initiated by him on statecraft under the title Arthashastra. The treatise covers the entire range of strategies, policies, tenets of leadership and governance which a king must follow to ensure that his subjects get to live in a prosperous and secure nation state. Not revered in India as much as Confucius and Sun Tzu are in China, or Clausewitz and Machiavelli in the West, Kautilya is the closest that any Indian strategist has come to
propounding realpolitik and understanding military organisations and war as key tools of statecraft. His work seemed to have disappeared for a long time in a patchwork conglomerate of states that India was in the Middle Ages – a fragmented polity that seemed to have reconciled to being dominated by invaders and colonists like the Mughals and the British for almost six centuries.
It re-emerged in the early part of the twentieth century in the sleepy south Indian town of Mysore where Shama Sastry, a Sanskrit scholar, set about translating a parchment that was given to him by a fellow scholar. When this patchwork called India finally did attain Independence, it did so by waging war of a different kind on its colonial masters – a war that was based on satyagraha and ahimsa, and not on structured violence that the world commonly known as war. Interestingly, Nehru’s dilemmas about the manner in which independent India would conduct statecraft seem to have deepened after he read Shama Sastry’s translation of Arthashastra; the ruthless wielding of power and The overwhelming dominance of the state over the individual seems to have disturbed him. These dilemmas were then articulated by him in a series of essays written in the 1930s under the pseudonym of Chanakya, which clearly indicated his discomfort with the realpolitik of Kautilya.
Though a number of researchers have indicated that India’s post-Independence obsession with idealism, liberalism and morality as the main pillars of statecraft meant that Kautilya was consigned to the periphery of strategic thinking, one of his few supporters was K.P.S. Menon, independent India’s first foreign secretary. He once noted in 1947 that ‘realism of Kautilya is a useful corrective to our idealism in international politics’.
As a result of independent India’s rather pacifist strategic orientation, war as a proactive tool of statecraft remained a peripheral tool for decades till Indira Gandhi discovered its importance in 1971. Understanding war as more than mere combat – as a complex and interconnected set of activities across layers of human interaction – Kautilya looked at hard power as exercised by the military as an important element of statecraft.
Its effectiveness, however, depended on the manner in which the king used it along with diplomacy and covert operations. Avoidance of war, according to Kautilya, was the ultimate test of the efficiency of a king and his army. I guess they call it deterrence these days! Let us look at a few critical principles of employment of the military as proffered by Kautilya and see whether India’s military has looked at them with some seriousness. I have heard of seminars being conducted from time to time on the relevance of Kautilya in modern statecraft, but very rarely has there been any critical dissection of Indian statecraft in the Nehruvian era against Kautilyan principles of hard-nosed realpolitik. This was only natural because the liberal and the altruistic flavour of modern Indian democracy did not see eye to eye with it. Many of the principles of Arthashastra support what we could call today enlightened autocracy. However, much of his treatise also endorses the sustenance of a disciplined democracy, the likes of which have sprung up in countries like Singapore and Switzerland. But that is straying from the military dimension of Arthashastra.
IMPORTANT SOURCES
The primary source of my offering is the book Kautilya: The Arthashastra, edited, rearranged, translated and introduced by L.N. Rangarajan, a diplomat and scholar of the highest pedigree. It is a difficult read, but instructive and illuminating, as one grapples with the subtle nuances of statecraft in an era long gone by. Some military tenets that I felt were relevant to modern warfare as experienced by the Indian armed forces in recent times are discussed in subsequent paragraphs. Two other excellent papers on Kautilyan thought have proved to be immensely helpful. The first is a well-written dissertation on Kautilyan strategy by Wing Commander Vinay Vittal (now group captain) for his master’s degree at the School for Advanced Air and Space Power Studies, United States Air Force Academy. The second paper is a robust academic piece in the Journal of Military History, January 2003, by Professor Roger Boesche, a professor of politics and history in the US, entitled ‘Kautilya’s Arthashastra on War and Diplomacy in Ancient India’.
Both these studies do not refer to any of India’s modern conflicts and address only Kautilya’s thoughts. The following paragraphs attempt to benchmark much of what has happened in contemporary Indian military history against some of his ancient tenets.
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