In 326 BCE (Before the Common Era/ Current Era), Alexander of Macedon invaded India, and in alliance with three Indian kings In Punjab, established an Indo-Greek empire in the country’s northwest. It was history’s shortest lived empire. “Seven years later all trace of Macedonian authority had already disappeared from India,” wrote historian Will Durant in Story of Civilisation. The chief agents of its removal were Chandragupta Maurya and his strategist Chanakya who began the conquest of India by assassinating two Greek governors, Nicanor and Philippus.
According to historian Radha Kumud Mookerji, “The assassinations of the Greek governors are not to be looked upon as mere accidents.” By killing the two leading Greeks in India, Chandragupta and Chanakya took Punjab and Sindh without much fighting. Later Chandragupta conquered Afghanistan after defeating Seleucus Nicator, who had inherited Alexander’s conquests in Asia. In this way, Chandragupta founded the Mauryan Dynasty and – mentored by Chanakya – succeeded in bringing together almost all of the Indian subcontinent under one rule. As a result, Chandragupta is considered the first unifier of India and the first genuine emperor of India.
The Mauryan Empire was, and still is, astonishing. With a population of about 50 million people, it was larger than the Mughal Empire 2,000 years later and even larger than the British Empire in India, extending in fact all the way to the border of Persia and from Afghanistan to Bengal.
An examination of the departmental details of the Mauryan Empire indicates not only a high level of bureaucracy but also a certain concern for the quality of life of the ordinary people. This makes it unique among all great empires in history which were mostly ruler-oriented and existed solely for the pleasure of the elites while exploiting the vast majority of the population.
The Mauryans had arguably the finest system of governance in India’s recorded history. According to Durant – Akbar, the greatest of the Mughals, “had nothing like it, and it may be doubted if any of the ancient Greeks cities were better organised”. “Pataliputra (the capital) in the fourth century BCE seems to have been a thoroughly well-organised city, and administered according to the best principles of social science.”
Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to India, attests to the fine-tuned civic administration of the Mauryan Empire. Chandragupta’s government was organised into departments with well-defined duties and a carefully graded hierarchy of officials, managing respectively revenue, customs, frontiers, passports, communications, excise, mines, agriculture, cattle, commerce, warehouses, navigation, forests, public games, prostitution and the mint.
The state attended to sanitation and public health, maintained hospitals and poor-relief stations, distributed in famine years the food kept in state warehouses for such emergencies, forced the rich to contribute to the assistance of the destitute, and organised great public works to care for the unemployed in depression years. “The perfection of the arrangements thus indicated,” says historian Vincent Smith, “is astonishing, even when exhibited in outline. Examination of the departmental details increases our wonder that such an organisation could have been planned and efficiently operated in India in 300 BCE.”
Chaos vs order
Modern India has two choices. First, it can stumble and plodder towards chaos with numerous enemies such as communists, Maoists, radical Islamists, fundamentalist Christians, seculars, liberals and urban naxals working tirelesly to pull it down. These traitors are leading the nationwide riots against the Citizenship Amendment Bill; they are backing the radicalised criminals setting up Shaheen Baghs on public roads; they are the ones secretly working for China, Pakistan and other powers.
The second choice is the Mauryan model. While this model will be violently opposed by the aforementioned groups because it will basically castrate their power, it is a more attractive option for 99 per cent of Indians who are frustrated by the daily strikes, rallies by political parties which throw life out of gear, all too frequent riots by Muslims who then claim victimhood, and the media that almost always blames Hindus as intolerant.
For the Mauryan model to work, the flawed, chaotic and irresponsible – and almost lawless – democracy that has been foisted around India’s neck must go. The Mauryan system of governance, a forerunner of the Singapore-style benign dictatorship, was a benevolent autocracy that depended upon military force and widespread intelligence gathering to establish order. The government made no pretence to democracy, and was probably the most efficient that India has ever had.
In his role as minister, Chanakya played a leading role in assembling and administering this large empire. Using the pen name Kautilya (meaning crooked), Chanakya wrote the iconic treatise Arthashastra (the Science of Political Economy) in which he compiled his observations of statecraft based on this experience.
In a paper for the New Delhi-based Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MPIDSA) Dr Michael Liebig, is Fellow and Lecturer, Department of Political Science, South Asia Institute (SAI), Heidelberg University, explains that the Arthashastra is a prescriptive text that lays out rules and norms for successfully running a state and conducting international relations. “Its cardinal virtue is realpolitik, which emphasises the state’s self-interests and security above all else. Internally, the Kautilyan secret service is used for comprehensive surveillance of the people and the elites, especially within the state apparatus. There is a dense network of stationary and mobile secret agents and informants collecting information about treasonous activities, corruption, serious crime and the popular mood.”
Eliminating internal enemies
In addition, the secret service acts as a ‘secret police’ with executive powers and engages in various forms of active measures as listed in the Arthashastra:
1. Tracking down suspected treasonable individuals and groups, infiltrating and manipulating them. This strategy is especially necessary against the urban naxals who have grown deep roots in India’s colleges and universities and are poisoning young minds against the nation and its values. Indian journalists in the pay of foreign intelligence agencies can be easily ferreted out using technology and humint – human intelligence or spies.
2. Tracing corruption, embezzlement and abuse of office in the state apparatus, including ‘sting operations’. To some extent this has already started under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In 2014, days after he came to power, one of his ministers was (against Modi’s directive) meeting an industrialist at Delhi’s Imperial Hotel. Within seconds of sitting down with the businessman, the minister received a call on his mobile from the PMO as to what he was doing at the Imperial. The minister ran out of the hotel faster than a bat out of hell.
3. Silent liquidation of enemies of the state, whose extra-judicial killing is disguised as accident, normal crime or natural death. Sometime in spring 1994, a new chief was appointed as the head of a leading Indian intelligence agency; the following day an employee of that organisation was found crushed to death in a lift in the agency’s headquarters in Delhi. It may or may not be related to the employee being a traitor, but you get the point. Extra-judicial elimination of traitors.
4. Staging public relations (PR) operations to influence public opinion. Both the US and Russia are experts at this. During the Cold War, the US backed artists such Jackson Pollock, a leading figure of the abstract expressionist movement, to devalue socialist realism. Defector Stanislav Lunev revealed that Russia “helped to fund just about every antiwar movement and organisation in America and abroad”, and that during the Vietnam War the Russians gave US$1 billion to American anti-war movements, more than it gave to the VietCong. India needs to create and fund media outfits that will influence public opinion around the world.
5. Counter-espionage, including the use of double agents, and operations against foreign subversion and sabotage.
External security
Internal enemies are almost always bolstered by foreign foes. For instance, the Maoists, the communist CPM and naxals were backed by China; the communist CPI was backed by the USSR and the Khalistanis and Kashmiri Muslim terrorists are Pakistan’s creations. Similarly, the large number of journalists and NGOs who openly support Pakistan and China may be doing it for reasons of ideology but they are just as likely to be on the enemy’s payrolls. These internal enemies are like termites, who eat away at the nation’s vitals and destroy it from within. In this backdrop, the countries that back them must be dealt with in an appropriate and timely manner.
According to Chanakya, the external security agencies have two prime tasks: collecting information about foreign states, whether friendly, hostile or neutral; and covert actions against adversary states. The activities include:
1. Information gathering on the political, military and economic situation in order to identify strengths and weaknesses and political intentions. Of paramount importance is the identification of political factions, conspiracies and popular discontent. This is done by secret agents operating in a foreign country and by the recruitment of local informants.
2. Diplomatic personnel in foreign countries must collect information, recruit agents of influence and participate in subversive operations – independently and in collaboration with secret agents operating in the host country.
3. Whenever political tensions and instability are ascertained, the secret service should use local agents of influence to exacerbate tensions and give covert support to treasonous persons and groups as to further weaken and discredit the established governance. Political figures, who stand in the way of one’s own interests should be targeted for (covert) assassinations.
4. If an armed conflict looms, the secret service should weaken the will to fight of the leadership and people as well as the combat power of the armed forces through sabotage operations, ‘psychological warfare’ and covert assassinations of key political and/or military leaders.
Prime dharma: Pursuit of wealth
Prosperity is the foremost goal of all rulers. For the first time in post-independence India, Prime Minister Modi has focussed on wealth creation. This is in marked contrast to previous governments which were politicking instead of putting money in people’s pockets.
According to the late American political theorist Roger Boesche, beyond protecting the kingdom, the king who uses Chanakya’s science can bring to himself and his subjects the three goods of life – material gain, spiritual good and pleasures. Wealth is the key to raising successful armies and having a peaceful and just kingdom, and Chanakya’s political science brings wealth. He cites Chanakya: “The source of the livelihood of men is wealth, in other words, the earth inhabited by men. The science which is the means of the attainment and protection of that earth is the Science of Politics.” Put another way, the Arthashastra is the greatest weapon a king can have, and political science is more important than – or at least brings about – wealth, armies and conquests.
Nothing comes cheap
Used to the easy urban life, completely oblivious to the threats faced by India, and callously apathetic towards the long-suffering Indian people, the leftists and seculars will reject the Mauryan model as a totalitarian dictatorship. But those fears are a reflection of what they will do to the average law-abiding Indian if these champagne socialists come to power and establish a Maoist or Leninist government in India.
Boesche asked rhetorically, “Were the harsh actions Chanakya often recommended necessary for the common good of India? Did Chandragupta and (his son) Bindusara have to act in a violent and sometimes brutal fashion to defend India, bring order, and establish unity?”
The fact is that with the old order crumbling, with the Nanda kings (almost a carbon copy of the Gandhis) having proved cruel and inept, with enemies on India’s borders, and with the threat of anarchy within, Chanakya’s harsh measures were necessary. According to Indian historians, there was simply no alternative. Bhasker Anand Saletore says such actions were justified in view of the “nature of the times in which he lived”. In defence of Chandragupta and Chanakya, historian Purushottam Bhargava writes, “All kinds of means might have been considered necessary to restore peace with honour.”
With synchronised jehadi and Maoist attacks supported by the left-liberal ecosystem threatening to overwhelm the Indian nation state, a chaotic democracy may prove suicidal in the long run. India needs several decades of good governance free of elections so that its economic heft and military might both become impregnable for its enemies to overcome. This is why more than 2,300 years later, the Mauryan Model continues to be relevant.
The author is a New Zealand based defence analyst. His work has been quoted extensively by leading Think Tanks, Universities and Publications world wide. The views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Raksha Anirveda.