Stick to the basics ... With Love, from Chankya

Three disclaimer before you read this long post..

a) I am not an international relations expert. These thoughts at best should be taken as that of an amateur enthusiast.

b) I have not read the book referred to here in this article but all the references here are based on publicly available information on blogs and expert interviews.

c) bit odd it may sound, but I am writing this in English just to ensure its reach to a particular section of people who need to read this but aren't very much comfortable in Hindi. I will try to come up with a Hindi translation of this text given the time available. So here we go..

As our ancient texts says there are four aspects of human life.. Dharm, Arth, Kaam and Moksha. People in India are somewhat aware of our Dharm shashtras. They somewhat know what good bad evil traits are, What is permitted as moral behaviour and what is Paap and what is Punya. Since Moksha is not for common men, it is not even expected that a common man will know about Moksha. Thats a niche area and only sages are expected to know that.

Sad part is our ignorance towards shashtras related to Arth and Kaam. Situation is that we learn about Kaamsutra, our text around Kaam, from a semi porn erotic movie and rest of the our public knowledge comes from some pulp magazines hidden in our closets. Most of the our young generation think Of kaamsutra as an erotic text like Playboy. But thats a topic for some other day.. Let us talk about the remaining aspect Arth and our ancient text around it named Arthshastra.

Year 1905, a Tamil brahmin in Tanjavur presents an ancient text written over palm leaves to Mysore orient library. Librarian identifies the text as Arthshastra by Kautilya, assumed lost since Gupta period. It is published in 1907 and its first English translation is published in 1915. There are 17 versions of Arthshastra, most reliable one written by Kautilya, prime minister of Chandragupta Maurya and Bindusara. These scriptures were written by a person who had the idea, created the plan and ensured successful execution to establish the biggest empire known to us with secure borders and happy people. Till this person was alive, no foreign power could put their little toe our land Bharatvarsh.

Today when we are surrounded by hostile neighborhood and at the time of writing this article at least 20 of our finest men have martyred in Ladakh, it is natural to think what is wrong with our foreign policy or international relations.

Though this Arthshastra was discovered 42 years before we got our independence, why it was not referred to while forming our foreign policy. Why Arthshastra is not taught in our universities from where our burocrates come who form our foreign policy. Why do we base our foreign policy on western principles which has given us colonialism, 2 world wars, cold wars and such a divided world. Answer lies in a our own inferiority complex and a western imposed morality. Just because Arthshastra mentions and does not protest Varna system, it was considered to be an medieval text and discarded. Its a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We could have easily retained the principles of international relations to form the basis of our foreign policy, and then, may be we wouldn't have faced what we are facing now.

Arthshastra details everything about relationship between states, internal administration, espionage, bureaucracy and even land reforms. Many of these topics are not even mentioned by Machiavelli whom we consider the father of political science. Most of our generation, almost complete political leadership and also writer of this article are unaware of Kautilya and his writings. Whole Arthshastra deals with only two themes ' Yogakshem' and 'Raksham', i.e. welfare and security of people. As shown by Covid and China aggression, it seems we struggle miserably on both fronts.

Atmnirnbhar Bharat cannot happen unless we look deep inside our knowledge treasures and learn from them. Borrowed and copied knowledge and its incompatible application to our state policies has brought us where we stand today.

As we often see in cricket, when any team struggle in a tough match, coach shouts.. stick to the basics.. In case of India also, we need to first learn our basics which we have ignored, forgotten and are somewhat ashamed of and then stick to it. Then only we are worthy of calling ourselves descendants of Chanakya. Once we do that that, it will be the real master-stroke.