Tag chanakya

Indian traditional wisdom on intelligence gathering for internal security – Neha Gupta

VOI

Chanakya & Chandragupta Maurya

Ancient Indian wisdom reveals that internal security was never viewed merely in terms of coercion or military strength, but rather as dependent upon informed governance, economic resilience, effective diplomacy and responsiveness to public grievances. – Neha Gupta

Over two millennia ago, long before the digital age of encryption and satellite surveillance, the foundations of sophisticated intelligence systems were laid in ancient India. From Kautilya’s clinical analysis in the Arthashastra to the pragmatic diplomacy of Tiruvalluvar’s Tirukkural, statecraft was viewed as a rigorous science in which information served as a vital instrument of power. These ancient texts discuss espionage, diplomacy, and governance in ways that continue to resonate in the modern era of strategic competition and information warfare.

Kautilya, in his Arthashastra, described a sophisticated intelligence system comparable to a modern secret service, a crucial instrument of power. Secret agents (gudha purusa) were broadly divided into stationary and mobile spies. While stationary agents reported to the ruler’s chancellor, the most sensitive intelligence operations were directly supervised by the ruler himself. These stationary agents included civil servants who did routine surveillance, ascetics with religious covers, spies posing as astrologers, bankrupt farmers, artisans and merchants who monitored neighbours and customers, among others. Mobile agents, i.e., intellectually sharp female agents who infiltrated wealthy homes, artists and servants who used poison to kill, assisted elite intelligence officers reporting to the ruler personally. Espionage was directed not only against enemy states but also against ally and neutral states, for example, placing secret informants at their courts.

Hence, detailed categories of people encompassing nearly all social groups operated in various locations as spies to avoid suspicion, including children when necessary. This vast network of secret agents and informants collected information about treasonable activities, corruption, serious crime, popular mood and acted as ‘secret police’. Kautilya advocates techniques such as secret agents infiltrating enemy camps to spread disinformation often as “divine proclamations” to create fragmentation within the enemy’s hierarchy or to declare fictitious triumphs to inspire their own troops, using deception to propagate disunity amongst internal rivals by inducing a ruler’s second or third son to attempt a revolution against their own family, tracing and unmasking of enemy agents, turning exposed enemy agents into double agents rather than discharging them, employing trained killers for covert assassinations and extra-judicial killings disguised as accident, normal crime, or natural death and staging political public relations to influence public opinion.

If the secret service detects legitimate public grievances or growing anger among sections of the population, Kautilya argues that the state must first address their root causes before resorting to repression. Arthashastra looks at the ruler’s duty to secure and expand public welfare as inseparable from the strength of the state. The secret service therefore functions not merely as an instrument of surveillance, but as an “early warning system” that alerts the ruler to social discontent and policy failures, enabling timely corrective action. Kautilya also insists that statecraft must rest on empirical data and scientific knowledge grounded in reality, rejecting magic, astrology, prophecy, or impulse. He further considers a strong economic base essential to internal stability and security. Enhancing agriculture, production, trade and tax revenue was therefore central to state power. He warns that a weak state leads to matsya-nyaya, the “law of the fishes,” where the strong prey upon the weak, both within society and in interstate relations.

The Arthashastra has discussed four methods of statecraft (upayas) that predate it within the Indian traditional wisdom, in the order: saam (peaceful conciliation), daam (enticement or bribery), dand (force or punishment), bhed (division or sowing discord) for diplomatic relations. The Tirukkural (Kural) by Tiruvalluvar also considers diplomacy essential to maintaining stable inter-state relations. Tiruvalluvar emphasises that ministers and ambassadors must be skilled in statecraft, knowledgeable about world affairs, and capable of making prompt and impartial decisions. He also highlights the importance of persuasive and fearless communication in foreign courts. In matters of diplomacy, the Kural often adopts a pragmatic approach, advising rulers to reconcile with stronger powers while acting firmly against weaker adversaries.

Echoing the Kautilyan principle of dvaidibhav (dual policy), Verse 875 advises that a ruler helpless against two foes should secure one as an ally to help against the other. Verse 679 further suggests to secure alliances with the enemies of one’s enemies than to focus solely on existing friends.

Kautilya’s views on intelligence encompasses not just information collection and analysis, but also counterintelligence, i.e., manipulating the espionage picture of one’s own state for the enemy in one’s favour. He prioritises covert means such as subversion, sabotage and targeted operations over conventional wars that cause great human and material losses. Kautilya may seldom be cited explicitly in India’s strategic discourse, but his influence remains deeply embedded. Mahatma Gandhi’s preference for non-violent resistance can be seen through a Kautilyan lens of realism, choosing methods that weaken a stronger adversary without incurring unsustainable costs like a traditional war.

Kamandaka’s Nitisara (Nitishastra) also advises against frequent warfare due to its destructive consequences. At the same time, he stresses the importance of safeguarding state secrets while systematically probing an adversary’s vulnerabilities, an early articulation of what is today called information asymmetry. His intelligence framework is broad, extending even to monitoring weather, disasters and epidemics that could affect state stability.

The relevance of these ideas has remained unaltered through the ages. Intelligence agencies today continue to strive hard as agents not only of security but of strategic foresight—anticipating and pre-empting threats, preventing mishaps, shaping outcomes and protecting the nation from all kinds of threats—internal and external. Ancient Indian wisdom reveals that internal security was never viewed merely in terms of coercion or military strength, but rather as dependent upon informed governance, economic resilience, effective diplomacy and responsiveness to public grievances. In an age increasingly shaped by covert influence and hybrid threats, the above principles of intelligence continue to hold good for all times to come. – The Pioneer, 4 July 2026

› Neha Gupta is Junior Research Fellow at Bharat Ki Soch.

Thiruvalluvar

Chanakya: Why Devdutt Pattanaik’s pseudo-history falls apart – Prosenjit Nath

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Chanakya & Chandragupta Maurya

Chanakya was real, brilliant, and indispensable to India’s civilisational memory, no matter how inconvenient that fact may be for the modern political fantasist Devdutt Pattanaik. – Dr. Prosenjit Nath

I read Devdutt Pattanaik’s article “A fantasy called Chanakya” in The New Indian Express (9 Nov. 2025). Had Chanakya himself been alive, Pattanaik’s fantasies would have survived about as long as the kusa grass Chanakya famously uprooted when he vowed to destroy the Nandas. Beneath the polished prose and familiar rhetoric lies an old ideological trick: confuse the reader with multiple names, shout “interpolation” often enough, wrap it all in modern caste politics, and hope a historical figure vanishes.

But history does not work that way. The moment one actually looks at primary sources, Pattanaik’s thesis collapses flat.

Let us begin precisely where he does not want readers to look: the Arthaśāstra itself. The text explicitly identifies its author in unmistakable terms: “विष्णुगुप्तेन आर्यकौटिल्येन च सम्पादितम्”—compiled by Viśnugupta, the noble Kautilya. And again: “समाप्तं कौटिलीयम् अर्थशास्त्रम्”—here ends the Arthaśāstra of Kautilya.

Pattanaik’s sleight of hand rests on manufacturing two doubts. First that since the author is called “Kautilya”, Chanakya must be fictional. Second, that if the Arthaśāstra can be pushed centuries later, Chanakya cannot belong to the Mauryan age or guide Chandragupta Maurya. Both doubts evaporate the moment chronology is taken seriously.

Ashoka’s edicts from the 3rd century BCE describe an empire run through mahamatras, welfare officials, judicial ethics, administrative surveillance, animal-protection days, and moral governance—all core elements laid out systematically in the Arthaśāstra. The Mauryan state cannot be built on a Kautilyan framework if that framework supposedly did not exist until 500 CE. The empire itself is the evidence. Kautilya must predate Ashoka, exactly as tradition maintains—at least the late 4th century BCE.

Then comes the Spitzer Manuscript, the oldest known Sanskrit manuscript (1st–2nd century CE), which contains unmistakable references to the Arthaśāstra. Its discovery location is devastating for Pattanaik’s narrative: a Buddhist monastery in Kizil, Xinjiang—thousands of kilometres from any imagined “Brahmin power structure”. Why would Buddhist monks preserve and study a supposedly late “Brahminical propaganda text”? They would not, unless the text was already ancient, authoritative, and indispensable. This single fact shatters the claim that Kautilya was invented centuries later.

But the knockout punch arrives with the Kāmandakīya Nītiśāra (4th century CE), authored by the Buddhist scholar Kāmandaki. He explicitly and admiringly states that Viśnugupta/Kautilya—the author of the Arthaśāstra—was the very strategist who overthrew the Nandas and established Chandragupta Maurya. This is not a Hindu text, nor a Brahminical self-glorification exercise. A Buddhist intellectual, with no incentive to mythologise a Brahmin minister, identifies Kautilya and Chanakya as the same revolutionary statesman. That is the missing bridge Pattanaik refuses to acknowledge.

The convergence does not stop there. Buddhist sources such as the Mahāvaṃsa and Divyāvadāna describe Chandragupta’s Brahmin mentor. Jain texts like the Nisītha-Cūrṇi and Hemacandra’s Pariśiṣṭaparvan narrate the same overthrow of the Nandas by Chanakya for Chandragupta. Gupta-era dramas like Mudrārākṣasa assume the identity of Kautilya and Chanakya is already common knowledge. Kashmiri traditions such as the Tantrākhyāyikā immortalise Chanakya as the archetype of political genius. Across Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, and regional traditions—often rivals, sometimes hostile—the same man performs the same acts under different names. That is not myth-making; it is historical convergence, the strongest form of evidence when dealing with antiquity.

Pattanaik makes much of multiple names, as if this were suspicious. It is not. In the ancient world, it was normal. Confucius was also Kong Qiu, Kongzi, and Zhongni. In India, Viśnugupta is the personal name, Kautilya the gotra or scholastic name, and Chanakya the patronymic. One man. Many names. Total consistency. Claiming otherwise is like arguing that Zhongni disproves Confucius.

The remaining tactics are equally flimsy. References to “China” and Roman dināra are used to push the Arthaśāstra centuries forward. Yet scholars like K.P. Jayaswal showed long ago that “Cina” refers to the Sina/Shina Himalayan region near Gilgit, not Han China—hence terms like kauseya and cinapatta, which are not Chinese words. Later interpolations do exist, just as they do in Homer, Euclid, or the Pentateuch. No serious scholar claims interpolations prove the author never existed. Pattanaik deploys this argument selectively because he needs the text to be late to sever it from Chanakya.

Finally, the caste obsession collapses entirely. The earliest sources identifying Chanakya as a Brahmin are Buddhist and Jain traditions—historically critical of Brahmin authority. If “Brahmins invented Chanakya”, why do rival traditions independently preserve the same identity centuries earlier? Because they were transmitting historical memory, not manufacturing propaganda.

To be clear: Chanakya, Kautilya, and Viśnugupta are not three different people. They are three traditional names for one historical genius—the architect of the Mauryan Empire. When multiple competing traditions over two millennia remember the same man overthrowing the same dynasty for the same emperor, coincidence becomes absurd. History, in this case, is unanimous.

Devdutt Pattanaik’s article is not courageous scholarship. It is ideological provocation dressed up as history—a soggy biscuit of pseudo-academia that dissolves the moment primary sources are allowed to speak. And they speak loudly: Chanakya was real, brilliant, and indispensable to India’s civilisational memory, no matter how inconvenient that fact may be for modern political fantasies. – News18, 1 January 2026

› Prosenjit Nath is a technocrat, political analyst, and author. He writes on national, geopolitical, and social issues.

A Fantasy Called Chanakya by Devdutt Pattanaik