The Grammar of War

This protocol was my submission for the course Philosophy of War under Prof. Olivier Del Fabbro

I

The Arthaśāstra is a historical text on statecraft from ancient India, whose author, known variously as Kautilya, Chanakya, or Vishnugupta, was a Brahmin strategist traditionally credited as the chief architect behind Chandragupta Maurya’s ascent, the overthrow of the ruling Nanda dynasty at Pataliputra, and the consequent founding of the Mauryan empire around 321 BCE which was the first empire to encompass the majority of the Indian subcontinent.

This empire reached its zenith under the rule of Chandragupta’s grandson, Ashoka, when its territory extended from present-day Pakistan, Afghanistan, and parts of Iran in the west to Bangladesh in the east, and from the natural boundary of the Himalayan foothills in the north to well beyond the Deccan plateau, deep into the southern peninsula. Having won the bloody battle of Kalinga in 261 BCE, Ashoka was so moved by the carnage that he converted to Buddhism and turned towards the Buddhist dhamma-vijay or victory through righteousness rather than arms. It was Ashoka’s patronage that played a foundational role in spreading Buddhism further east into Asia.¹

The Arthaśāstra and Ashoka’s dhammapada embody the two major pillars of Indian political thought: artha, or material advantage (which gives the Arthaśāstra its name), and dharma, or righteous duty. Ashoka’s renunciation of armed conflict in favour of dhamma-vijay stands in sharp contrast to the cold logic of expansion that the Arthaśāstra systematizes. That both traditions emerged under the rule of a single dynasty is itself striking.

While it remains a matter of debate whether Kautilya wrote the entire Arthaśāstra, he is credited with a large part of it, but the text is also believed to have undergone further redaction during the Gupta period (c. 4th–6th century).^{2 3} It was in this same period that Vishakhdatta composed the Sanskrit drama Mudrārākṣasa, which tells of how, through the systematic use of spies, subversion, forgery, and other such methods, Kautilya turned a key minister of the Nanda court to his side. The play stands as a classic illustration of subduing the enemy without fighting.

The Greek world supplies further external corroboration. Alexander of Macedon crossed the river Jhelum in 326 BCE, entering the subcontinent and defeating King Porus.⁴ His exhausted army, however, refused to advance further, and Alexander’s campaign came to an end in the face of the powerful Nanda kings and their elephant armies further east in Northern India. Following Alexander’s death, the Seleucid Empire that succeeded him in West Asia is believed to have entered into a treaty with the Mauryans. Seleucus I Nicator is said to have given his daughter in marriage to Chandragupta, in return for which the latter supplied a fleet of war elephants. The Seleucid ambassador Megasthenes, stationed at Chandragupta’s court in Pataliputra, composed Indika, a description of Mauryan government, society, and caste, of which only fragments survive, preserved largely through quotations in later authors such as Strabo and Arrian.⁵

It is Megasthenes’ account of Pataliputra itself that offers the most striking comparison with Mauryan scale. He describes a fortified city, encircled by a moat and studded with towers and gates, which by some estimates made the Mauryan capital twice the size of Rome under Marcus Aurelius.⁶ Whatever the precision of such a comparison across centuries, it conveys the scale from which the Arthaśāstra’s machinery of governance operated.

II

“An arrow unleashed by an archer may kill a single man or not kill anyone; but a strategy unleashed by a wise man kills even those still in the womb.”

— Kautilya, Arthaśāstra 10.6.51

Kautilya conceives of the state as a union of saptāṅga, or seven constituents, enumerating the limbs of the body politic which are the king, or sovereign (svāmin), the ministers (amātya), the territory and its people (janapada), the fortified city (durga), the treasury (kośa), the army (daṇḍa), and the ally (mitra).⁷ This invites a parallel with Hobbes’s Leviathan, which argues for a sovereign power to prevent humans from reverting to a state of chaos. While Hobbes argues that, to escape a “brutish” existence, rational individuals must enter into a social contract, Kautilya’s body politic is, from the outset, strictly monarchical. However both share the common theme of order giving rise to power.

The Arthaśāstra also offers an account of the geopolitics of the then-known world through its maṇḍala theory, literally, the geometry of enmity.⁸ According to Kautilya, geography is the primary factor determining the natural enemy of a state, which is typically its immediate neighbor (ari), while the enemy’s enemy or the king beyond that neighbor is a natural ally (mitra). The maṇḍala is built upon precisely this alternating pattern of enmity and friendship. This circle is organized around a single ambitious sovereign, the “seeker of conquest” (vijigīṣu), and includes, beyond mere allies and enemies, the “middle king” (madhyama), who is powerful enough to tip the balance of power, and the “neutral king” (udāsīna), who stands apart from the immediate conflict. War, much like in the Clausewitzian purview of “the continuation of politics by other means”, is thus for Kautilya the very mechanism through which political order is created and transformed.

Kautilya’s treatment of neutrality was borrowed into modern Indian polity. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Indian prime minister, built India’s post-independence foreign policy on non-alignment, refusing to enter the Cold War blocs. He partly drew from the idea of Kautilyan neutrality and also praised him in The Discovery of India. The position of power for him arises from the freedom of action. In the 1955 Bandung Conference, Nehru remarked: “Are we, the countries of Asia and Africa, devoid of any positive position except being pro-communist or anti-communist? […] It is most degrading and humiliating to any self-respecting people or nation. It is an intolerable thought to me that the great countries of Asia and Africa should come out of bondage into freedom only to degrade themselves or humiliate themselves in this way.”

Kautilya identifies three forms of war in the Arthaśāstra.^{9 10} The first is open or manifest war (prakāśa yuddha), a pitched battle fought at a particular time and place between massed armies in strategic formations. The second is covert or crooked war (kūṭa yuddha), which includes surprise attacks and the exploitation of the enemy’s moments of weakness. The third, and most unsettling, is silent war (tūṣṇīm yuddha), which encompasses targeted assassinations, poisoning, and the fomenting of sedition and subversion within enemy ranks, all while formal peace is ostensibly maintained. For Kautilya, there is no distinction between peace and war, silent war runs continuously between this ambiguous interface of peace and war between the characters of the maṇḍala.

Open war, in its decisive Clausewitzian sense, is what Kautilya calls “the most righteous”. He dwells on the role of morale, strategic formation, and similar factors in conventional warfare, and treats it as the form of combat with the fewest hidden variables. However, for Kautilya, this remains a last resort.

In his treatment of crooked and silent war Kautilya seems similar to Sun Tzu. That all warfare is based on deception and that the commander has to attack the enemy’s strategy is similar in taste to Kautilya’s preference of winning by other means. But where Sun Tzu’s bloodless victory seems elegant, Kautilya’s version is something else. The assassination and poisoning of enemies, the use of women for seduction and ulterior motives thereafter is mentioned with the same dispassion as city fortifications. There is also an economy of violence. Governing the three forms of war is the doctrine of four upāyas or the four instruments which are arranged in a pedagogical order of escalation. These are sāma (conciliation, persuasion), dāna (gifts, the buying of loyalty), bheda (the sowing of dissension, the splitting of an enemy’s coalition), and daṇḍa (force, the application of the rod). The practices within the three forms of war are the enactment of these upāyas.

A comparison with Machiavelli on the question of moral constraint becomes especially instructive here. For Machiavelli, what mattered was that knowledge be applied according to necessity. The reputation for ruthlessness that is attached to him arises from his frank acceptance that moral rules might be suspended in the service of the republic. For Kautilya, the purpose of war is yogakṣema or the protection of the state’s well-being which is set within the larger aim of attaining cakravartin, or world-sovereign, status. Into this framework, he also folds the idea of dharma, or righteous duty, viewed through his own lens of morality. The wise vijigīṣu is counselled to be content with a defeated king’s submission, not out of mercy, but because a conquered population treated with restraint becomes a strategic asset, while one treated with cruelty rises in revolt.

For Kautilya, peace is not the opposite of war but simply one of its instruments. His sixfold policy (ṣāḍguṇya) treats peace and war as interchangeable moves on the same board, to be selected purely according to the calculus of relative power. The components of the sixfold policy are peace (saṃdhi), open hostility (vigraha), staying quiet (āsana), marching to war (yāna), seeking shelter with a stronger king (saṃśraya), and the dual policy (dvaidhībhāva) of making peace with one power while simultaneously waging war on another. A peace pact concluded from a position of weakness is, on this view, nothing more than a temporary expedient, one to be discarded the moment strength returns.

“The Arthaśāstra’s exhaustive and matter-of-fact catalogue of the imperatives of success led the distinguished twentieth-century political theorist Max Weber to conclude that the Arthaśāstra exemplified “truly radical ‘Machiavellianism’ … compared to it, Machiavelli’s The Prince is harmless.” Unlike Machiavelli, Kautilya exhibits no nostalgia for the virtues of a better age. The only criterion of virtue he would accept was whether his analysis of the road to victory was accurate or not. […] In Kautilya’s counsel, equilibrium, if it ever came about, was the temporary result of an interaction of self-serving motives; it was not, as in European concepts after Westphalia, the strategic aim of foreign policy.”

— Henry Kissinger¹¹

III

Major General Qasem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force until his death in 2020, and General Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the Russian General Staff, are instances of Kautilyan logic applied to the present day. Russia’s “active measures” and Iran’s “non-classical” warfare are silent war by another name. The key observation, made by the historian Charles Bartles, is that “while the West considers these non-military measures as ways of avoiding war, Russia considers these measures as war”:¹² Moscow, Tehran, and ancient Magadha share a common conviction about the conduct of war.

Iran’s reliance on proxy warfare, militias in Syria and Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, and its relationship with Hezbollah in Lebanon, to confront a conventionally stronger adversary in Israel and the United States while preserving deniability, is a close modern realization of bheda, the concept Kautilya describes in Arthaśāstra 7.1.33 as governing the conditions under which an actor should initiate hostilities against an enemy.

Soleimani’s tactics amount to a near-exhaustive deployment of the inventory that Kautilya lays down. The IRGC recruited Shia-sympathetic officials within the Iraqi state and armed militias such as Kataib Hezbollah and Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, waging a campaign of attrition against U.S. forces. After 2011, Soleimani extended this model to Syria, securing Hassan Nasrallah’s commitment of thousands of Hezbollah fighters and assembling a multinational militia force.

Kautilya warns that a conqueror who plunders and alienates a subject population, the lobha-vijayī, as against the restrained dharma-vijayī, turns the gains of victory into the seeds of revolt. Leaked Iranian intelligence reports suggest something close to this outcome. Quds Force-trained Shia militias are recorded as having driven Sunni residents from their homes in Iraq, and from 2019 onward, mass protests against Iranian influence swept across both Iraq and Lebanon.

The “Gerasimov Doctrine”, used to describe Russia’s non-military tactics, has likewise found a place within the doctrine of covert and silent war. The “Minsk conundrum” preceding the 2022 invasion of Ukrainian territory in the Donbas illustrates how Russia used non-state actors to consolidate separatist movements. The Crimean operation of 2014 offers an illustration of covert and silent war as Kautilya or Sun Tzu describe it. Russian special-operations units, disguised as local self-defence militia, seized the Crimean parliament and within roughly two weeks had complete control. Kautilya’s instruments of covert war are deployed here not against an isolated minister but against an entire territorial claim.

The subsequent campaign in the Donbas extended this repertoire. Keeping the conflict frozen allowed Moscow to “stay quiet” (āsana), albeit in a modern form, and to hold an advantage in suspension. Beyond Ukraine, Gerasimov also oversaw the integration of deniable private military companies as pseudo-non-state actors, most prominently the Wagner Group. The Arthaśāstra explains how alongside the hereditary core (maula) of the army, the hired troops (bhṛta) and levies drawn from forest tribes (ātavī) also form the king’s available instruments.¹³ Wagner’s operatives are simply this category’s contemporary descendants.

Soleimani and Gerasimov are united by the same structural condition since each commanded the irregular forces of a state too weak to contemplate open war against its principal rival. With smaller economies and even smaller defense budgets, Russia could no more fight an open war against the American-led order than Iran could against Israel. For both, kūṭa and tūṣṇīm yuddha were not preferences but necessities, something highlighted as the actions of a weaker king within the Arthaśāstra.¹⁴

Despite his brilliance, some blind spots in Kautilya’s framework become apparent in the very case that has illustrated its reach. Kautilya supposed a clean separation between silent and open war, with the former serving as the alternative to the latter. Yet the years of attrition that the IRGC waged through its proxies were precisely what provoked an overt response from Washington in the 2020 strike that killed Soleimani, which prompted Iran to launch a ballistic-missile operation against the U.S. airbase at Al-Asad.¹⁵ Silent war, instead of substituting for open war, manufactured the conditions for it. The second blind spot lies in the saptāṅga model itself, which places the svāmin at the head of the body politic and assumes that decapitating that head ends the body’s capacity for ordered action. Soleimani’s death tested this assumption. Within days, Esmail Qaani had assumed command of the Quds Force, and the network continued largely undisturbed. The Arthaśāstra has no account of the ideological ties that can bind a body politic.

The first of these two blind spots reappears now, at far greater scale, just five years after Soleimani’s death. In June 2025, Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure opened twelve days of direct conventional war, drawing in American strikes before a fragile ceasefire took hold. The network that the IRGC had built proved unable to alter the course of the war it was meant to make unnecessary. It is important to consider that alliances within the maṇḍala are creatures of interest rather than loyalty.

Another important consideration is the absence of any audience beyond this maṇḍala of rival kings. Kautilya is not far off the mark in his assumption that the (modern) world knows little of stable peace, and in an age of unending, multi-domain competition, every interval of calm is another front for calculation. The Arthaśāstra does not consider and does not have an equivalent of how during the Twelve-Day War, governments split into camps of condemnation, calls for restraint, and open support. A state that wages silent war today does so under the gaze of a global public and within an international order, however imperfectly enforced, of norms, sanctions, and reputational cost. The Arthaśāstra offers no calculus for any of this.

Kautilya offers one of the most complete grammars for understanding war. It is as systematic as Sun Tzu, and more ruthless than Machiavelli. Its integration of war and statecraft is perhaps more thorough than Clausewitz’s. Even with its faults, the theory stands the test of time in explaining modern conflicts like the Twelve-Day War and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But just as the treatise itself ends in flaws, so too did the empire that gave it birth. The state that had perfected the art of war turned away, under Ashoka’s conquest of Kalinga, from the very instruments that had built its glory.