Kautilya’s Arthashastra : The World’s First Fully Organized Surveillance System

The Arthashastra was the first book anywhere in the world to call for the establishment of a professional intelligence service. It has traditionally been attributed to Kautilya (also known as Chanakya), one of the chief advisers to King Chandragupta Maurya (317–293BC). He was the founder of the Mauryan dynasty, who halted the advance of Alexander the Great’s successors and became the first ruler to unite the Indian subcontinent. It was produced at about the same time as The Art of War, though its authorship is controversial. The book has discussed in enormous detail the recruitment, uses and twenty-nine main cover occupations (with fifty sub-types) of a huge network of spies at home and abroad. The network was such a high priority that the King was told to take personal charge of it.

Royal Day was to be divided into 8 periods of one and a half hours each, during which intelligence was assigned a higher priority than in almost any other surviving timetable of a world leader. One and a half hours after midday were to be devoted to writing correspondence, conferring with senior officials and receiving ‘secret information from spies’; the hour and a half after sunset was allotted exclusively to ‘interviews with secret agents’; and the hour and a half after midnight was devoted to consultations on sending spies.

Though the King was to deal with leading secret agents, his senior officials were also to have their own agent networks. The Arthashastra thus envisaged the world’s first fully organized surveillance state. The King was told to regard almost everyone within the state as a potential threat to royal authority: senior courtiers might try to usurp the throne; peasants might rebel; military commanders might challenge the Crown.

Agents provocateurs were to be used both to discover potential plotters against the ruler. The key role assigned to agents reflected the paranoid tendencies of the Mauryan King rather than establishing a modern authoritarian intelligence system. An ambassador to the court of Chandragupta Maurya, in the late fourth century BC, reported that the King was so fearful of assassination that he changed his bed chamber every night. Arthashastra declared it the duty of the sovereign state to use ‘secret methods’ such as the following to assassinate treacherous senior officials:

1. A secret agent shall tempt the brother of the traitor to kill him with the promise of being given his brother’s property;  when the deed is done, by weapon or by poison, he himself should be killed for the crime of fratricide.

2. A mendicant woman agent, having won the confidence of the wife of a seditious minister by providing her with love potions, may with the help of the wife contrive to poison. 

3. If the traitor is addicted to witchcraft, a spy in the guise of a holy man should inveigle him into a secret rite, during which he shall be killed by poison or with an iron bar. The death shall be attributed to some mishap during the secret rites.

4. A spy in the guise of a doctor may make the traitor believe that he is suffering from a malignant or incurable disease and kill him by poisoning his medicine or diet.

Spies selected for assassination missions were to be ‘recruited from the bravest in the land, particularly those who, for the sake of money, are willing to fight wild elephants and tigers, in total disregard for their own personal safety’.

The author of the Arthashastra writes that: 

“A single assassin can achieve, with weapons, fire or poison, more than a fully mobilized army.”  

The estimate of the assassin’s role was shared by Stalin and his foreign intelligence service two millennia later when they were plotting the murder of the great Communist heretics of the Stalinist era, Leon Trotsky and Marshal Tito. In each case, the priority of choosing assassin and the ingenuity of the method of assassination lived up to the standards demanded by the Arthashastra. By the outbreak of the Second World War, the assassination of Trotsky had become the main objective of Stalin’s foreign policy. The Arthashastra emphasizes the importance of recruiting agents among the enemy population, especially senior officials. Its proposals for agent recruitment abroad, some of which reflected the influence of the Mahabharata, were, however, unrealistically ambitious: A King shall have his own set of spies, all quick in their work, in the courts of the enemy, the ally, the middle and the neutral kings to spy on the kings as well as their eighteen types of high officials.

The different types of spies are as follows: 

1. Inside their houses: hunchbacks, dwarfs, eunuchs, women skilled in various arts, dumb persons, mlecchas.

2. Inside their cities: traders, espionage establishments.

3. Near the cities: ascetics.

4. In the countryside: farmers, monks.

5. Frontiers; herdsmen 

6. Forest dwellers

Though the Arthashastra continued to be cited in Indian literature until the twelfth century, thereafter it disappeared from view for almost a millennium.