Theory of Government in Ancient India (Post-Vedic) c6.167.6

c6.167.6

"The slaughter of a foe who does you evil is always praiseworthy." One may dexterously commit the direst deeds. Whenever convenient, one should invent pretexts, reasons for those pretexts and then reasons for those reasons.¹ The whole chapter on Āpaddharma reminds one of Machiavelli. There are sentences written with the "point of a stilette" which may pass for "the Prince." Here the poet of the Mahābhārata, like the quotations from Italian realist, "strips away the following garments of convention and commonplace; closes his will against sympathy and feeling; ignores pity as an irrelevance, just as the operating surgeon does." The section, as a whole, may be styled, as Diderot proposed to head certain chapters of Machiavelli, as "the circumstances under which it is right for a prince to be a scoundrel." In both, the purpose is the same, "the secular state, supreme, self-interest and self-regard, avowed as the single principle of state action; material force, the master-key to civil policy. Clear intelligence backed by unsparing will, unflinching energy, remorseless vigour, the brain to plan and the hand to strike—here is the salvation of states."¹