’Acharya, don't citizens have the right to know how their tax revenues are being used?'
'Dear me. No, no, no. People don't want to know how tax revenue has actually been spent. Does any worshipper ever ask the temple Brahmin what happened to the ritual offering made to the gods?'
'Acharya, isn't good government about acting on principles?'
'Absolutely. Government is about principles. And the principle is, never act on principle.'
You come across many such wily snippets as you flip through the pages of Ashwin Sanghi's thriller, 'Chanakya's Chant', which is essentially a book that presents two parallels in the form of the story of Chanakya grooming Chandragupta to be the Emperor of the mighty Mauryan empire and that of the modern day kingmaker, Gangasagar Mishra in an Indian small town.
Both the characters though separated in time have one thing in common: both are excellent teachers in their own right, who, fuelled by the greater good of bringing India together to fight against the larger enemy, are machiavellian in their means.
The beauty of the book is that it smoothly transitions from about 2300 years ago to the present age India. The reader goes back and forth in time and gets a chance to understand and compare the strategies taught by the two gurus.
Chanakya, also known as Vishnugupta or Kautilya is known to the readers as a great thinker, an economist, jurist and an advisor to the Mauryan King, Chandragupta. But Sanghi’s book highlights his contribution to the Mauryan empire as the greatest teacher of all time. A propagator of the philosophy of ‘saam, Daam, dand, bhed’, Chanakya is alternately condemned for his ruthlessness and trickery and praised for his sound political wisdom and knowledge of human nature.
Sanghi paints Gangasagar Mishra in modern colors, who believes that “There’s always a war if you look closely”. He searches for this ‘war’ “in the newspapers”. His firm devotion to the ‘Adi Shakti’ leads him to select, nurture and groom his protégé, Chandni right from her childhood. The writer, through Ganagasagar Mishra, takes us into the murky, opportunistic and vindictive world of politics and makes us believe that indeed ‘end justifies the means’.
The book ends with a confession that politics is indeed a dirty game, but one that is needed to be played for the beautiful bigger picture, and that is what the two gurus, Chanakya and Ganagasagar did, removed by thousands of years from each other.
So if you want to read a political thriller set in an Indian setting and written by an Indian author, Ashwin Sanghi is a name to reckon with and what can be better than to begin this exciting journey with ‘Chanakya’s Chant’.
- Anagha Natekar
Visiting Faculty, ELTIS