The New Arthashastra

A Security Strategy for India

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BRIG GURMEET Kanwal is literally a warrior turned scholar, fighting battles, acquiring targets in artillery guns, providing net assessment of possible scenarios to the armed forces, managing the Indian Army’ s think tank CLAWS, contributing reports to MoD’s think tank IDSA and to various newspapers and periodical, India Strategic included.

He has brought out this high sounding book, The New Arthashastra, on security challenges for India. It is high sounding, as Gurmeet himself pointed out a little embarrassingly that the original Arthashastra, or statecraft, was written by Chankaya, the 4th century BC Indian thinker, diplomat and royal advisor on governance.

The book was released by Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar recently at function attended by the capital’s strategic community, and the minister’s comments generated a lot of heat as besides speaking about the book, he also spoke on introducing an element of uncertainty in India’s nuclear doctrine. (More on that later).