Strategy & Culture

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, talks about victory without fighting . Such a doctrine would not work in India of Kautilya’s Arthashastra, where a whole caste , the Kshatriyas existed for the purpose of fighting. For this class it was a disgrace to die anywhere else , except on a battlefield. Sun Tzu’s doctrine of victory without fighting would have rendered a caste, virtually jobless.

Infact, a world without war was inconceivable in the Hindu world order. The Kshatriyas had such a stranglehold on war mongering that it was literally inconceivable for other castes to think of participating in wars. One of the reasons that Brahmins , the priest caste, were kept out of wars was that the enemy can put Brahmin troops out of action simply by prostrating before them and prostrating persons, by law, could not be killed.

So a strategy has to account for cultural ethos & organizational structure for it to be execution-able.

Such was the stranglehold of Hindu social order that India’s biggest Emperor Asoka, who ruled virtually the entire subcontinent had to forsake the ‘Hindu’ order and embrace Buddhism, in order to put an end to his war-mongering & blood thirsty ways after the poignant victory over the Kalinga kingdom.