By now, most of you have likely heard of the recent events that took place in Kashmir, where militants, alleged by India to be backed by Pakistan, targeted and opened fire on Hindu men, killing over twenty individuals in the heavily disputed region. Pakistan, for its part, maintains that it had effectively “shut down the Kashmiri militant factory” almost two decades ago, specifically after President Musharraf sought to align with American interests post-9/11, when any support for “radical Islam” became politically very costly.

Pakistan has asserted that this attack was a false flag operation, i.e., an act of self-sabotage committed by the victim party against itself. Attacks of this nature are done with the aim of eliciting sympathy, to justify a violent and extreme response against the falsely accused, and to also exploit the situation for political gain later on. Essentially, Pakistan is accusing India of having carried out a violent attack on its own people in order to use it as an excuse to strategically expand its geopolitical influence in a Machiavellian fashion.

Chanakya: Politics as Immorality

There is a dark tradition of “immoral politics” that runs deep within the Hindu political tradition. Chanakya, often hailed as being the greatest (or, as some critics might argue, the only notable) Hindu political philosopher prior to modern times, is a perfect exemplification of this. Due to Hindu civilization’s age-old problem of lacking any emphasis on historiography as a scientific discipline, very little is known about Chanakya’s life. For example, it is not possible to accurately identify the precise time period in which he lived. Even his actual identity is not completely clear, since he is also known by another name: Kautilya.

Nevertheless, there is a major work that has been attributed to him, i.e., the Arthashastra. However, it is likely that there were actually multiple authors that had contributed to the work over time. The Arthashastra is a collection of aphorisms on politics, warfare, and economics that was composed sometime between the 3rd century BCE and the 3rd century CE. This text has had a profound and undeniable influence on classical Hindu political thought.

Enthusiastic Hindus often describe it as a Hindu counterpart to Machiavelli’s writings because Machiavelli pioneered a “realist” approach to politics. However, Machiavelli was amoral, concerned with pragmatism rather than ethical breaches. Chanakya, on the other hand, openly legitimizes sabotage, espionage, manipulation, and even the use of women as sexual tools of political intrigue.

There are several chapters in the Arthashastra that are dedicated specifically to the art of treachery and deceit. For instance, in Book 11, Chapter 1, the Hindu strategist writes:

Spies, gaining access to all these corporations and finding out jealousy, hatred and other causes of quarrel among them, should sow the seeds of a well-planned dissension among them and tell one of them: “This man decries you.”

[…]

Keepers of harlots or dancers, players, and actors may, after gaining access, excite love in the minds of the chiefs of corporations by exhibiting women endowed with bewitching youth and beauty. By causing the woman to go to another person, or by pretending that another person has violently carried her off, they may bring about a quarrel among those who love that woman; in the ensuing affray, fiery spies may do their work and declare: “Thus has he been killed in consequence of his love.”

[…]

A woman who has been violently carried off at night may cause the death of her violator in the vicinity of a park or in a pleasure house, by means of fiery spies or with poison administered by herself. Then she may declare: “This beloved person of mine has been killed by such and such a person.”

A spy, under the garb of an ascetic, may apply to a lover such medical ointments as are declared to be capable of captivating the beloved woman and as are adulterated with poison; and then he may disappear. Other spies may ascribe the incident to an enemy’s action.

In Book 12, Chapter 4, we also find instructions on poisoning the food of not only enemy combatants but even those that would be considered “civilians” according to modern standards:

A spy, employed as a chief officer of the enemy’s army, may adopt the same measures as those employed by the vintner.

Spies, disguised as experts in trading in cooked flesh, cooked rice, liquor, and cakes, may vie with each other in proclaiming in public the sale of a fresh supply of their special articles at cheap price, and may sell the articles mixed with poison to the attracted customers of the enemy.

The Arthashastra is replete with disturbing “recommendations” of this nature. It is worth noting that Hindus who criticize Islam for its wartime ethics or things like taqiyyah (something specific to the heterodox minority fringe sect of Shi’ism) must also confront the reality that no classical Islamic political thinker ever fell into the dark depths of criminal pragmatism that Chanakya had descended into. Moreover, what emanates from the Arthashastra is not a vision of “traditional Hindu society” as some sort of proto-social democracy. Rather, it is as a mass-surveillance-based police state, one that is perpetually at war with its neighbors. Effectively, it is a sort of Hindufied Soviet Union.

Hindu False Flag Ops

Given that India’s post-independence political elite has often cited Chanakya as a guiding figure—including Prime Minister Modi, who referenced him during a 2021 speech at the United Nations General Assembly—, this does lend significant weight to Pakistani allegations that the ruling government might be staging false flag operations in order to advance its own interests.

In fact, dirty tactics such as this would not be an unprecedented occurrence in Kashmir. Arundhati Roy is a contemporary Indian author who was awarded the Booker Prize. She is also arguably the most fearless dissident voice in India today. In her book, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy (2009), she presents a few very telling examples as a small sample (pp.84–86):

Killing people and falsely identifying them as “foreign terrorists,” or falsely identifying dead people as “foreign terrorists,” or falsely identifying living people as terrorists, is not uncommon among the police or security forces either in Kashmir or even on the streets of Delhi.

The best known among the many well-documented cases in Kashmir, one that went on to become an international scandal, is the killing that took place after the Chhittisinghpura massacre. On the night of April 20, 2000, just before the U.S. President Bill Clinton arrived in New Delhi, thirty-five Sikhs were killed in the village of Chhittisinghpura by “unidentified gunmen” wearing Indian army uniforms. (In Kashmir many people suspected that Indian security forces were behind the massacre.) Five days later the SOG and the Rashtriya Rifles, a counterinsurgency unit of the army, killed five people in a joint operation outside a village called Pathribal. The next morning they announced that the men were the Pakistan-based foreign militants who had killed the Sikhs in Chhittisinghpura. The bodies were found burned and disfigured. Under their (unburned) army uniforms, they were in ordinary civilian clothes. It turned out that they were all local people, rounded up from Anantnag district and brutally killed in cold blood.

There are others:

October 20, 2003, the Srinagar newspaper Al-safa printed a picture of a “Pakistani militant” who the Eighteenth Rashtriya Rifles claimed they had killed while he was trying to storm an army camp. A baker in Kupwara, Wali Khan, saw the picture and recognized it as his son, Farooq Ahmed Khan, who had been picked up by soldiers in a Gypsy (an SUV) two months earlier. His body was finally exhumed more than a year later.

April 20, 2004, the Eighteenth Rashtriya Rifles posted in the Lolab valley claimed it had killed four foreign militants in a fierce encounter. It later turned out that all four were ordinary laborers from Jammu, hired by the army and taken to Kupwara. An anonymous letter tipped off the laborers’ families who traveled to Kupwara and eventually had the bodies exhumed.

November 9, 2004, the army showcased forty-seven surrendered “militants” to the press at Nagrota, Jammu, in the presence of the General Officer Commanding Sixtenth Corps of the Indian Army and the Directqr General of Police, Jammu and Kashmir. The Jammu and Kashmir police later found that twenty-seven of them were just unemployed men who had been given fake names and fake aliases and promised government jobs in return for playing their part in the charade.

These are just a few quick examples to illustrate the fact that in the absence of any other evidence, the police’s word is just not good enough.

Roy highlights that the “Chanakyan” approach of the Indian security forces has set a precedent where viewing recent events in Kashmir as potential false flag operations certainly seems justified.

This trend is not confined to Kashmir alone either. A particularly key moment in Indo-Pakistan relations was that of the 2007 Samjhauta Express bombing. “Samjhauta,” meaning “agreement,” referred to the train service that connected Lahore, Pakistan to India’s capital, Delhi. At the time, there was cautious optimism about ties between the two nations improving, and the attack was a significant blow to the efforts towards normalization.

Initially, responsibility for the bombing was attributed to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), an “Islamist organization” known in Pakistan primarily for its philanthropic work via its charity wing Jamat-ud-Dawa (JuD). It is also blamed for current tensions. However, investigations later revealed the prime suspect to be Lt. Col. Prasad Purohit, an Indian army officer with ties to Hindu nationalism.

In light of this, the possibility of a “Chanakyan” false flag operation cannot be dismissed.