A file sits on a clerk’s desk. It is complete, stamped, in order ~ and it will not move. The applicant, a farmer or a small contractor or a widow chasing a pension, learns the unwritten tariff: a little cash to the right hand, and the file walks. Repeated ten thousand times a day across the country, the scene has lost its power to shock us; we have come to treat petty corruption as weather, a thing to be endured rather than ended. Yet a counsellor who advised an emperor twenty-three centuries ago saw it coming, named it precisely, and prescribed the remedy.

We have spent the years since mislaying both the diagnosis and the cure. The counsellor was Kautilya, and his Arthashastra remains the most clear-eyed manual of statecraft India has produced. Its premise, and the premise of the wider tradition behind it, is one our public life has quietly abandoned: that political office is not a privilege to be enjoyed or a spoil to be shared, but a trust to be discharged. The oldest layer of that tradition puts it most starkly.

“Enjoy through renunciation,” the Isha Upanishad commands in its opening verse; “do not covet the wealth of another.” The exchequer is not the minister’s to enjoy; it is held in trust for the citizen, and to covet it is to break an order older than any statute. The Sanskrit name for the duty is rajadharma ~ the dharma, the binding obligation, of those who hold power. By that measure corruption is not merely a leakage of revenue. It is a breach of the single thing that gives office its legitimacy. What makes Kautilya bracing rather than pious is his realism. He did not expect officials to be honest; he expected them to steal, and said so in a sentence that has never been bettered.

“Just as it is impossible not to taste the honey or the poison that finds itself at the tip of the tongue,” he wrote in the second book of the Arthashastra, “so it is impossible for a government servant not to eat up at least a bit of the king’s revenue.” This is not the voice of a moralist wringing his hands. It is the voice of an auditor. In the same book he enumerates some forty distinct ways in which a treasury can be quietly bled ~ a receipt entered late, a payment entered early, a sum booked under one head that belongs under another ~ the obsessive taxonomy of a man who has read real ledgers. Having assumed the disease, he........

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