Chandragupta Maurya
Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the Maurya Empire, was undoubtedly one of the Indian sub-continents greatest monarchs.
Not much is known about Chandragupta’s family ancestry but where most historians concur is that he was not born into considerable power and his rise to prominence began when he came under the tutorship of the legendary philosopher Chanakya, who took a young Chandragupta from his birthplace of Magadha (southern Bihar) to the Takshashila (north-west Pakisthan) and tutored him for around 8 years.
With Chanakya architecting his military and political strategies, Chandragupta initially established his rule in regions around Magadha (southern-Bihar) by 321 BCE and then looked towards expanding his dominance over the Nanda Empire. The Nanda Empire was – at the time – the dominant power in the subcontinent. The legends of its military capabilities were so awe-inspiring that it had forced a mutiny within the army of Alexander the Great when his soldiers fearfully refused to engage the Nandas in battle, forcing Alexander to retreat from the Indian sub-continent.
What followed was a bitter war of around a decade which ended with Chandragupta Maurya – guided by the strategies of Chanakya – defeating the Nandas and assuming control of the Nanda capital, Pataliputra. By 312 BC, having established is rule over most of north and north-west India, Chandragupta Maurya began to look further west towards the regions which had been conquered by Alexander of Macedonia.
Seleucus I Nicator
Seleucus I Nicator was a member of the infamous Diadochi – a group of Alexander the Great’s generals and friends who battled of the control of his empire after his death in 323 BC.
Post the death of Alexander, Seleucus was one of the most powerful participants in the War of the Diadochi and managed to wrest control of the eastern territories of Alexander which also included regions in the Indus Valley.
After having established his dominance in the east, Seleucus engaged his major rival amongst the Diadochi, Antigonus, in the Babylonian War. The war ended in a decisive victory for Seleucus and Antigonus was forced to retreat westwards.
Soon after Seleucus, following the tradition of Greek kings founding cities in their names, constructed the city of Seleucia (within present day Iraq) and proclaimed himself king of the regions he controlled.
The Mauryan-Seleucid War
With his rule over northern India secure, Chandragupta and Chanakya saw the sudden death of Alexander and the disarray amongst his generals as on opportunity to expand their rule towards the west.
Alexander had left his Prefects in control of the regions he had conquered in the Indus Valley. Chandragupta is said to have taken control over the areas governed by four such Prefects – Nicanor, Phillip, Eudemus and Peithon, resulting in Mauryan control being established until the banks of the Indus River. Chandragupta’s conquest of these regions and his military prowess is vividly described by the Roman historian Marcus Junianus Justinus who went onto claim that the Mauryan king was even revered by ‘wild lions and elephants’.
News of Chandragupta’s western forays reached the ears of Seleucius, who decided that he needed to secure his eastern flank and thus began the Mauryan-Seleucid War.
The war is estimated to have begun in 305 BC, with Seleucius crossing the Indus and engaging Chandragupta’s forces in the Gandhara (north-west Pakisthan) region.
While no accounts of the actual battled fought exist today, the historical consensus is that Chandragupta Maurya emerged victorious against the Greek forces. Post the battle, Chandragupta continued control over all the regions he had conquered previously. Seleucius also ceded to Chandragupta his territories in Arachosia (Kandahar), Gedrosia (Balochisthan) and Gandhara. Around the same time, Chandragupta is said to have taken over the Hindu Kush, eastern Iran, Punjab and east Afghanistan – greatly growing his empire and expanding his victory of Seleucius to establish his dominance from modern-day Afghanistan to Bihar.
The Roman historian Appian of Alexandria also suggests that the terms of terms of peace negotiated by Seleucus with Chandragupta went beyond the ceding of Greek territories to the Indian monarch. Seleucus is also speculated to have married off his daughter to Chandragupta while receiving 500 war elephants in return – either as a gift or dowry.
Aftermath
Seleucus would put the 500 elephants he received from Chandragupta to good use soon after. The beasts were said to have played a decisive role in Seleucus’ final battle with his great rival Antigonos in the Battle of Ipsus. In the battle Seleucus inflicted a final defeat onto Antigonos and then added Antigonos’ regions into his own empire. With this victory, Seleucus was able to found what came to be known as the Seleucid Empire which ruled over large parts of the Mediterranean and the Middle East until its collapse in 63 BC.
Chandragupta Maurya, of course, had already established the Mauryan Empire by the time he came into conflict with Seleucus. Nevertheless, his victory in the Mauryan-Seleucid War and his tremendous expansions towards the west lifted him to exalted status in the region. He would soon turn his focus towards the south beyond the Vindhyas and into the Deccan. At the zenith of his reign, Chandragupta is said to have ruled over most of the Indian sub-continent.
Chandragupta’s legacy went beyond his military conquests as well.
The Mauryan Empire, which he founded from next to nothing, became one of the largest empires in the world at the time. Under the guidance of Chanakya – unquestionably one of the greatest philosophers of all time – Chandragupta implemented administrative systems which allowed trade and agriculture to flourish under his rule, starting off a period of great economic activity in the Indian subcontinent. Chanakya’s mastery of economics, finance, defense and statecraft also enabled Chandragupta to ensure peace, prosperity and security for his citizens under his rule. This was also a time when the region enjoyed great religious peace and harmony along with flourishing art and culture. More importantly, the systems and structures which Chandragupta put in place lived beyond him – allowing his successors Bhindusara and Ashoka to build on his achievements and take the Mauryan kingdom to greater heights.
For his towering military and administrative achievements, Chandragupta Maurya is today remembered across India as Chandragupta Maurya the Great – one of the few monarchs to have been bestowed the epithet.
Unfortunately, this great conquest of Chandragupta – and those of others like him – are almost forgotten today. An intellectual project, spearheaded by Leftist academia, ‘rationalised’ out the great achievements and victories of Indic monarchs and generals from our textbooks and consequently, from the minds of our people.
However, for India to truly become the power that it deserves to be, it is important for its citizens to remember its real history and to truly appreciate the greatness of some of its successes.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.