Kautilya's Maxims
18
The Duty of Witnesses
(ArS 3/11:44-49)Followers of Usanas: In cases of conflicting testimony due to the stupidity of the witnesses, the witnesses shall be fined the lowest, middle, and highest fines according as the question concerns place, time, or fact.
Followers of Manu: False witnesses, whether they create a figment or deny a reality, shall be fined ten times the amount at issue.
Followers of Brhaspati: If witnesses through their stupidity invalidate a court proceeding, they shall be tortured to death.
Kautilya: No. Witnesses have a duty to respect the truth. If they do not, they shall be fined 24 panas. If they fail to testify, half that.
As in Maxim #17, Kautilya declines to recognize an earlier attempt to extrapolate from the law of property. He thus avoids the "consequences" trap (relating the penalty to the amount at issue in the trial), and derives his rule from the primary obligation of the witness to tell the truth. Their duty is not to the matter being decided, but to the process of decision itself. False testimony is twice as serious, because it is twice as disruptive of a just outcome, as a refusal to testify. This is a step in generalization: the rule for severity derives not from the details of the case, but from a generalized concept of legal process.
With Maxim #18 we family law and take up civil law. It is at this point that Kautilya, whose sequence of topics is respected by the arranger of the ArS core sayings, and by the later compendium of "Manu" after him, introduces the main technicalities pertaining to witnesses. The order in which previous authorities are cited is different here than in other cases; the usual order would put "followers of Manu" first. See our summary of these sequence questions on the Order page. We may note that the "followers of Usanas" pronouncement has the same precise, even quiddling, quality that we noted in Maxim #16a.
Kautilya's Maxims is Copyright © 2001- by E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks
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